Hi, everyone. My son is starting college soon, and he has a mobility disability that affects his limbs. He can type, but slowly.
His college asks volunteers to pitch in with notetaking for peers with disabilities. However, my son would like to be independent in making his own notes. His disability prevents him from writing with a pen productively, but he can type quite slowly.
He’s allowed to record lectures, and he has software that helps him to add bookmarks as he makes the recordings. So, he can insert a bookmark for anything he considers noteworthy. (The software is called Sonocent.)
The question is this: how can he convert these bookmarked recordings into typed notes? At this point, he intends to type up summaries of the parts of the lectures that he’d bookmarked.
Does anyone have ideas that could work better for independent notetaking? Would using Google Docs voice typing or Dragon Naturallyspeaking be helpful for generating transcriptions from his recordings?
Have any of you students had good luck with simply asking professors for lecture notes?
Any and all suggestions will be received gratefully!
Macs have built-in support for speech-to-text dictation. I just tried dictating the first few sentences of your post. Here are the results:
So it’s not perfect, and I don’t know how well it would work in a big room with lots of ambient noise, but I’m sure you could find something better (for a price).
Have you talked to your new school’s “Accessibility Resources” office (or whatever it’s called there, assuming there is one)? We scheduled an appointment with ours when my son started. Right then and there, they handed him a set of “Smart Pen” equipment to help with note-taking. That was quite a few years ago so there may be more/better options now.
Lecture notes from a professor are a fairly common accommodation. The request should start with disability services. However, the quality (and value) of those notes will vary from professor to professor.
I learn mid-term this fall that my daughter and one or two others are being paid for their notes by the school to provide them to a disabled student. The payment is small ($50-$100 for the semester), but provides backup for whatever items might be missing in the notes the student and/or their technology capture during class. Regardless of technology, I would investigate getting copies from others. Good luck.
My friend who teaches doesn’t use notes or powerpoints (that contain actual contents - more examples). I wouldn’t count on professors notes. I might start with support line for the recording/bookmarking software you are using (or community board for it) since surely this is a likely request from many that use it.
My son gets copies of notes in some classes from a student who is hired by the school. The disabilities office informs the prof that he is entitled to the service and the teacher puts out a call for students. I also bought him a small tablet that he uses in class to take his own notes, that he then supplements when he has time. I knew about this service because my D was paid in college to take notes in some of her classes.
The OP stated that the student would prefer not to use another student’s notes. One possibility, though, would be to get those notes in addition to the ones that the student takes himself, to make sure he hasn’t missed anything important.
While it will vary by school, my son’s flagship hired students to take/provide notes for students with disabilities taking the same class. They had to apply for that responsibility, providing sample notes from the first week or so of class, along with a transcript, I think. They were paid a few hundred dollars per semester, which was good money for a college student for doing what they were already doing.
Though not everyone lectures from notes, more and more profs are scaffolding classes with PowerPoint or other presentation software (if for no other reason than it’s harder and harder to keep class attention otherwise.) I don’t “lecture,” but most of my classes are accompanied by PP which give the framework for what we’re doing that day. I have started to post these on Canvas after class, speared on by the request of a deaf student in my class this semester. Though not all profs use these, more and more do, so it’s a resource that shouldn’t be dismissed.
If you can’t find a good software solution, don’t be too concerned about using a paid note taker. These students are just resources, not hand holders or anything like that. Your son can still be independent while making use of the notes. My daughter was a paid note taker. She uploaded her notes to the class website, and anyone who wanted them could download them. The school paid her, so there was no cost (other than the hideously expensive tuition everyone paid!) to users.
To add to that, I think it’s generally true that the notetaker doesn’t know who the notes are going to. They hand them to the Disabilities Office which provides them to the student. So it’s not like the student will feel beholden to someone. I think they won’t know who the notetaker is, either.
^Depends on class size really. D was notetaker and turned her notes into the professor at end of class. The student who needed them waited around and got them from professor, so didn’t take long to figure out who it was when the class had only 15 people. But that person obviously didn’t mind being identified or she could have gone by professors office at some other time - D still never spoke directly to her about the notes.
Get a smart pen. They are super cool things that record the lecture and transcribe it directly into your word processing program. There are a couple of different companies who make them. Actually, the college might pay for it, though if you can afford to get it yourself, I would get it early to practice with it. My disabled student veterans use them all the time (and they can be a hard sell on outside assistance!). I think Livescribe is the most well-known company, but I’m not sure which brand is best or most easy to use. Hope this helps! Smart pens are awesome, and very unobtrusive. I don’t ever really trust student notetakers, unless the class is super regimented and lecture-based, in which case the prof. will probably upload the powerpoints anyway.
I have RA so it’s often hard for me to write/type. I use dragon speech to text and it works well. Obviously he’d have to record and then take notes later but it’s a suggestion.
It won’t work in all situations, but one possibility is to get used to being successful in classes without writing down everything the professor says, and instead focusing on thinking about and understanding the lecture when the professor is speaking. I have horrible handwriting, to the point of likely being a fine motor control issue. Any pen and paper notes I took in lectures would have been near illegible. I also didn’t own a laptop or other tech notetaking device when in college. Instead I simply didn’t take notes. If I wanted to study for an exam, I’d review the textbooks, class handouts, and problem sets; rather than notes. In the rare cases where something of importance was said that was not covered in textbooks or class handouts, I’d remember it.
I also have a limited mobility in my hands due to a physical disability. I use a LiveScribe smartpen to take notes on a special notebook. The system works really well for me because it records as I write, so I don’t need to take copious notes (just a word here and there, and when I want to review, I can automatically listen to that section in the recording by tapping the word in my notes). The disability office at my university also recommended Sonocent. It sounds like a great program, but I chose not to use it because I hate having a phone/computer/screen in class.
As for dictation, I heard Dragon doesn’t work super well on Macs as it does on PCs. I tried the Mac Dictate and was not so impressed. I found that the Google Drive dictation program works very well for me.
There is a theory that the more senses you use to absorb the information (hearing it, seeing it, touching (writing) it, saying it aloud) the more you will retain, so I get why he wants to control his own notes. Is there a way he can get his bookmarked information onto the notes someone takes? The disabilities office might have a way to do that, or perhaps he can do it in a study group?
I was a big note card person so I’d transfer the highlights of the notes onto cards. I also like to take notes in different colors depending on where the info was coming from, like black for class notes, red from the book, blue from study group, and green if I came to those conclusions on my own. Your son might be able to use the notes from the other student in black and get his bookmarks in red or blue.
OP here. Thank you, everyone, for such insightful comments! Very helpful!
Because my son is an English major, the disability services advisor cautioned him that it can be difficult to find other students willing to share their notes beyond first-year English class. So, my son’s drive to manage his own notetaking is strong! That said, I appreciate suggestions to at least try to obtain notes and use them as backups to his own notes.
My son’s fine-motor control would prevent him from using a pen, but we understand that the Sonocent software works much like a Livescribe pen (but with a keyboard). So, I’m very encouraged to hear about people’s positive experiences with smart pens. Recording a lecture through Sonocent and an Ipad, a person just has to tap the screen (anywhere) to flag a part of the recording to return to later when writing up notes or studying. As well, the user can type in a few words at any time, and they will be placed into the right chronological point in the recording.
I’m happy to hear that students with disabilities don’t need to feel shy about asking instructors if they would be willing to share their own notes, PowerPoints, etc. It seemed like a gutsy ask to us, so thank you for the encouragement.
I’m also very pleased to read about people’s experiences with simply listening intently to lectures. This sounds better than my own student-days strategy of scrambling to write down everything the professor said, and not really being able to listen to content properly.
The world of voice-activated software is all new to us, so thank you for sharing so helpfully about your own experiences. We will definitely try out the different offerings.
Thank you again for your very kind and practical help. Any more comments would be 100% welcome!
My son had notetakers in HS and college paid for by the school. They were very useful. He also sometimes used the LiveScribe pen but didn’t really use that. But, he was in math and econ and psych classes, not English. He got notetakers in a math-y grad program but did not get them in an MBA program.
He never felt shy about asking for help with notes. He saw his job as figuring out how to be maximally successful at whatever he set as his objectives and if asking for help would get him there, he would do it. He graduated summa from one of the very top LACs, started a company that is still running, got the two top grad programs in the world for what he wanted to do, and is in his last quarter of school but has raised several million in seed funding for his next company. He asked me last night for my advice about hiring an exec asst/office manager – and is clearly looking for someone who has complementary skills (which is the real-world version of many of the accommodations one would get in school).
When I was in school, some of the lower level science classes had notes for sale in the bookstore! I used to buy them for bio-psych because there were a lot of drawings and I just couldn’t draw fast enough and pay attention. For about a buck, I’d get some really nice notes and then supplement them with my own notes.
The disabilities office will make sure he gets the notes. I’m sure they’d rather pay someone in the class to take them because they’ll be better, but if no one will they’ll hire someone just to sit in the class, or get the prof’s notes.