Evaluation of the Knowledge Notebook Study Tool

Introduction

The utility of a study tool can be evaluated based on a variety of factors. First and foremost, the study tool must be easy to use and practical in a classroom environment. In addition, the study tool must not only enable students to easily record information, but also to retrieve it later for study sessions.

In this paper, the Knowledge Notebook note taking software will be evaluated for its ease of use and practicality in real life class room settings, more specifically in comparison with one of the most common note taking programs, Microsoft Word.

Benefits of the Knowledge Notebook Software

Organizational Features:

Knowledge notebook offers organizational features that simply aren’t present in Microsoft Word. For example, Knowledge notebook allows students to add different tags to their notes, which creates a much more organized database of notes than one finds in Microsoft Word. In Microsoft Word, the only way to search for different sections in one’s notes are to search for different key words in the document itself. This means that if you don’t remember an exact word or phrase that you used in your notes, it will most likely be very difficult to locate the section of notes for which you are looking.

In addition, in Microsoft Word there is not an easy way to separate the different lectures, either by the content of the lecture or the date of the lecture. I believe there are only two ways to organize and separate different lectures when using Microsoft Word.

The first is to save every lecture as a different document. This is inconvenient (Microsoft Word). When I have a dozen or so documents on one theme, say, in Psychology about child development, I will have to individually open up each lecture document to find the section which I am searching for.

The other way to organize your notes in Microsoft Word that I’ve observed is to put all of your notes for a class in a single Word document. This makes for a very large and cumbersome Word document. It can be very difficult to stay organized with this system, because you are working with so many pages of notes. In addition, by placing all your notes in one document, you are in a sense placing all of your eggs in one basket, and if (for whatever reason) the file is corrupted or accidently deleted, you lose all the notes from that particular class.

In contrast to Microsoft Word, the Knowledge Notebook Software allows students to easily organize and search notes by tags that they themselves create. This means that if I want to label a collection of notes by a date, subject matter, content, professor, what have you, I can easily do so with the tags features that are available with Knowledge notebook. This allows for very straightforward and simple organization, and an unparalleled ability to search through the notes. As I previously mentioned, Microsoft Word only allows students to search for preexisting words or phrases in the document. Knowledge Notebook, on the other hand, allows students to proactively label the notes as they are writing or reviewing them, making for very easy retrieval when the student is ready to begin studying.

More Proactive Learning:

In addition, I believe that the organizational features of Knowledge Notebook help the students learn the information better, because it "forces" them to categorize the notes on the computer screen, which I believe will help them more easily mentally organize their notes. When I use the knowledge notebook software, immediately after the lecture I would look for common themes in my notes that would allow me to add different tags to the notes such as “lucid dreams” “Oedipus complex,” etc., which I believe would help me better store this information in my long term memory. Basically, Knowledge Notebook encourages more proactive note taking and therefore more proactive learning that starts long before the normal studying done before a test.

More Choices for Post-Lecture Review:

In addition, the Knowledge Notebook software allows students to view their notes in a variety of different ways, giving the student a much greater amount of flexibility and choice than does Microsoft Word. For example, Knowledge Notebook allows students to review notes by subject or tag, in addition to view the notes in a dashboard or holistic view.

Formatting:

The Knowledge Notebook software takes the most common and useful formatting tools and puts them right at the students fingertips. This creates a note taking system that is much more streamlined when compared to Microsoft word. With the Knowledge Notebook software, one is able to highlight, bold, italicize, etc, very easily. Granted, it is not especially difficult to use the same formatting tools in Microsoft Word, however there are distinct advantages to having all the most useful and relevant features all in one place for students who need to write and label their notes as quickly as possible in a fast-paced classroom setting.

Suggestions of Knowledge Notebook Software

Microsoft Word is unparalleled in its formatting features. Which would be very helpful in creating a fancy proposal and other formal documents.

Knowledge Notebook could benefit from more interactive keyboard shortcuts, much like those available in Microsoft Word.

Conclusion

An evaluation of the notetaking uses of Microsoft Word and the Knowledge Notebook software reveals that Knowledge Notebook has clear advantages over Microsoft Word for notetakers for notes organization and proactive learning capabilities. Also, I have to say, the evaluation uses the Basic Version of the Knowledge NoteBook software.