Note Taking Devices for Students?

Gavin Scott asks: "I'm looking for solutions for a college student who needs an inexpensive mechanism for note taking in class. She suffers from a condition that makes writing notes out by hand slow and painful. One of the small sexy sub-notebook computers would be ideal, but at $1,500-$2,500 these are completely out of reach budget-wise. She has a perfectly good desktop system at home, so something that simply allowed typing in notes that could then be transferred to the PC would be ideal. I've considered things like a Palm-type device with an external keyboard, but I'm interested in knowing what other options people might suggest. Or any opinions on what kind of lightweight almost-laptop devices are good in, say, the sub-$500 range?"

Note Taking Devices for Students?

[gougou42]

How about a small voice recorder and a digital camera ? Less than $500 and very effective.

Re:Get back to work!!

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I'd go one step further- NEVER send a link to SLASHDOT to your BOSS at all- if you see a topic that would interest him/her, drill down and send them a copy of the original article.

Re:Get back to work!!

[shufler]

That's a good piece of advice. There's no sense in wasting all that appearence of net-savvy or apparent in-depth knowledge of the industry.

Seriously.

Oh wait, links from slashdot? Nevermind.

Product Idea ...

[Breakerofthings]

I am not a l33t hardware guy, or anything, but this gives me an idea for a product:

a device consisting of a keyboard, with a 1 line LCD Screen across the top (can even be segmented, like on a cheesy calculator), that allows you to type, and see what you are typing, and not much else ... and which buffers your keystrokes into a couple of K of RAM, then writes it all out to a CF card (or flash card standard of your choice).

Maybe even skip the flash; just have a MB of RAM; that's it. the KB could have a regular old kb connector, and you can hit a special key sequence to dump the memory to the KB Port. (The software here would be SO simple ... just increment a pointer on every keystroke, writing the scan code into the cell; decrement the ptr on backspace ...

The point is, this could be manufactured REALLY cheap; and would be ideal for taking notes. You could even outfit it with the guts of one of these [slashdot.org] to take snapshots of blackboards, etc.

It would seem like something like this could sell for < $50 .. maybe even around $25 (given enough volume ... keyboards are < $10 nowadays).
Even starving college kids could afford one.

When I was in school....

[cmowire]

I just used a laptop. A cheap one, either used or closeout. I got one partway through high school, which then lasted until my senior year of college. Walmart is selling new generic ones for a few hundered now.

The trick is to set up style sheets and macros and such for Word to allow you to get all of the symbols and stuff.

Of course, typing may not help too much if you have hand problems.

Most unversities, when faced with a student who has a medically documented problem taking notes the normal way, will generally provide you with "accomidations". All you need is a doctor to vouch for you. Accomodiations will generally be some sort of notetaking service, at least.

Different schools do it differently. Some schools can move heaven and earth for you if you have a documented dissability.

Re:never underestimate your calculator ;)

[brilinux]

We are approaching off-topicness, but I have an HP calculator (HP-48GX) from which I have surfed the net (yes, Slashdot worked), checked my e-mail, played ADVENT and Nethack via the serial port, and taken notes in class. It is possible to get software to remap the keyboard to be qwerty-like and to rotate the screen, to aid in note-taking. Not only is it cheaper (~$100 now) but it can also do a lot more than many other calculators. Back on topic, I also new a guy with the same writing problem, and he was able to get money from the local government to help pay for a subnotebook for the purpose of note-taking in class. He certainly did not let his disability slow him down.

Re:Vocational Rehabilitation

[Glonoinha]

Lets play pretend : $100K salary.
Highest tax bracket in the US is 28% for Federal, kicking in at about $70k a year. Lets call this $20k after deductions.
Tack on another 6.2% for Social Security, plus another 6.2% to cover employer matching if you are self employed. Another $10k here.
Add in 8.25% sales tax on everything in a few of the bigger states. There goes $3k
Add in 6% state income tax on the average (I hear CA is more.) Nice $5k here.
Kick in a cheapo house at $250,000, tax rate of 2.5% in the city and you are paying another $6k.
Register your vehicles and pay the licensing, taxes, and inspection taxes : $1k tops.

That's about $45k right off the top in taxes. You are probably right, just in taxes he isn't paying 60%, but it is brushing up against the Half-Way mark. Add in insurance (car = $1500, house = $1500, medical for a 2 person family = $5,000) and you bust right through the half way mark at $53,000 gone before you buy your first candy bar, and I assumed way low on the price of the house. But going with it, knock another $1,800/month in house payments, $150/mo in electricity, $100/mo in cable (tv/Internet), $100/mo in phone (cell + landline), $50/mo in water, $50/mo in natural gas, $100/mo in gasoline and there goes another $28k, summing $81k before you buy your first candy bar. Throw in a relatively conservative $250/mo for a car payment (lease or buy) because you need something dependable to get you to your $100k/year job, and there goes another $3k - don't forget your 7% ($7k) towards a 401(k) or some sort of retirement plan and bumping you up against the $91k mark in just fixed expenses. Leaves a whopping $9,000 per year, or $750 per month for food, clothes, a computer, software licensing, liquor, eye glasses / contact lenses, medical deductables, lunch at work, toys, haircuts, and what have you.

Yea, $100k/year is a lot, but after the government takes half and fixed expenses take another third there isn't a lot left over.

As for the OP: we all hated taking notes in class. It sucks, and it is painful - but we do it. If you are female, taking tech classes with nerds ... I recommend buddying up with a few of the nerdiest guys and offering to bake them brownies or something(!) in exchange for a photocopy of their notes. If it wasn't for my amazing note-taking and scholarly techniques in college I probably never would have seen a decent pair of tits, much less home made brownies.

How about a Jornada 720 or something?

[MikeLip]

They have a reasonable keyboard, Windows OS, a voice recorder if you need it, plus the usual Microsoft apps. No messing around when you get back to home base, either, you just sync it and you're good to go on your desktop with what you've done during the day on the palmtop.

Re:Get back to work!!

[Kalak]

I'm on the flip side. Send links to /. to your boss to show that good, useful, and work related information can come as a result of reading /. It's called research, keeping up with technological trends, and a ton of other more management friendly phrases. I /. at work, but I do it with work in mind, so it is work (and I do it at home as well, so I wind up working after hours by doing the same thing, such as right now). I can say (with good reason) that the article on Simulating Network Latency [slashdot.org] is *very* relevant to work as a systme administrator. Just remember you're working, and don't send links to /. atricles that are way out of scope or send links to posts *you* make. The discussion may be interesting to your boss, and you may get kudos for reading /.

Get a lightly used/older laptop....

[emmilliiee]

I'd recommend getting a used but still in good shape laptop + new battery. Until fairly recently, I was using a 366mhz iBook (clamshell, baby!) for taking notes, and with a brand new battery I could make it through all my classes no problem. Shop around Craig's List, and since you're at a University, picking up a laptop on the cheap should be easy (my school surpluses them fairly routinely -- lately I've been seeing Lombards and Wallstreets -- and kids are always selling them towards the end of the quarter for extra cash) Set it up with a minimal OS installation, a text editor, and you should be good to go. I especially liked my old iBook, because it was really really energy efficient. As in, I could leave it sleeping for days and it would lose less than 1% of it's battery. (Unlike my powerbook, which slowly leaks power during sleep. Grr.)