Best note taking app for iPad.

[Aurea]

Hi

My Yr 12 son is taking in an iPad, keyboard and pencil into school for note taking.

Any app recommendations? It's for physics, chemistry, maths and English.

Many thanks

My uni dcs used a pen and actual notepad.... an iPad for A levels seems a bit like overkill. Esp science ones where you need different symbols.

I was mesmerised by when looking at options for my ds, who is about to go into Y12.

The Paperlike screen protector looks like it could be very helpful, although not cheap. The creator of the above YouTube video uses Goodnotes5; I personally would go for something cross-platform like OneNote to make it easier to access the notes on a laptop etc.

I tried using an iPad for note taking at uni and tbh it was a bit of a faff. I resorted to old fashioned notebook and pen. I found I couldn't take notes in a condensed way by typing.

Thank you.

His school are suggesting he take in some type of technology for his lessons. We are in Scotland so maybe recommendations are different here. His handwriting is rather slow and his typing is faster and more efficient.

He wants to do computer science at uni so he's keen to use this type of technology.

OneNote is the best IMO due to how compatible it is with other software. It's great to be able to take a picture of a white board screen and annotate it with the pen. There are just tonnes of things it can do. And it's free!

I notice that some people recommend a Rocket pad . Has anyone heard of it ?

Good Notes is great. You can import documents from other places to it and annotate/draw on them. Has a really good search function too, can identify words written in my very poor handwriting!

Notability is great, particularly with science-y type courses where you need to be able to handwrite.

I was just going to say motability. It’s about a tenner. Dd prefers good notes.

Notability

DS bought a Rocket Pad. It was utter rubbish. Went in the bin after a week. Like trying to write on those grey pads with a plastic stylus that we had in the 80s.

I can handwrite notes on the ipad in OneNote no problem. No more difficult than writing on a paper notebook- but you can change colour and highlight and drop in pictures and sections of documents all without putting your pen down. It does so much- worth watching some youtube tutorials. I never keep handouts anymore. Just drop a picture of them into OneNote and annotate in situ.

DD used one note, her college has iPad delivery for all A levels, you can buy your own, buy or rent from the college and they have help for those on certain benefits. One of the reasons her college was very good at remote learning as everyone was already connected.

I use Goodnotes - but it gets pretty tribal between that and Notability. Apple's in-built Notes app is meant to be pretty good as well - but I personally just preferred Goodnotes.

I'd recommend getting some form of physical keyboard AND the relevant Apple Pencil though - being able to swap between typing and then physically writing to draw out an equation or a quick diagram is brilliant (I have to do a lot of phonetic transcription and the pencil facility is amazing for that)

Thanks all. He's gone with Goodnotes for now.

He already uses onenote at school as well.

Our school had invested in digital learning prior to lockdown (we often get several snow days here) so much was set up already. In addition, some pupils have remote lessons in different schools to broaden subject choice (we only have around 12 A level equivalent subjects offered by our school).

Trying to think what else I use on my iPad for academic stuff.

I use a few different mind map apps - Simplemind is the one I tend to default to. Quizlet is what I use for revision, but I think Goodnotes has added that function in now (I beta test Goodnotes so I'm never quite sure what's made it into the retail version at any point in time - it may be hidden under "enable experimental features" if I recall correctly).

I use liquid text to read and note take on longer PDFs (I have most of my reading list as e-books and I'm dyslexic so I need to muck about with text to actually process it really). I have the Claro apps for text to speech - again for my dyslexia, and I find Yoink really handy in terms of having as a better version of a clipboard to save chunks of text onto. Documents by Readdle is another one that's quite handy in terms of getting files between a PC and an iPad without farting about much.

So yeah - looking at my iPad... about 10 productivity apps, and most of the content in Apple Arcade for procrastination.

Oh yeah and todoist as a to-do list app (just cos it syncs across all my devices quite nicely.

Biggest issue he might have is that for reasons utterly only known to Apple - the iPad doesn't currently (there's rumours it's changing) come with a stock calculator app so he'll probably need to find one of them.