Laptops are increasingly popular in the classroom, but are they best for taking notes? 

Alright, so here’s a topic that I admittedly don’t have much to contribute to: Is it better to take notes the old fashioned way (in a notebook) or is it better to take notes on a laptop?

For the purposes of the classes I took freshman year, a laptop was great. I type four times as fast on a laptop as I can write on paper. Being a freshman I also thought it necessary to take an exorbitant amount of notes to cover my bases. Thus, laptop note taking was the way to go.

But, alas, as I returned for my sophomore year, my laptop’s battery life was a whopping 48 minutes. That gets me through half of a class if I’m lucky. By spring semester my computer had juice for 29 minutes. How my laptop still operates, even when plugged in, is beyond me.

So paper notes it was from that point on. And although I could not surf ESPN and Facebook while in class, paper notes suited me just fine.

My hunch is that different areas of study are more conducive to different styles of note taking. What’s the best style for you? Why?