When the world suddenly shut down in March and everybody
had to start taking their classes on Zoom all of a sudden,
I was actually already an expert on taking online classes because
I had been doing so for a year - yes,
by choice. My name's Michelle - I'm a part-time
education graduate student and a full-time educator,
and today I'm going to show you how I keep track of my
online coursework using Notion. [mouse click]
[mouse click] Taking online classes is hard.
I am not here to sugarcoat that.
But Notion has been my number one tool to make sure that
I am keeping track of all of my assignments and staying
organized. If you haven't heard of Notion, it's basically a flexible
database platform that allows you to interconnect different
sets of data, view data in different ways, and nest
information within different sets of data.
I use Notion to keep track of all of my assignments and also to
build an archived version of a class that
I can refer back to after the class is over.
Here's how I do it. [mouse click] I know a lot of people have these super elaborate
set ups to do their coursework on Notion, but my goal
here is to keep this very simple. I know myself,
and, the more work that I have to do to keep up a
system, the less likely I am to keep that
system up. You want your systems to work for you,
not for you to have to work for your systems.
I'd say the largest lift on my system is
at the beginning of the semester, when I use a table view
to enter all my assignments into my coursework calendar.
I've seen other set ups where people use different databases to keep track
of different courses, but
I keep all my coursework in the same database from semester to semester.
I find that gives me a lot of flexibility for how I can sort the data,
as well as cutting down the amount of work that it takes to set it up.
You can always apply a filter so that you're only seeing the
current coursework as needed. [mouse click] Quick tip to make assignment entry
even faster. Apply a filter for all of
the tags that you want a group of entries to have.
For example, I would always start with applying a filter that
has the name of the course or the number of the course or however you're gonna
indicate what course these assignments are a part of.
That way every assignment that you're entering is
automatically tagged for that course and you don't have to be enter that for
every one. I also always apply a filter that
indicates that I'm only looking at "to do"
items because when I'm entering them I obviously
still have to do them, so I want that to be applied automatically.
I like to apply a tag for the module that an assignment is a part of,
and that way I can sort assignments later easily by what week they're a part of.
For example if you apply a filter for module 1, you can enter all
of the first week's assignments, and then when you move onto the
second week's assignments, you can just change the filter to be
filtering for number two. I also filter for the data as well,
I find the date to be the most
cumbersome thing to enter in Notion actually,
and in online classes typically all of the assignments
are due for the week at one time
so it's really easy to just kind of tag them all with the
same date. As I'm entering my assignments, I'll also
add the names of any readings into this field of the table,
which is a relation to my other school database which contains
all the readings that I've done for my program.
entering the name of the reading here creates a new entry in
that other database, which will look at in a second. [mouse click]
This definitely takes a little bit of front loaded work at the beginning of the class,
but I'm not mad about it because I have in the past
done pretty much the same thing in a paper planner,
and that really provides me a lot less functionality
than I end up with in Notion so
it's about the same amount of time that I would have taken
anyway for a lot more return. [mouse click]
Once all the assignments are entered you have the option to view
them in a lot of different ways. You can view the course separated
by module to get an idea of the workload over the entire semester,
on a calendar to keep track of what
is due when, or by status, so that you can feel the
satisfaction of moving assignments from "to do"
over to the "done"column. [mouse click] So that's the part that
replicates the paper planner to make sure that you're really getting
everything done and staying organized in that way,
which is really helpful, but Notion actually offers
a lot more than the paper planner can. The coolest
part I think is that each of these entries is its own page
that you can use to store information about that
assignment. For example, I have the option to
apply a template that I made - nothing fancy - that has a space
to enter the discussion board prompt and then
a space for me to type my response to that prompt.
This gives me a place to write my first draft and save it
if I'm not ready to post it to Blackboard right away
and it also archives all the work that I've done from this class in a way
that really makes sense and is easy to access
for after that class is over and you don't have access to that
discussion board forum anymore. When I'm done typing it up
I just copy and paste it into Blackboard and submit it.
And if I reference any of the course readings
I'll make sure to relate it up in this field here.
I also upload any assignments that I have to upload as Word documents here
as well as any assignment descriptions that I've downloaded from Blackboard.
For classes that have extensive online materials, I'll copy
and paste all of that into a Notion page so that I have access
to it after the class closes.
This also allows me to actively engage with the material
while I read it by leaving myself notes and comments.
I also have a template that has space for any notes, downloads, or
online resources that might come up during a live Zoom class.
This is also where I'll archive
any slides that are posted later if they're available.
For bigger projects like research papers, I'll do the whole
planning process in a Notion page, including
looking for and organizing source material. Now let's
hop over to the readings database. This thing contains all
the reading that I've done in my program so far, and it's sortable in
a lot of different ways, including by class that it was from,
by author, by publisher, by topic,
really any data that I can enter here into the table,
I can sort this data by. In the body of the reading pages
I've just made a few quick templates. These help me to
create citations for each of these readings so that they're ready
if I need to cite them in an assignment. And I'll usually "print"
the PDFs of readings into google drive for safe keeping
and at this point I usually read them there as well and annotate them
with the comment feature, and then I can embed
the google drive PDF into the
Notion page so it's really easy to find and access through
this data base. [mouse click] And the last little
thing I have going on is just a
small table where I keep the suggested course plan for my program
and this is where I just keep track of the courses that I've already
taken, when I took them, what's left for me to take and what I
might want to take next. [mouse click] Okay! So that's how I use
Notion to keep track of and archive my online classes.
If you want to use or adapt my systems, I've included a link down below
to a blank template that you can duplicate into
your own Notion workspace. The basic version of Notion is
completely free for everyone to use so there's really no risk
to try it out if you're interested. If this was at all helpful to you
please press the like and subscribe buttons, and leave a
comment to let me know if you've already tried Notion
if you're going to give it a shot, or if you have
another foolproof system that you think I should look at.
Thanks for watching, and happy studying.