Doctoral Journey

iPad, Apple Pencil & Goodnotes App

My ipad, Apple Pencil and Goodnotes app are integral to my memory, my organization, and my planning.

I grew up in the 1980s, and learning was conducted through pen and paper. As a learner, I know that I retain information better when I handwrite it as compared to typing.

The Goodnotes app was a one-time purchase that I made about four years ago (2018) and the price was around $10 (CAD). I have used it extensively at work – I am never in a meeting with the wrong notebook, or without a notebook, and I am now extending my use of this app to my Doctoral studies.

Specifically, I am importing the research articles I am reading as I can highlight, annotate, write, circle, and engage in all other manner of thinking, but I don’t have to pack heavy books around with me.  When I find myself at my son’s piano lesson, I can read. A waiting room at the dentist? A great opportunity to read. It keeps me portable.

Additionally, I use it for note-taking during lectures.  I can snap a photo of the screen directly with the app, crop the photo, then annotate and draw the connections out that I see in my mind.

To make the experience more akin to writing on paper, I have applied a paper-like screen cover to my ipad.

Within Goodnotes, I have applied my own strategy as it pertains to the articles themselves. I import the .pdf files into Goodnotes on my Macbook. Goodnotes has a companion to the iOS app, and as a paid Gootnotes user, the MacOS companion came at no charge.

The covers on the articles amd books are deliberate am well, I strategically apply a cover to each reading. The covers with the pink colour on the left side indicate that there is research contained therein pertinent to artificial intelligence or AI in education.  The light blue line represents research on the teaching effectiveness framework. The yellow line symbolizes readings that pertain to teacher wellness and teacher stress.

I also utilize digital stickers on the covers of the articles. I have percentage stickers to denote how much of the article I have actually read. I also have a typewriter “sticker” that I employ to clearly mark which readings have been transcribed into the slide deck. Again, it is time consuming, but it really keeps my stress and anxiety surrounding completing this degree while working full time in K-12 education reasonable.

Zotero & Google Slides

I recognize that there is redundancy in my system. That is intentional. Each time I download an article or a book in digital form, I am intentional with my process.

1. Import it into Goodnotes as mentioned above.

2. Load it into Zotero to easily get the citation data at a later date.

After reading the article, chapter, or book, I open Google Slides where I have resized the slide to be a standard letter sheet of paper. I go through all my highlighting and annotation of the article (in Goodnotes), and I transcribe the citations I may wish to use onto a deck of slides organizing the information into categories as I work.  For instance, in my slide deck for my research on AI, there are categories such as:

• Algorithms
• ChatGPT
• Big Data
• Teacher-Student Relationships
• The Gaps in the Literature
• Plagiarism
• AT Tutors

and much more.  Each time I add a new category, I create an alphabetical, hyperlinked index on the first slide, expanding the pages as I work. 

I use slides for this purpose for a couple reasons, not the least of which being that it is so easy to create that hyperlinked index which allows me to quickly navigate through the literature I am using to backbone my research.

I do not copy-paste the citations, though obviously I could. I also do not use speech-to-text for these citations, but I do not. The reason I make this choice is that a doctoral degree is a marathon, not a sprint. I will be taking part in a candidacy exam (planning to do that in June, 2024), and eventually I will have a dissertation to defend. I find that when I type out my citations, the likelihood of the information sticking in my head for retrieval at a later date is higher. It’s more time-consuming to do it this way, but I did not make the decision to complete a doctoral degree because I thought it wouldn’t take some time. And honestly, I am very interested in my topic, and so it is a pleasure to revisit the literature frequently.