Are you sick of printing off powerpoints and losing precious handwritten notes? Check out the iPad Pro for the ultimate nursing school note-taking experience.

Fast forward to 2019, and I was about to start a 4 month critical care education program for nurses switching from med-surg nursing to critical care. I knew I didn’t want to take handwritten notes, but that my computer note-taking method didn’t work either. That’s when I started looking into the Apple iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. My coworker had recently finished the same program and had used this setup throughout. He showed me his handwritten notes, and I was amazed at how organized the iPad was and knew this was the answer for me. I bought an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil and started downloading Powerpoints immediately.

The best part of this combo is an app called “Notability”. This app allows you to download any PDF, Powerpoint, or other document to the platform. You can keep different subjects organized in the tabs on the left side of the screen, and then you can further divide these down into sub-sections. I would make general subjects like “Cardiovascular”, and then within that I would put any of the Powerpoint lectures, PDFs, etc. that fell under that subject. One of my favorite things to use was the “search” function, which searches the whole document INCLUDING your own handwriting. So if i jotted something in my notes with the Apple Pencil, I could easily find it by typing in the word I was looking for.

I also invested in the Keyboard for the iPad because sometimes I just want to respond to an email or type up a quick document, and I dislike using the large onscreen touch keyboard on the iPad. The keyboard also doubles as a protective case which can protect the screen if you want to put the iPad in your backpack or computer bag and not have to worry about scratching up the screen. The keyboard functions perfectly and quickly and easily folds up when you are done using it.

The ability to keep every Powerpoint, PDF, or handout for every class in nursing school would have been extremely valuable to me and I really wish I had this setup when I was in nursing school. I never would have had to shuffle through papers, looking for the notes I had scribbled down about what was going to be on the next exam. And to me, handwriting my notes just makes it seem to “stick” better than typing them out.

I ended up using only my iPad Pro + Pencil + Keyboard and loved every second of it. To this day I still pull up my notes occasionally when I have a question at work, something that I would have never done with traditional paper + pencil notes. If you are like me and hate old-fashioned note-taking, or you just want that extra edge in nursing school, I highly recommend that iPad Pro!

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