Abstract:

At present-day, university students are digital natives. They have grown up immersed in digital culture and have used electronic devices from an early age. Despite being qualified and skilled in information technology, their use of digital devices for educational purposes is limited. Notably, teachers generally detect that students use common digital tools such as laptops, tablets and mobile phones little to improve their learning. On many occasions, lecturers are the ones who induce students to use their mobile phones, for example, doing quick tests or gamification in class through applications such as Kahoot, Socrative or Moodle. In general, students highly value using their mobile devices for these activities. They improve attention, motivation, and participation in class, and their use has been widely extended in recent years. Thanks to new technologies, ubiquitous learning (u-learning) is also gaining ground as a way for students to study and do their work anywhere, at any time and from any device. However, many students are not aware that they could use these mobile devices to improve other aspects that can significantly impact their learning. Using tablets to take digital notes during lectures, for example, is an activity that can bring positive aspects to learning. One of these is that students have a digital copy of the notes, which they can correct, improve, modify, complete, and share at any time. Correcting the digital notes is very comfortable and allows to rewrite and redo the notes very quickly and effectively. Also there is the possibility of completing the notes with external material, images or documents extracted from different sources or improving the notes by adding a theme to change the appearance, format, colour and font sizes. They represent some interesting characteristics to use note-taking applications through tablets. Numerous applications for tablets are devoted to notes, such as Evernote, OneNote, SimpleNote, Google Keep, Ulysses, GoodNotes, Obsidian or Coda. Some are free, while others are not. However, the latter are usually offered at a fairly affordable price. At the University, we are detecting more and more students bringing their laptops or tablets to class. Some take notes from lectures, problem classes or laboratory practices taught by the lecturer. However, the general trend is that still, very few students use these devices to take notes. The goal of this work has been to evaluate the real use of these tools in class, specifically for taking notes, to know which specific applications they use, the causes of their low use, and the potential use by students who still do not use them. For this, a survey was created and carried out by practically all the students enrolled in the subject Industrial Chemical Processes of the Industrial Technology Engineering degree. The questions dealt with the availability or not of tablets by the students, their carrying in class, their use in class to take notes or not, what specific application/applications they use, whether they were aware of the possibilities of using tablets to take notes in class, the advantages of its use, and if they would be willing to use them if they did not use them before. The results were positive regarding the potential use of these tools and applications for note-taking during classes in general.

Keywords:

Tablets, class notes, mobile devices, note-taking apps.