A White Board and an iPad

For me, with the limited attention span typical of most Emergency Medicine doctors, I found sitting down in front of a text book for hours on end mind numbingly boring. Rote learning, long didactic sessions and endless lists and notes just didn’t do it for me.

I needed to have a billion and one resources, jump around multiple topics and study in multiple different locations, in multiple different styles to keep my attention on the job. Not everyone is like this of course, and its important to find the style that suits you best.

One of the most useful methods I found however to read a short topic for maybe 15-20mins, then summarise immediately what I had remembered onto a white board, often in the form of a daft annotated diagram in a few colours. This meant I was really challenging my brain to recall the information, and that while I was reading it I paid attention as I knew I needed to summarise at the end.

StrokeWhiteboard
Stroke Syndromes Whiteboard
TheophyllineWhiteboard
Theophylline Toxicity Whiteboard
Toxidrome Whiteboard
Toxidromes Whiteboard

 Next, i’d use my iPad to take a photo and arrange the whiteboard photos into folders for each subject. This meant that if I had my iPad with me at all times, I could revise the whiteboards without having to carry notes or text books around with me.

WhiteboardFiles

Worked for me……and also is environmentally savvy as no huge piles of paper notes!