Create your own digital textbook

Do you miss the days of textbooks, highlighters, and sticky notes? I do. Over the last several years I have transitioned to digital notebooks for my learning, but I will admit, on occasion, I will buy the book, grab my highlighters, and immerse myself in the pages. This is a rarity and for the Microsoft exams not an option since the material is on Microsoft Learn and not available as a digital download. As much as I love the content on Learn, I find it does not meet my study needs like highlighting specifics and adding my own notes. To get around this, I create textbooks with the Learn material. I am not referring to my OneNote study guides that are available on GitHub. The links I provide in my GitHub study guides are great for links to materials but not the Learn material. What I am referring to in this post is creating a digital “textbook” for my own learning.

You can create your own digital textbook by sending the Learn pages to OneNote. Yes, it is a tedious process, but it gives you an offline version of the material that you can then highlight, add your own notes and graphics, and search the Notebook(s) for specific information. The Search feature is the reason I will take the time to create the textbook. If I just need to find one thing, Search will find in the current notebook but also search other notebooks as well. Plus Search will find text in slide decks that are imported into OneNote!

If you want to create your own digital textbook here are the steps I use:

1.      Add the OneNote extension to your browser.

2.  Create a OneNote notebook and be sure to save it to OneDrive.

3. Navigate to the Learn page or any page for that you want to capture, click the OneNote Clipper extension and select your preferred method to capturing the page. Personally, I prefer to use the Article option because it captures the text only. There is another benefit of using Article that you will see in the bonus tip below.

The captured page will be sent to the selected OneNote and section.

That’s it. Yes, I know this can be time consuming clipping each page but for me it is worth the time and helps in my learning process. Plus, it becomes a reference that I can quickly refer to.

Keep in mind that this method creates a static reference guide. The OneNote notebook will not be updated as the webpages are updated.

You could even combine your new digital textbook with the links from my other study guides for a comprehensive reference guide.

Bonus Tip: since writing the draft of this article, I have been spending way too much time diving into ChatGPT and have learned that the tool will create summaries from text. You could export your OneNote notes to a text file, pop it into ChatGPT and have it create a summary or cheat sheet for you. Using the Article option during the capture makes it easier to export and clean up the text before adding it to ChatGPT.

Here is my example:

My input for ChatGPT

My ChatGPT response:

Extra bonus tip: Have ChatGPT create test questions for the exam and then create flash cards in your OneNote.

I know this not a perfect solution but hopefully it will help those of you who like a textbook.

How do you create your study notes? Please post your tips.