Tana for Law Students: How I'm Prepping my 3rd Semester Law School Courses

Hi everyone, welcome or welcome back to my channel, Systematic Youth. I'm Dr. Monica Reishevi and today I'm excited to show you how I'm setting up one of my third semester law school courses in tana. If you're new here, I'm a former high school teacher and college professor and administrator turned online education company Chief Operating officer as well as a first year law student. I'm all about helping students master productivity and enhance learning with tana, turning overwhelming coursework into manageable systematic workflows so you can learn better, faster. Let's dive in and see how TANA can revolutionize your study and productivity habits. First, let's start by taking a look at my law school dashboard in tana. What you can see here on the screen is the main dashboard that I navigate to whenever I'm starting to work on any sort of law school related project or activity assignment in Tanha. And on the sidebar you can see that I have a couple of different menu options under courses I have this semester. This is a query that is set up to show me just my courses that are happening this semester. So you can see this semester happens to be first summer and I have them labeled first, second, and third and so forth because I have three and a half years or so of school and it's tagged with course so I can see the three courses I'm taking this summer. If for some reason I want to reference some of the past courses that I have taken already, I can also see my current but I can scroll across and see all of the courses I've had since I started. As I mentioned at the beginning of this video, I'm a 1L first year law student. Technically speaking, that will be more than one year because I'm a hybrid student. I think I'm a 1L through the fall of 2024, but we'll see it has to do with credits and so anyway you can see all of my different courses and I can go back really easily and take a look. Recently I added another query, another search query to show me all the textbooks that I've used across my courses because sometimes I've had to reference my textbooks from my previous courses and current courses. So this has been really helpful as well. I like to add a screenshot of the COVID of what it looks like for the book because that helps jog my memory sometimes because oftentimes we sometimes use books that sound sort of similar depending on what it is. We had for example two case books. I believe in property that my first semester, I was having a heck of a time keeping them straight. So having the COVID here, the image was really helpful for me. So we're going to start off by taking a look at the course I haven't had a chance to prep yet. And that course is my legal profession course. So my point, my goal in showing you how I'm prepping a course is so that if you were thinking about prepping any class, it doesn't have to be law school. It could be high school, college, a graduate program, your PhD program. I wish I had used this in my doctorate program. If Tana had been around, I know my program would have gone so much more smoothly. The point is you can use this with any type of program you're working on. You can even use this if you're tracking your own professional development or personal development. I want to challenge you to think if you're starting to watch this and like, oh, I'm not in law school, this isn't for me. Or I'm not in school, this isn't for me, I want to challenge you to think about how you could apply this to something you're learning in your life. Whether it's something more, let's say practical oriented in sense of it's a training from work. Maybe it's an online course that you signed up for that's not for credit or for credit. It doesn't have to be traditional education that you can apply this to. Think about how you could take this structure of having a course. So maybe this is a program or a training for you instead of a course and how you can use some of the things I show in this video, talking about how I'm gathering information and breaking down assignments and putting due dates and so forth to keep myself on track. Think about how you could apply it to your life in that way. So now I'm going to switch screens and show you with a split screen view how I am prepping my course called the Legal Profession for this semester using Tan. What you see here on the left is my course the Legal Profession. And on the right invite of my course site. This particular course for my university uses the Canvas learning management system. So Tana on the left, Canvas on the right and the browser I'm using is called arc. One of the features I like about it is that you can have this split view. It makes it really nice to be able to show things side by side. So on the left hand side inside of Tana, you can see I've already added some information. I've Added the names of my instructors. I've added some details for the course description. This really varies per course. Sometimes the course just has a paragraph that I think is the boilerplate description that was approved by perhaps the curriculum or the academic committee and it's just a paragraph. In this case, there was quite a lot of information in the syllabus, so I nested it underneath these nodes. So about this course, as you can see, is quite a lot of information about what'll be going on in the course. Course cohorts this course has an interesting concept of how based on we answer a pre survey, pre quiz, they're going to group us into one of these five cohorts having to do with what our goals are post graduation, what we plan to do with our law degree. Course structure. There's details about how the course will be meeting. This particular course, it's a one credit course. It's going to be meeting over, I think it's two or three days. Actually it's two days, but two different times on the first day and one the second day and then the rest of the semester, the rest of the summer it will be online and it will be asynchronous. So this is a little bit different than my other courses that tend to have some immersion periods and then sometimes live classes during the week. It really just depends. One of the reasons why I chose my program is it's a predominantly asynchronous program that doesn't require live classes. And that's fantastic because of my work schedule, family responsibilities, those sorts of things. You'll see here. I've added information about my syllabus here as well. I typically add the syllabus in one of two ways. In Taton, I always download the syllabus into a folder that I have on my Mac that is for law school. I have it separated by courses and that is synced to OneDrive so that I know I have a backup of that information. I also put a copy of the syllabus here in Vladatano because I can click it and expand it and take a look at it really easily. And so that way if you know, for whatever reason, I need to see it when I'm at school, for example, for my computer, I can do that. I can also bring it up on my phone from OneDrive. I have the app on my phone so it makes it really simple to be able to access it. I have a field inside of Tana called classes. Most of my courses don't really have classes, meaning live classes. This one has these three synchronous live classes in person. When I go to immersion in Concord, New Hampshire, which because I'm recording this video on May 31st, this is actually next Friday, so June 7th and June 10th I'll be having these classes and I've entered some information already in the classes that I already pulled from the syllabus. And what I'm going to show you that I'll do live here on the video is walk through how I'm going to add the information. So class one, it gets the class tag and the information that I'm adding to this. So I'm going to pull up the modules because this is broken down by module and by the lms. And so class one is the immersion day one and I'm just double checking that I have my information right. So 9 to 1145, I don't know the classroom yet they will be posting that information. So I'll update it with that. The about this class information that I've added to my summary field pulled from my syllabus and it was quite a lot of information here again. So it's great that I can nest it inside of the tag. In case you didn't know this about Kaima, you can bold and highlight. So if there's things I really wanted to point out here, perhaps I might go ahead and highlight that and even bold it too. And I often do that as I'm reading just to sort of help keep me focused first of all and help me remember the parts that are most important for me. Now, this does not have a module associated with it. I'll talk more about modules in a moment. But modules for my courses, suffice it to say, are, for example, week one, week two, week three. Sometimes modules are chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. I tend to use modules as the organizational bucket that mimics the way the instructor set it up in the learning management system. So if they have it by weeks and they don't delineate like chapter one, chapter two separated out as the organizational bucket, then I will probably use the week. If they use chapters or topics, I will go that way. I usually just match it to the LMS to keep it simple for myself. The assignments. So this is where I'm going to add in the assignments. I've only done one and I stopped so I could go ahead and show you the rest of them. So I'm going to take a look at these pre class assignments and you can see I have the first one here and then the second one I needed to Copy that link because I wanted to make sure to add it here. And let's see, it's the SharePoint Site Crew Service and a lot of times I'll just go ahead and link the words exactly. Sometimes I'll put parentheses link and I'll link that. And I'm tagging it as an assignment. And I won't show you on all of these because it'll be the same. But if I expand this, you'll see a bunch of information is automatically added because of how Tana's super tags can inherit information from other tags and fields. So if I show you, for example, associated course, it already has the legal profession associated with this assignment because it's inheriting it from this particular course. And if I take a look at level that's filled in already, I can take a look at, let's see, my law school has the name of my school and most of the things and semester. So all of these assignments, if I were to take a look at them in a search, I can easily sort of group filter by any of these fields because they have that information associated with it. The third assignment I have to do, and you'll notice I'll go back and forth between simply highlighting like this and copying and pasting. And sometimes I will use a shortcut from my cleanshot Pro so that I can easily paste them in. So this doesn't look exactly the way I would like, but it's close enough so I don't need a period there. So let's see. Complete and submit links. Yep. And if I take a look at this, I can't really see the link to that. So that's one of the things I don't entirely like about this. So I am going to take this out and put complete and submit. And here I'm going to link because otherwise it's not really giving me a lot of information about what I'm going to here it's not, but I like having it separated out just as opposed to the way it came over here, I'll tag it as an assignment. Notice these also have checkboxes, so I can check them off as I go through. And if I were to use the shortcut, which for me is Command Shift 1 on my keyboard, I can just grab the text and then paste it easily in. And these are articles that are inside of Canvas. And sometimes I'll grab all of this at once and then I'll just hit enter and separated them out. So this one's going to turn into just one big one. And I can take this and do spend some time. And that's another one. Click Assignment. Assignment. Great read. Good. So these are all of my assignments that I need to do before immersion. What I'm going to show you next is how I use a table to quickly put in things like due dates. So I'm not having to expand every single node, you know, over and over again to do that. So I mentioned that I'm going to show you how to put your dates in in a faster fashion. Otherwise you're going to have to expand each of these toggles. Now, when I first started working with Tana, I didn't realize I could do this on a field. I would normally create a search view that would show me the assignments for this course and I would turn the view into a table. But there's a much faster way. You could just click in the field and view command K view as table. And I've already set this up so the only thing I can see here is dates and assignments. And this way I have and I consider the dates field, the due date field. I have a due D o date and I have a dates field. I don't have a D u E because I take that to mean the same as dates. So in this case I need to finish all of this before my first class. And the first class is the seventh, so I have to be done by the sixth. So I'm going to go ahead and let me expand this a little bit to make sure I don't have extra information. Nope. And I can copy. I believe let's say sometimes copy pasting doesn't work the best inside of. Okay, as long as you don't hit enter, you can just go ahead and paste. And I'm doing command C to copy the date and command V to paste the date. So then I quickly had in here all the things I needed to have due for this class as the pre assignments just before day one or class one. And I point this out simply because you might have noticed there's a couple of days for this class. So I'm going to assume all of that work needs to be done by the sixth. Because once I get to school up in Concord, there's not really time to do homework. You're in the midst of doing a lot of other things. So now I can switch this back. I just do command k view as list and it's back to a list again. Now that I've tracked all of my assignments for the pre class, I am going to go ahead and see if there's any of the ratings that I can add in to Tana as well. So I'm going to go back up to the modules and if I take a look, I can see the career goal questionnaire. It looks like that is probably yes. I need to complete this inside of Canvas, so I'm not going to do that right now. But I can see some of the different readings. So circles and rectangles. That's one of the readings I had. I can download that. So I'm going to go ahead and download the PDF and let's see if I can download some of the others too. Reinventing your personal brand. And I can download that too. And the last activity, thinking through your self reflection activity. And these are not mentions, but I'm going to go ahead and download them because I have a feeling I'm going to need them. Your journey. And that's the self reflection exercise. So I'll download that. And I think that's just where I submit the file. Yep. So I've downloaded all the files. If I go back to this circle and rectangles, I have a reading and sometimes I just do command F to find where it is. But I have a reading field so I can add my readings to it. All I have to do is drag it, see from my sidebar because I've had downloaded it in Canva or excuse me, inside of Arc. So I'm going to take the circles and drag it out to the reading and I'll just take a moment to upload again. I typically download this to a folder that's synced with OneDrive, so I also have it there as well. So the next one is the reinventing your personal brand. And that one actually let me grab the field first and if I can't find it, command F is my best friend to be able to find the field because you'll notice I use a lot of fields and then I'll just drag it out there. So I will have the reading in this field as well. And I don't need that anymore. The self reflection exercise, it's not so much a reading as the directions for the assignment. But I'm gonna go ahead and put it there for now because I will need to read that and I have that there. Okay, so now I have my assignments prepped for just that first day, that first class, because the class meets twice on the first day. And like I mentioned earlier, I assume I need to finish all of this before the class begins, before immersion begins. So I'm going to go ahead and Take a look at the next immersion session, which is also on the same day and see what assignments I have for that. And I'm going to go back up to my legal profession course, go to Class 2 and let's take a look at the assignments here. So again I'm going to use Cleanshot Pro just because it's faster than copying pasting things over and over again and then I'll just separate it out. So read that and then read employer. I'm just tagging each one of these as assignment. And now if I go ahead and take a look, I'm hoping that this information is here as well. How I made partner. Yep, it's another download. So we'll go ahead and download that. The employment options, downloading that as well and the employer hiring table. Okay. And then I have again all of those downloaded. So I'll just expand it and I will go to my reading section. You'll note I have this pre filled. Typically I'm putting in information that I've copied from like let's say an E textbook to help me annotate it. So I have that node there. And that's because I like to nest my reading content under a node because usually it's really long and the field would grow otherwise. In this case it's just a short. It's a PDF, so it's one line. So this one was how I made partner. I'll drag it in then employment options. And again I'm just deleting that pre filled text because normally I'll show you an example. I would have something like this and I would paste in the node. So then below this I would put the information. Again, because this is a PDF, I don't need that here. So employment options. And this final one, the hiring timetable. Okay, so now I have all of the assignments for the second class during immersion, but I need to put due dates. So I'm going to go back to assignments command K view as table and you'll see this time there's a whole lot more fields and that's just because I haven't hid them before. So I'm just going through and hiding the one that I don't want because I'm not going to use those right now. I'm going to bring up that dates field that I mentioned earlier and I don't need summary so I'm going to hide that. And again this needs to be finished by the sixth because that's the date I have immersion or that's the day before immersion. And then I'll just put it back to a list and it's ready to go. So let's go back up one. I can collapse this back out and just one more immersion day to take a look at class three. So immersion day two, the pre class assignments which happens to be class three. And I have some information that I've pasted in about the class already that was from the syllabus. And then there are some things to think about. So I'm gonna do. It's not an assignment so much as considerations I suppose. So I'm gonna call this completes pre class reflection. And inside of that I'm gonna. And I'm going to paste this. This for me is going to go in summary because actually it'll be a note because I may have things that I end up saying about the. Oh, I'll paste it here. And then there's some information about a panelist. It looks like this is someone who's going to be speaking. That's cool. And I'll close this out. There's not really much to do here and since it's only one, I'm going to go ahead and just fill the data in as opposed to making a table. So again this will be the sixth and I have my date here and then there isn't anything else listed for immersion day two. So that particular class is prepped. I just have the one assignment to take a look at. I'll put also here to kind of remind myself I have a shortcut command shift and the up the bar that lets me add a description. So remember to review panelists bios to kind of remind me to take a look and check that out. So this is all I can really do right now to prep this current course. My program typically has a mix of predominantly asynchronous courses, meaning you do things online at your own pace with due dates in a few synchronous live classes. This particular class, it's a one credit class called the legal Profession has these three in person sessions over two days which I will be taking next week and the following. Then the rest of the semester is asynchronous. Right now if I take a look at. These are the modules. The only modules that are here are these immersion ones. So I imagine that over this semester there will be more modules added for us to do things because it's supposed to be sort of a weekly cadence I think throughout the semester. But for now I just have these three. I don't really have anything about course schedule for now. Normally I would Put something in about, you know, overarching due dates. Right now there isn't really anything here I can put to sort of jog my memory. So I don't think I've forgotten to do that. Just a screenshot of what I have so far. And that's usually what I do if I want to remind myself, hey, that's. That's what I have for the course so far. So today we've taken a look at a couple of different things about how you can use Tana to prep for a course or a training activity or some type of professional development that you have. And you seeing how I'm taking information from the syllabus and putting it in various fields in Tana, how I'm uploading certain fields with certain information and files like the syllabus, I will point out that occasionally I will also take the text and put a full text below that. And usually I just copy paste. I would put text and paste it below. I do that for two reasons. One, that way it's searchable, and by devtana, the PDF itself is not searchable. So if I want to be able to search it and find it, I will add it as text. I also put it as text if I want to be able to quickly reference it in maybe another assignment. Like grab a paragraph node and put it with an assignment, if it's that assignment. And it's going to help me with that particular work. So we've also talked about how I've used the different fields in Tana so that they inherit information. So for example, the semester, the level, and the course are all automatically being filled for me. And that's great, I don't have to go through and fill it out. And I also showed you that tip about how instead of maybe making a search node and then creating a table so that you could quickly add dates, you can just go in the field and do Command k view as table and you can put in information to your table command k view as list and you're back to a list. Again, thank you for watching this video. I hope you found it to be helpful. If you I love getting questions. So if you have any questions about something I showed in this video or other questions related to how can I do X in Tana, leave me a comment below, let me know. I'll help you out as soon as I can. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.