Making technology well work for you
College and high school students are seen every day walking around with their fancy iPod touch, or some other MP3 player with all sorts of features to listen to music or watch videos between classes, all the while complaining about their difficulties with study in class. Well, here’s a secret: you can make your technology work for you.
I believe all opportunistic students should take advantage of their technology to get through college faster and make the most of their study time. Students should find ways to make their resources work to their benefit as much as possible.
Take that MP3 player being used between classes for entertainment; it’s a gold mine for lecture recording. There are accessories available for purchase to attach to an MP3 player in order to record things such as class lectures or other useful meetings where having the audio later on is useful.
In my opinion, this accessory works much better for listening to lectures later on than other digital recorders. It’s an attachment to something used so frequently that it’s much more difficult to forget, and much easier to control.
A student has a chance to use more than one sense to maximize learning absorption. Recordings can go on iTunes or other music sources, or they can be recorded onto a CD. Anyone can turn anything into a study session with recordings.
Reading, writing, and other forms of study are still core necessities, but the more ways there are to repeat information, the better it is absorbed into long-term memory. Frequent usage is everything when it comes to learning.
Part of learning and using every resource accessible involves finding a way to make learning and studying more rewarding.Audio-record notes yourself when you have a good question or have come across an important point in your study. Turn something into an audio or video comedy, make a Web site where the information is complementary to lectures, and be the hero in your class; whatever it is that makes study most worthwhile for you.
Get a few Instant-messaging names from people in your class willing to do a study group, but aren’t necessarily all around to getting together and studying at the same time.
Put your notes from the day onto your computer if you haven’t been taking notes from a notebook during class. Using a notebook in particular can be beneficial on its own, since typing is faster than writing in pencil. A student can transcribe pretty much everything a teacher says in lecture as long as they’re experienced with a keyboard. This is not to imply you will absorb more from typing than from written notes; only that you’ll have more information saved somewhere than if you were only using pencil and paper.
Your ability to turn study in your favor is what will make all the difference between a difficult and very successful college career.
The better you know your resources and technology for study, the better chance of succeeding in the classroom, and later on in the work environment. Make what you have work for you. Technology is your best example of what can be done today that could not be done a few generations ago.