As technology advances, tools for studying and staying organized are moving from old fashioned pen-and-paper to electronic and high tech. Creating hand written flash cards, jotting notes on loose leaf paper, and hand writing essays are becoming tasks of the past. Help your child update his study and organizational habits by using the tech-based options below.

Writing

For many students, writing an essay can be a dreaded ordeal.  They may have poor handwriting, weak fine motor skills, or simply find the task of writing tedious. With voice recognition programs such as Dragon Dictate, students can dictate their ideas as the computer types them. In doing so, students avoid the physical limitations of writing and tend to elaborate and add more details and than they would with handwriting. Once their writing is complete, the program can read the it out loud to them, allowing the student to catch more mistakes and‎ self-check them.

Study Guides

Power Point can serve as a helpful tool for creating study guides. Students can create a Power Point presentation using material they need to learn for an exam – a task many students enjoy more than hand writing flash cards or study guides. The computer can then read the material out loud as the student listens and absorbs it.

Reading

Instead of reading a print-only version of a book for school, students can listen to books on CD (or digital versions) and read along with the written copy. They can also use sites such as Learning Ally, which offers thousands of digital novels, textbooks, reference materials, and newspapers that can all be downloaded.

Interactive Study Tools

Interactive text-to-speech programs, such as Kurzweil 3000, combine the reading of text with engaging study tools. With these programs, users can scan and import text or transfer in web pages and learn how to actively interact with the material. They can use multi-colored highlighters to identify key information, take digital margin notes, and even write electronic “sticky notes.” Students can take read or listen to text, organize information, and learn important vocabulary words, all in one place.

 As technology advances, encourage your child to update her approach to studying using these tech-based tools. She will enjoy the interactive process and will ultimately feel more confident and successful in school.

The post Tech Tools That Make Studying Easier for Students   appeared first on EBL Coaching.

Taking end-of-the-year exams can be one of the most daunting aspects of school. Many students lose well-needed sleep and cringe at the thought of the big test day arriving. By learning some helpful test taking strategies, students can improve their performance on these exams, while helping to strengthen their overall study skills.

Column-Style Study Guides

Learning large quantities of information can be overwhelming for many students, especially when it comes from densely written texts. A helpful strategy for learning this information is to create column-style notes to serve as study guides. Say, for instance, a student needs to learn a text book section about Word War I. He or she should first read that section one sub-section at a time before taking any notes. The student should highlight the main idea of each section in green, or if there is no explicit main idea written in the text, he or she should write an implicit main idea in the margin and highlight that in green. The student should then highlight the important details in yellow, trying to only highlight information that is very important and only words and phrases whenever possible. One the student has finished reading the section, he or she should create a column-style diagram which might look as follows:

Topic: World War I

On the top of the page, the student should write the topic of the section; in this case, World War I. The main idea of each sub-section should be written in the column on the left in his or her own words (Causes of the War, Battles, etc), and the important details from each sub-section should be written in the column on the right. Note that for the important details students can feel free to use abbreviations, symbols, contractions, or any form of shorthand that they find helpful. Students should use this strategy for each section of text that they are required to learn. With this technique, they are able to “chunk” information that was once overwhelming into smaller, easier-to-understand, bits of text.

Memorizing Terms

Students are often required to memorize large quantities of vocabulary words or terms. Without having a photographic memory, this process can be tough. The three-tier note card strategy can be a helpful tool for learning these words and terms. The trick is to write the word or term on the front of the card and then create three horizontal columns on the back of the card, as follows:

The student should write the definition on the top part of the back of the card, in his or her own words. In the second (middle) section, the student should write a sentence with an association to something in his or her life. In the bottom section, the student should draw a picture annotating the sentence. For example, if the vocabulary word to be learned is digress, the student would write that word on the front of the card. On the top section of the back of the card, he or she might write “to stray or deviate.” In the middle section, he or she might write the following sentence: Every time my friend Sally tries to tell a story, she digresses from the main point. In the bottom section, he or she might draw a picture of Sally with a bubble coming out of her mouth with “blah, blah, blah” written inside the bubbles. With this strategy, students learn to link random vocabulary words and terms to various people and events in their lives.

Students should try to avoid cramming these strategies a day or two before the exam. To ease anxiety, they should start applying these strategies well in advance of the test day. By using these techniques they can become active, rather than passive learners, and help prepare themselves not only for one particular exam but for all future exams (and there will be many!) to come.

Dr. Emily Levy is the Founder and Director of EBL Coaching, which offers one-on-one tutoring and intensive summer programs. For more information, visit www.eblcoaching.com or call 212-249-0147.

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