Summary of my learning journey

Learning online is important. Most of the people would think that you need to be enrolled in an online class to learn online. This is not true. Everyone can learn from an online experience. The internet provides different tools to approach a learning experience and the user needs just a few basic skills. During my semester I had the fortune to be enrolled in EDUPL 1159. The class taught me how to manage my time with studying and working hours.  Thanks to online tools such as Google Calendars it is easy to schedule appointments and classes and invite people to attend. In this way the user will not forget because somebody else is invited too. With this tool it is easy to plan the week and set reminders. With these tools I turned my assignments on time. Unfortunately I set the reminders until the last week of classes and for this reason I post on this blog with a few hours of delay.

Time management is very important for a student. More activity a student does and more he needs to manage his time. Procrastination was a term I learned in this class. This term is the reason why most of the students are not ready for an exam or turn in late assignments.  The class provided a few tips that I want to share again, that help to defeat procrastination. The most important action to do is not to over think or “rationalize” too much. This happens when we are focused on an article or on a book and we get distracted by something that is not very important at that moment. The best way to stop procrastination is to understand when we are starting to rationalize and to stop it focusing more on the studying.  

Time management is not the only tool to improve learning/studying skills. In fact there are more tips to help student to have a more efficient preparation. For example a good internet search can provide u important information useful for our papers. To do so we need a few skills that only online experience can provide. Understanding the characteristics of a web page is important for us because it could provide important information. Author or publisher can make us understand how we can trust the source. But online sources can also be considered digital copies of books or articles. To help the user to find what he needs Google provides a tool called Google Scholar which helps the user to find articles or journals based on his necessities.

Videos and audio sources are also important. I discovered that a lot of topics are covered by podcasts on iTunes. Every academic topic can be found on iTunes and the most interesting thing is that important universities such as Harvard or Princeton upload lectures for free on Apple’s software. Video are also important. As I described in a previous post the Khan Academy provides different topic explanations through videos. From math to history this academy provides well done explanations. In most of the example both videos and audios can help student to have a better focus on topics that are covered in class.

In this class I learned the above skills and the use of the above tools. Most importantly I learned how to fight procrastination. Procrastination is the most interesting part of this class because it influenced me in my studying for long time. In future I will always remember what I learned and I will fight against procrastination, because it can be the first obstacle for a student to prepare an exam. 

Researching on the Internet

The internet can be considered like an Ocean, the webpages are the fish. When we research for information that we need for a paper we need to be able to catch the those fish. Users need the right Knowledge to make the search efficient. We can find millions of information on the internet but only a few can be helpful for our paper. To do so we need to know how to use research engines but also to distinguish reliable website that provide quality information.

How can we recognize a reliable website? First of all I would suggest to look at the web address. Domains that end in ".edu" and ".gov" for example can be considered reliable since they represent school institutions and governments. We need also to check the page and understand who is the writer or the publisher (we can find this on the "about us" page). When we know who the publisher is we need to search the credentials if we do not know them. 

How can we understand how reliable the information provided are quality ones? We need to understand if the information are up to date, some articles have dates next to the author. At the end we can understand if the information are useful to our paper. 

Google provides an useful tool to find articles and scholarly sources. Google Scholar. If you never used it, check it out! It searches for scholarly sources on the whole internet.

Studying tools: Notes taking

Taking notes is an action that comes natural to most of the students attending a lecture. The strategies can vary as the results they bring to. Taking notes is not just a way to show that you are participating in class but a good way to start a preparation for an ex

am and learn new information.  Very person has a different approach to notes taking but it is possible to define an efficient strategy that everyone can apply.

First strategy is an easy one. In case the professor uploads lecture’s slides online or he hands them out in class, the student can print the slide as a handout and take notes on the predefined area. In this way the student can have a memory about the information and be able to gather more data without losing time copying from the slides. In case the teacher does not provide the slides ahead the students has to take notes in a standard way.

Second Strategy, it is the more classical way. The student has to listen to information in the lecture and produce notes. Note taking is very important because it provides a tool for the student to store information. The messages and ideas that a student listen in class can be written down and reviewed later. The best way to do this is to write down the important key concepts and ides.

Third Strategy, students can be helped thanks to notes taking models such as the Cornell model. It consists in a pre-made sheet with ideas organization. Organizing ideas into sections can help the memorization and it can increase the speed in the comprehension.

In the case that a few information are left behind the best solution is emailing a teacher. But if we cannot have a communication with our teacher we can ask help to the internet. On internet a few tools can help us to fill the blank in our knowledge. Videos and podcasts are the best examples. 

A Different Way to Learn

Les Miserables and France's many revolutions

    What I present today is a video that prove how it is easy to use the internet and its tools to learn academic topics. Thanks to the Khan Academy the internet user can, in his own home, study and review topics that are covered in the classrooms every day. This video in particular covers French history and makes a connection to the movie "Les Miserables". Also if this video only covers about 55 years (between 1815 to 1870), it provides a lot of information that can be helpful to understand the french history and the events in the background of the famous movie. 

    

    This video helps the viewers to have a better idea of the topic providing both visual and auditive information. Providing visual information it is really helpful to understand better topics. It can be compared to foreign language movies with the subtitles in the original language. The ear gets information at the same time of the eye giving more data to our brain. The Khan Academy provides different topics and it is really helpful on subjects that can't be explained easily by voice like physics and maths. This particular video is helpful because of the use of pictures (important to understand the important historical characters) and the use of a timeline to make the viewer understand when the events took place.

 

Procrastination = Student’s worst enemy.

Many students think that during their academic career the worst enemy is a book. Well, it is not so true. Procrastination is one of the worst enemies for a student. Laziness can be a problem for a few students but also the most wiling students fall under the weapons of procrastinations. I do too sometimes. I always thought that working on the deadline would help me focus better and produce a better job. The reality is that when a student starts to rationalize on the happenings around him the focusing on the studying disappears. Internet, the noise of a clock in an empty room, the most useless thoughts comes in mind while you are studying.  The only way to stop this behavior is to replace this “rationalizations” with the motivation to finish the work and do it well. To do so the student needs a few strategies. The strategies are focused on time management and they help to keep focus on the job. A fast job gives chances to use the spear time for “better” activities, but the job has to be done in the proper way. Having under control the progress of the activity is very important. Do the activity in parts and focus on those small pieces time by time is very important in the understanding. Making a schedule and plan ahead before studying can save the panic of not be able to finish. In conclusion I believe that excluding every kind of distractions and keep the focusing are the best strategies to follow. To do so a student need to believe in the capacities he or she has and not rationalize at all during the studying activity.