How Technology Helps Students to Learn

ferfetIf there’s one thing that most educators and students alike can agree upon, it’s that not every student learns in the same way to the same level. With alternate learning styles becoming more and more prominent, students are finding themselves falling behind simply because of the style of the education. But students today are part of the technology age, an age that provides all kinds of accessible tools when it comes to learning and studying. The Uni Tutor, for example, is one of them, providing essays and help for students in the UK that might otherwise struggle with the English language. But technology doesn’t stop there. The possibilities are endless as to the help it can provide to students.

Online tutoring

Online tutoring has made it increasingly more accessible for students of all backgrounds and learning styles to gain access to much-needed help. With the number of tutoring websites on the rise, it’s becoming easier to find tutors for even the most obscure subjects and topics, as well as to organise sessions that suit both the tutor, and the student. With the ease of an online session, there’s no need for worrying about the cost of travel, or the act of trying to navigate unfamiliar roads to find an unfamiliar location. Online tutoring can be done from anywhere with an internet connection, providing more comfort for both parties.

Nervous students might find it easier to talk over the internet to a tutor as opposed to sitting face to face, which opens up tutoring to an otherwise more difficultly-accessed audience. It provides a service to students of all different levels of health with any number of conditions, with online special-needs tutors being available too.

Apps

With the rising age of smartphones, it was only a matter of time before study-centric apps became available and they’re now available in excess. From apps that will block social media notifications for given amounts of time, to an alarm that makes you solve a maths equation in order to switch it off, all the way through to apps that allow you to create mind maps, prepare flashcards and make notes to have in your pocket all throughout the day.

It’s known that most students will find themselves drawn to their phone as a form of procrastination, and so it only makes sense to fill their phones during exam-time with any and everything that will help them to study. An app like Tinycards can provide students with a set of aesthetically pleasing flashcards to flick over if the intense studying gets too much. With shorter workouts that fit to your study breaks, Sworkit can be just as important as any other study app. Having an exercise routine while studying not only provides a break, but also helps brain performance and concentration.

For when you’re actually in a studying mood, however, there are apps with background noise or calming music to help you focus or an app like ‘EasyBib’ that will scan the barcode of a book and create a bibliography for you, technology has it all. Time-saving apps like Dragon Dictation can help students focus on what’s important. Rather than writing up masses of notes that they aren’t truly concentrating on, Dragon Dictation allows the student to speak into their phone and will convert your words into text, cutting down note-taking significantly.

Types of Learners

The four different types of learners is something that a lot of students might remember from as early as primary school. It’s a concept that has been around for a while, but that still isn’t being implemented in schools as much as it probably should be. But this is where technology can help. The four styles – Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing, and Kinesthetic – all can be catered to with today’s technology.

Visual learners – students who learn best by watching or looking at something – have more access than ever to countless videos all over the internet that can even be accessed on their phones. YouTube, for example, has an impressive level of resources for most topics, thanks to a user base who will create so that others can watch and learn from what they’ve watched.

Some of those that have created the content may very well be kinesthetic learners – people that learn by doing. With the increase in touchscreen technology including phones and tablets, kinesthetic learners have better resources than ever when it comes to learning. There are apps and games littered all over the internet that can provide a hands-on approach to learning.

Reading/Writing learners not only have the means to study faster with the ability to type, but they also have access to endless resources online for whatever their topic of study might be. With the endless reading material and the ability to type up notes faster than they may be handwritten, technology has offered an easier, faster way for Reading/Writing learners to study.

Auditory learners have access to an array of resources online too. With audiobooks growing in popularity and podcasts in the millions, they can gain access to already-recorded notes to listen to. But it doesn’t stop there. Where there may be a lack of resources for a specific topic, technology also allows for students to record their own voice notes and listen back to them at a later date.

Quicker and Easier

Overall, technology has made studying a much quicker and easier process. It’s eradicating the need for endless hours spent writing up notes, it makes even the most tedious of tasks like referencing that little bit easier and faster, and it has provided the equipment for students to do all of this on, too.

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