Ms. Elior Coleman, Ms. Naomi Portnoy & ms. varda Berkson
Project Abstract
A major difficulty that we encounter while working in the SLC is keeping our students on track at home. While in the SLC, learning specialists and students come up with comprehensive study plans to keep students on top of their work and to break down long term assignments into manageable chunks. These plans often fall apart when students do not stick to them once they walk out of the SLC. Additionally, students often feel frustrated when they seem to have studied for hours on end, but do not see positive results. Therefore, we were motivated to create a project which utilized different technological tools to help monitor our students work habits at home and to train them to monitor their own use of time and overall focus. We wanted to find a way to track how much time students spent on school work at home and how productive they actually were doing during that time. Our initial plan included choosing individual students who struggle with time management, introducing them to a tool from the website toggl.com (see first entry in chart below), and having them use the tool for a few weeks. This toggl.com tool tracks the amount of time students work on different tasks (school work, facebook, dinner, softball practice, etc.), and then shows them how they’ve truly spent their time each night. The website also compiles entries and can show how students managed their time over weeks and months, or by assignment. We hoped that this tool would help to organize students’ time at home and help them to become more aware of how they were spending their time outside of school. What we found was that the students were not following through and were not entering information into toggl. The idea of a timer was attractive, but the same issues of focus and time management that were problematic to begin with, created challenges in implementing this strategy.
In our many attempts to implement toggl and a variety of other time management and organizational tools with our students, we learned about the vast array of apps and sites out there for academic support. We decided to shift our focus and to create a database of different study tools which could be used to support our students. We divided the list into the different categories that we have found students in the SLC most often struggle with; time management, distraction blocking, note taking and general studying. For each category, we included a number of sites that students and teachers could access, and the pros and cons of each site. As was true with Toggl, the sites and apps are only as good as the user implementing them, and each site requires active engagement and participation by the users. We hope that this database will grow and will become a resource for all students, even those outside the SLC.
A major difficulty that we encounter while working in the SLC is keeping our students on track at home. While in the SLC, learning specialists and students come up with comprehensive study plans to keep students on top of their work and to break down long term assignments into manageable chunks. These plans often fall apart when students do not stick to them once they walk out of the SLC. Additionally, students often feel frustrated when they seem to have studied for hours on end, but do not see positive results. Therefore, we were motivated to create a project which utilized different technological tools to help monitor our students work habits at home and to train them to monitor their own use of time and overall focus. We wanted to find a way to track how much time students spent on school work at home and how productive they actually were doing during that time. Our initial plan included choosing individual students who struggle with time management, introducing them to a tool from the website toggl.com (see first entry in chart below), and having them use the tool for a few weeks. This toggl.com tool tracks the amount of time students work on different tasks (school work, facebook, dinner, softball practice, etc.), and then shows them how they’ve truly spent their time each night. The website also compiles entries and can show how students managed their time over weeks and months, or by assignment. We hoped that this tool would help to organize students’ time at home and help them to become more aware of how they were spending their time outside of school. What we found was that the students were not following through and were not entering information into toggl. The idea of a timer was attractive, but the same issues of focus and time management that were problematic to begin with, created challenges in implementing this strategy.
In our many attempts to implement toggl and a variety of other time management and organizational tools with our students, we learned about the vast array of apps and sites out there for academic support. We decided to shift our focus and to create a database of different study tools which could be used to support our students. We divided the list into the different categories that we have found students in the SLC most often struggle with; time management, distraction blocking, note taking and general studying. For each category, we included a number of sites that students and teachers could access, and the pros and cons of each site. As was true with Toggl, the sites and apps are only as good as the user implementing them, and each site requires active engagement and participation by the users. We hope that this database will grow and will become a resource for all students, even those outside the SLC.
Click below to download a list of apps
tools_for_study_skills.pdf | |
File Size: | 109 kb |
File Type: |