Study Prof

For years, and in my video (see right sidebar), I’ve been preaching the power of frequent study breaks to boost recall. Here’s a great online app you can quickly set to keep track of study sessions and breaks. It’s a nice (free) all in one package. Plus, there’s a downloadable desktop version. Take a look here.

Trying to establish a knew habit? My students know that committing to the new behavior of 30 days IN-A-ROW, is the key to making those habits stick. Enter Don’t Break The Chain!, an online calendar that allows you to tick off the days to your thirty day chain of good behavior. Knock’em dead!

I’ve mentioned Gopingme.com before. I’ve been using it lo these many years now to set up reminders for myself. Reminders can be emailed or texted to you on any interval you choose.

For example, I can set it to text me, “Don’t forget The King’s birthday,” once a year at 12AM on January 8th, or “Pick up more hemorrhoid cream,” every second Tuesday at 8AM. You can even configure it to keep bugging you, say every five minutes, until you respond to the text or email. It’s dead simple and way powerful, so go get an account NOW (totally free, by the by).

Now you have a procrastination assassin on call! Set up (more…)

VocabSushi, though still in beta, is proving to be a nifty tool for bulking up those flabby vocabulary muscles. You’ll need to sign up first (free) and pick the test your studying for (GRE, SAT, whatever). VocabSushi will give you short quiz to find out your current verbal expertise, and then you’re off! Quizzes, reviews, pronunciations, definitions, contextual uses, and more! And when you master a word, VocabSushi will add a new word to your list so you’ll never run out.

It does have some minor beta issues, but they’re small, and certainly worth the annoyance. I wouldn’t necessarily use this as a replacement for flashcards, but it’s a nice upgrade for your arsenal.

Studies show that simply tracking how many times you engage in a good habit (or sideslip a bad habit) will cause most people to up those numbers. How simple is that?! So start tallying up those push ups, timing your study hours, and counting your calories, to become master of your domain!

Amble on over to this nifty site for tracking your trends. Enter absolutely anything you want–number of periwinkle blue caravans you’ve narrowly avoided purchasing, amount of salmon mousse consumed with no lethal effects, quantity of fleshy-headed mutants you’ve found friendly, total number of obscure movie references you’ve noticed in this post, whatever–and the site will keep track of it and allow you to display it in a variety of tres-hip ways.

Check your grammar, style, and spelling with After The Deadline, a free online tool. Just paste your writing into the box and After The Deadline will underline words or phrases that need a closer look. Click on the word or phrase for suggestions and explanations. This would be a great way to revise those rough drafts.

At http://www.online-stopwatch.com/ they have an online stopwatch and timer, but you can also download them as flash programs.  Need more than one stopwatch/timer running at a time? You can launch multiple instances of the flash program. A must have for timing those study sessions. And all for the low, low price of FREE.

Here are a few more sites similar to the aforementioned Academic Earth site for watching online lectures by top academics.

For business related topics take a look at MBAvid.com, and for lectures in a larger variety of subjects try Lectr.com.

For your thoughtful consideration I’ve included a random, hilarious (disturbing?) picture I found at Awkwardfamilyphotos.com, just cuz.

You’d think that college profs would be able to teach, wouldn’t you? You’d think they would actually have to prove their merit as teachers before sticking them in front of 200 freshman paying $90 per credit hour each for the privilege. But most of us know better.

In fact, your average high school teacher is a much more capable and well-trained educator. HS teachers get waaaaay more training in good pedagogical methods than do college professors, and they often teach the same subjects over and over, not only to multiple classes in a single day, but year after year. Practice makes perfect (at least in theory). High school teachers are also directly concerned with how well you learn the materials. Not so for your average college prof.

Don’t get me wrong. (more…)

Updated from May 2008 post…

God bless book stores.  For the low low price of zero dollars an SAT/GRE junkie like me can go take a look at purty much every test prep book out there.  I go through the various books on a semi-yearly basis to see if there is any new test fu I can bring to my students.

There usually isn’t.  All the test prep books use very similar tactics and techniques but rename them and package them to sound different from the competition.  This is pretty much what you would expect, isn’t it?  After all, there are big bucks to be made, and I’m not the only one with access to a book store.

Which SAT or GRE prep book should you buy? The one you’ll use. One recent study compared different methods of test prep to see (more…)