Foolproof Guide To School Success!

This pretty cafe I visited today😍 Finally got some time to read and relax😊

so one thing that totally stressed me out in first year of uni was the emphasis on auditory learning! personally, i’ve never been able to learn when i’m just being talked at or told information, my brain just doesn’t work that way. 

if you’re like me, here’s some of my top tips on how to get the most out of lectures when you suck at listening:

01. always come prepared

preparation is key when you know you won’t be concentrating for the full duration of your lecture. the night before a lecture, your priorities should be to print off your lecture slides, read over them and look over the extra readings (if any have been set). i always find that it’s easier to listen and i’m more likely to pay attention in a lecture when i know the basics of what’s being talked about! it’s a lot easier to learn and pay attention when what you’re being told about is building on some basic knowledge that you already have. if i’m going into a lecture completely blind, then i’m going to get distracted in the first ten minutes and the rest of the lecture is a write off!

prepare, prepare, prepare!!!

02. sit where you lecturer can see you

if you sit in teacher’s line of sight, you’re going to be 100% more aware of what you’re doing and how you’re acting in your lecture. being conscious of what you’re doing is really helpful in stopping yourself becoming distracted and letting your mind wander! if i make eye contact with my teacher and i’m not totally concentrating, it’s zones me back in and i can continue trying to listen

03. take audio recordings of lectures

even if your university provides recordings for you, having personal audio copies of your lectures will be a life saver. recordings give you something to constantly refer back to when you have gaps in your notes and knowledge because you couldn’t pay attention in lectures. listening back to them can also reassure you when you were listening but weren’t sure if you understood the concept at the time!  i use a combination of voice memos on the iphone and audio recorder on microsoft onenote, depending on whether i have my phone or laptop with me

04. stay hydrated

having to stay focused on one person talking for hours at a time can be really draining and exhausting when that’s not what your brain likes. being dehydrated can also make you tired and irritable too! if you can tackle one source of your tiredness then you’re going to feel invigorated and ready to learn, so drink lots and lots of water! a bottle of water will stop you feeling sluggish and boost your productivity during lectures

05. invest in textbooks and key texts

i mentioned before how preparation is key, but continuing your learning after your lecture ends is just as important! in my first year, i made the bad mistake of getting angry that i struggled learning content during a lecture so i just left the lecture and didn’t go back to it again. i now know that it’s so important for me to access the course’s key books and texts and use them after the lecture to consolidate what i heard and to expand on some points i was struggling to understand during the allotted lecture time! textbooks have completely saved me ass this year

06. reflect when you’re distracted

if you find yourself becoming distracted or you can feel your mind beginning to wander, take a second to stop and ask yourself why you’re getting distracted and why you’re not learning. most of the time, the problem is going to be something small that can be fixed there and then. if you’re struggling because you’re hungry, have a snack! if you’re struggling because you’re thirsty, have a drink! if you’re struggling because you’re uncomfortable, stretch your legs and your arms and try again!

obviously all of these tips are personal to me and things i find helpful so they might not work for everyone, but i still hope i’ve helped at least one of you non-auditory learners out here! 

I finally finished my final exams and also took the results , this year was a difficult year for me and also my last year of school which means next year i will be in university inshallah.

sometimes, you don’t magically improve how you want to. sometimes, instead of getting an a in that class you worked really hard in, you get a c. but going from a fail to a c is so much progress in itself, and you should be proud of yourself for that. glorifying getting a’s is great and all, but we all need to see more posts glorifying real progress, whatever that looks like. you had failed that test completely but now you scraped a pass? progress! you got a d in that class last year and now it’s gone up to a c or a b? progress! a’s are wonderful and all, but sometimes you’ve got to cherish the other, less typically celebrated moments. no one goes from a fail to a 100 overnight. give yourself some credit.

50 Top Online Learning Sites

Rejoice fellow uni students looking for some studyspo, we urge you to take a few free lessons, as well as academic lessons provided from actual universities on several topics. Have a look at the 50 top learning sites you can find online to help you save some time.

Art and Music

Dave Conservatoire — Dave Conservatoire is an entirely free online music school offering a self-proclaimed “world-class music education for everyone,” and providing video lessons and practice tests.

Drawspace — If you want to learn to draw or improve your technique, Drawspace has free and paid self-study as well as interactive, instructor-led lessons.

Justin Guitar — The Justin Guitar site boasts over 800 free guitar lessons which cover transcribing, scales, arpeggios, ear training, chords, recording tech and guitar gear, and also offers a variety of premium paid mobile apps and content (books/ ebooks, DVDs, downloads).

Math, Data Science and Engineering

Codecademy — Codecademy offers data science and software programming (mostly Web-related) courses for various ages groups, with an in-browser coding console for some offerings.

Stanford Engineering Everywhere — SEE/ Stanford Engineering Everywhere houses engineering (software and otherwise) classes that are free to students and educators, with materials that include course syllabi, lecture videos, homework, exams and more.

Big Data University — Big Data University covers Big Data analysis and data science via free and paid courses developed by teachers and professionals.

Better Explained — BetterExplained offers a big-picture-first approach to learning mathematics — often with visual explanations — whether for high school algebra or college-level calculus, statistics and other related topics.

Design, Web Design/ Development

HOW Design University — How Design University (How U) offers free and paid online lessons on graphic and interactive design, and has opportunities for those who would like to teach.

HTML Dog — HTML Dog is specifically focused on Web development tutorials for HTML, CSS and JavaScript coding skills.

Skillcrush — Skillcrush offers professional web design and development courses aimed at one who is interested in the field, regardless of their background — with short, easy-to-consume modules and a 3-month Career Blueprints to help students focus on their career priorities.

Hack Design — Hack Design, with the help of several dozen designers around the world, has put together a lesson plan of 50 units (each with one or more articles and/or videos) on design for Web, mobile apps and more by curating multiple valuable sources (blogs, books, games, videos, and tutorials) — all free of charge.

General – Children and Adults

Scratch – Imagine, Program, Share — Scratch from MIT is a causal creative learning site for children, which has projects that range from the solar system to paper planes to music synths and more.

Udemy — Udemy hosts mostly paid video tutorials in a wide range of general topics including personal development, design, marketing, lifestyle, photography, software, health, music, language, and more.

E-learning for kids — E-learning for Kids offers elementary school courses for children ages 5-12 that cover curriculum topic including math, science, computer, environment, health, language, life skills and others.

Ed2go — Ed2go aims their “affordable” online learning courses at adults, and partners with over 2,100 colleges and universities to offer this virtual but instructor-led training in multiple categories — with options for instructors who would like to participate.

GCF Learn Free — GCFLearnFree.org is a project of Goodwill Community Foundation and Goodwill Industries, targeting anyone look for modern skills, offering over 1,000 lessons and 125 tutorials available online at anytime, covering technology, computer software, reading, math, work and career and more.

Stack Exchange — StackExchange is one of several dozen Q+A sites covering multiple topics, including Stack Overflow, which is related to computer technology. Ask a targeted question, get answers from professional and enthusiast peers to improve what you already know about a topic.

HippoCampus — HippoCampus combines free video collections on 13 middle school through college subjects from NROC Project, STEMbite, Khan Academy, NM State Learning Games Lab and more, with free accounts for teachers.

Howcast — Howcast hosts casual video tutorials covering general topics on lifestyle, crafts, cooking, entertainment and more.

Memrise — Lessons on the Memrise (sounds like “memorize”) site include languages and other topics, and are presented on the principle that knowledge can be learned with gamification techniques, which reinforce concepts.

SchoolTube — SchoolTube is a video sharing platform for K-12 students and their educators, with registered users representing over 50,000 schools and a site offering of over half a million videos.

Instructables — Instructables is a hybrid learning site, offering free online text and video how-to instructions for mostly physical DIY (do-it-yourself) projects that cover various hands-on crafts, technology, recipes, game play accessories and more. (Costs lie in project materials only.)

creativeLIVE — CreativeLive has an interesting approach to workshops on creative and lifestyle topics (photography, art, music, design, people skills, entreprenurship, etc.), with live access typically offered free and on-demand access requiring purchase.

Do It Yourself — Do It Yourself (DIY) focuses on how-tos primarily for home improvement, with the occasional tips on lifestyle and crafts topics.

Adafruit Learning System — If you’re hooked by the Maker movement and want to learn how to make Arduino-based electronic gadgets, check out the free tutorials at Adafruit Learn site — and buy the necessary electronics kits and supplies from the main site.

Grovo — If you need to learn how to efficiently use a variety of Web applications for work, Grovo has paid (subscription, with free intros) video tutorials on best practices for hundreds of Web sites.

General College and University

edX — The edX site offers free subject matter from top universities, colleges and schools from around the world, including MIT and Harvard, and many courses are “verified,” offering a certificate of completion for a nominal minimum fee.

Cousera — Coursera is a learning site offering courses (free for audit) from over 100 partners — top universities from over 20 countries, as well as non-university partners — with verified certificates as a paid option, plus specializations, which group related courses together in a recommended sequence.

MIT Open Courseware — MIT OpenCourseWare is the project that started the OCW / Open Education Consortium [http://www.oeconsortium.org], launching in 2002 with the full content of 50 real MIT courses available online, and later including most of the MIT course curriculum — all for free — with hundreds of higher ed institutions joining in with their own OCW course materials later.

Open Yale Courses — Open Yale Courses (OYC) are free, open access, non-credit introductory courses recorded in Yale College’s classroom and available online in a number of digital formats.

Open Learning Initiative — Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU’s) Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is course content (many open and free) intended for both students who want to learn and teachers/ institutions requiring teaching materials.

Khan Academy — Khan Academy is one of the early online learning sites, offering free learning resources for all ages on many subjects, and free tools for teachers and parents to monitor progress and coach students.

MIT Video — MITVideo offers over 12,000 talks/ lecture videos in over 100 channels that include math, architecture and planning, arts, chemistry, biological engineering, robotics, humanities and social sciences, physics and more.

Stanford Online — Stanford Online is a collection of free courses billed as “for anyone, anywhere, anytime” and which includes a wide array of topics that include human rights, language, writing, economics, statistics, physics, engineering, software, chemistry, and more.

Harvard Extension School: Open Learning Initiative — Harvard’s OLI (Open Learning Initiative) offers a selection of free video courses (taken from the edX selection) for the general public that covers a range of typical college topics, includings, Arts, History, Math, Statistics, Computer Science, and more.

Canvas Network — Canvas Network offers mostly free online courses source from numerous colleges and universities, with instructor-led video and text content and certificate options for select programs.

Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple — Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple” is, as the name implies, a set of just three lectures (plus intro) very specifically about Quantum Physics, form three presentations given by theoretical physicist Hans Bethe.

Open UW — Open UW is the umbrella initiative of several free online learning projects from the University of Washington, offered by their UW Online division, and including Coursera, edX and other channels.

UC San Diego Podcast Lectures — Podcast USCD, from UC San Diego, is a collection of audio and/or video podcasts of multi-subject university course lectures — some freely available, other only accessible by registered students.

University of the People — University of the People offers tuition-free online courses, with relatively small fees required only for certified degree programs (exam and processing fees).

NovoEd — NovoEd claims a range of mostly free “courses from thought leaders and distinguished professors from top universities,” and makes it possible for today’s participants to be tomorrow’s mentors in future courses.

IT and Software Development

Udacity — Udacity offers courses with paid certification and nanodegrees — with emphasis on skills desired by tech companies in Silicon Valley — mostly based on a monthly subscription, with access to course materials (print, videos) available for free.

Apple Developer Site — Apple Developer Center may be very specific in topics for lessons, but it’s a free source of documentation and tutorials for software developers who want to develop apps for iOS Mobile, Mac OS X desktop, and Safari Web apps.

Google Code — As with Apple Developer Center, Google Code is topic-narrow but a good source of documentation and tutorials for Android app development.

Code.org — Code.org is the home of the “Hour of Code” campaign, which is aimed at teachers and educators as well as students of all ages (4-104) who want to teach or learn, respectively, computer programming and do not know where to start.

Mozilla Developer Network — MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) offers learning resources — including links to offsite guides — and tutorials for Web development in HTML, CSS and JavaScript — whether you’re a beginner or an expert, and even if you’re not using Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser.

Learnable — Learnable by Sitepoint offers paid subscription access to an ebook library of content for computers and tablets, and nearly 5,000 videos lessons (and associated code samples) covering software-related topics – with quizzes and certification available.

Pluralsight — Pluralsight (previously PeepCode) offers paid tech and creative training content (over 3,700 courses and 130K video clips) for individuals, businesses and institutions that covers IT admin, programming, Web development, data visualization — as well as game design, 3D animation, and video editing through a partnership with Digital-Tutors.com, and additional software coding lessons through Codeschool.com.

CodeHS — CodeSchool offers software coding lessons (by subscription) for individuals who want to learn at home, or for students learning in a high school teacher-led class.

Aquent Gymnasium — Gymnasium offers a small but thorough set of free Web-related lesson plans for coding, design and user experience, but filters access by assessing the current knowledge of an enrollee and allows those with scores of at least 70% to continue.

Late night studying featuring my glass of orange smoothie 😋 #studygram #studyblr #studymotivation https://www.instagram.com/p/Bpj2b_2h28y/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1dv8ryfalc6ep

These moments.

There comes a time in your life when you have to make a decision. Choose one path to walk on, as they say. Well let me tell you, these are the hardest moments. Not only do you have to think about what you want but what others want you to want. People will tell you loads of things. What is cool & uncool. What is beautiful and ugly. What is right and wrong. But you have to block out all that noise. You have to try & find that quiet place, where you can take your decisions yourself. Where you can think about who means well. Take a deep breath & find that quiet place. Think carefully. Because this decision, is going to change your universe.

Sunsets are divine. So is Fitzgerald. 💗