Online Research Tools

Another very important but overlooked aspect of studying is to take proper notes when doing research online. If you are simple doing a cut and paste into notepad or ms word then eventually you are going to jumble up and lose valuable information. In a survey done of 5000 college students, it was found that 65% didnt use an online research tool and simply used notepad and ended up spending twice the time they should when typing and doing research online.

The main two tools that can be used are Google Notebook and Evernote. Both have pros and cons and we will start by looking at google notebook. The good thing about google notebook is that with a simple firefox plugin, you will always have your notebooks at the tips of your fingers. And with the same addon you can add and lookup information. It also saves information in its whole form in the notebook. For exmaple, if you copy and paste the contents of a web page, it will also insert the images that come along with it. This can help understanding of the text later and also saves you the trouble of saving the images seperately.

Evernote on the other hand unlike google notebook, is an application that you install on your computer. But also maintains a copy online for you to access when you dont have access to your own computer where the program is installed. It has the same features as google notebook and ultimately the decision about which one to go for will depend on your preferance after a few uses.

Both have one very important feature in common which is that whenever any information is copy and pasted, it retains the URL of the site that it was copied from. And for those of you who have to provide very specific locations that the information was referenced from, this can make a huge difference in both time saving and energy.

Touch Typing

Another very useful skill to have is to be able to touch type. No university student is going to be without a laptop or a computer nowadays and other than developing short notes for your studying, a lot of your time is going to be spent writing assignments and essays. The best way to improve your grades and your writing is to be able to type faster and this is where touch typing comes in. It is the ability to be able to type sentences and entire documents without ever looking at the keyboard with minimal or no errors in the text.

Why does this improve your grades and your writing? Simple. Because one 0f the biggest problems is that our typing can never keep up with our pace of thought. So while writing your latest assignement, as the flow of words and sentences forms in your brain, you have probably only typed a few words. How many times have you come up with a nice para only to find that you cant remember everything you thought of. The other factor is speed, the faster you type the more you will get done sooner, thereby giving you more time to make the corrections that you will probably always need to be making.

There are plent of books and software you can buy or download that will teach you how to touch type. One additional help would be if you spend a lot of time at the computer, this tends to make it easier to learn touch typing as you have already gotten used which key is where. Your performance and typing speed will greatly depend on what keyboard you have been typing on but regardless, if you only ever use your own computer or laptop you should see massive speed increases in a very short period of time.

Study Faster With Speed Reading

One of the best ways to reduce your study time, or at the very least, reduce the time it takes for you to study is to master the concept of speed reading. Not simply just reading fast, but to maintain standard levels of comprehension when reading. Learning to speed read is not as hard as you might think. All it takes is learning the basic principles behind it and then spending a short time practising. The best part about it is that you can actually practice with whatever study materials you have, so in effect you will also be learning whatever it is you are practising.

There are a lot of different kinds speed reading techniques available and you will need to try a few to see what works for you. One of the most common methods is to be able to identify words, not as a collection of letters but as a single object. So for example the word “the” would be recognized in its whole form and not from the three letters combined. When reading you would pickup “the” as a single entity instead of seeing the letters “t”, “h” and then “e”. Its actually a very simple concept and does not require any great talent.

Another method is to be able to identify words just by the shape of the top of the word. In that sense almost all words are unique to the shape at the very top and this technique goes a long way to radically improving your speed.

At the end of the day, once you have the hang of speed reading, with the proper comprehension levels, you can read a text book in roughly a quarter of the time it would normally take you. This means that you can either spend a quarter of the time studying or read the same text several times over if you need to memorize the information. How should you start learning? Well, the fastest way is to download or buy software which teaches you speed reading. These programs also test your comprehension levels after the reading session and can give you statistics on your performance and any improvements you might have registered.