The importance of technology in our lives grows from year to year. Now it’s hard to imagine that our parents had to write their essays by hand (the most modern ones used the typewriters).
Today almost every student has lots of gadgets that make their life easier and the process of study more comfortable. What are the main achievements of technology that make our learning a piece of cake?
- Online learning
The ultimate achievement of technology that gives us the possibility to study wherever we are and whenever we feel like it. The students from distant regions can enroll the most famous universities and graduate there without ever visiting the main building. It also gives people from developing countries the opportunity to educate and share their knowledge in their native lands. Also, thanks to the Internet they have access to different resources to help them with studying, like trusted educational websites, free essay databases like Study Moose or even online libraries.
Online learning is usually less expensive, so it lets the students from families with modest income get a degree of high-class university without spending their last money and giving them some free time to work.
The less noble goal of online learning is to let students learn at the time they are the most productive. Waking up at 9 AM can be a continuous disaster for some of us. Those who aren’t morning people simply can’t show their skills until noon, it’s a biological reality.
The same goes for young parents, people who need to help their disabled relatives and so on. Online learning lets them do the tasks and listen to the lectures at the time they really can do it effectively.
Podcast is a great invention of humanity, though lots of people use it for weird purposes. Every time you don’t understand a lecture or a whole subject, you can find a podcast stream, where the same topics are presented in a fun way, with video content, infographics and examples.
There are lots of people who really love the things they are talking to and are able to present them in the most understandable and entertaining way. Anything from history to astrophysics can be explained even to a kid, with the right approach.
Sometimes, podcasts are also the way to visit the lectures or seminars of the most renowned people in their areas. Few of us can visit Oxford or Cambridge to listen to some stars of science, but their podcasts allow us to learn from them at home.
Moreover, the podcast maker can use any apps to enhance the experience of the audience. No more whiteboards and PowerPoint presentations: now everything can be fully interactive and even cinema-like.
- Forums and social media groups
The ability to discuss the material learned in the lectures is crucial for remembering it for real. The collective projects teach students teamwork and management, also allowing them to use their best skills for common success and improve the weaker ones while watching others. For many years students did it in libraries, cafes or at someone’s place.
But with the development of the Internet, they don’t need to meet in person outside the class anymore. The social media group or the forum is the best way to make an instant announcement to the group (everyone will get a notification on their smartphone) or to discuss something that shall be thoroughly documented.
These platforms are also a great place to share materials: books, links, video and audio recordings. One doesn’t have to give them to others one by one, it’s enough to put the files to the common file storage.
- Handy apps
This category is essentially infinite. There are thousands of apps that can make students’ lives easier: grammar and spelling checkers, proofreaders, creativity boosters, text-to-speech and speech-to-text translators, dictionaries and reverse dictionaries and so on.
The ultimate app (well, it doesn’t consist of the site only) is Wiki. This worldwide library contains an incredible amount of articles, each of which has a backup of scientific works, published books and other reliable sources.
The statistic shows that Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites in all the Internet and during the exam period the quantity of visitors almost doubles. Although not all articles in Wikipedia can be taken without fact-checking, it can, at least, give people the direction of search and provide lots of useful sources to read.
The other apps usually deal with enhancing writing skills. No matter what exactly you are studying – you’ll need to write papers about it. There are apps that allow users to make text more academic, less academic (and more reader-friendly), adjust it to any standards or structurize it in a proper way.
Text processors aren’t a mere substitution to the typewriter, they provide users a tremendous amount of possibilities to self-correct. Furthermore, students can use as a source of information free essay examples on websites like like procollegeessays.com that can be useful in writing your own material with a specific topic.
We didn’t even start the list of technological improvements that are useful for the students. You may google dozens of these lists (by the way, Google and other search engines also qualify) and each will be different.
We can’t deny that technology made the learning process much more comfortable – the only thing that people still must do is actually learn – thoroughly and eagerly.