 Okay, so we ripped the post-it note off and we're ready to go. I am Ms. Johnson, Lisa Johnson, one of two of the ed techs here on campus. And Chris Hansen is the second or the other two, half of the other two ed techs here at Westlake High School. And today's topic is going to be augmenting your study skills. And the reason this topic came up was, you know, obviously we're getting right, you know, kind of before finals and that's going to be coming up as well. But just as we're talking about, you know, social emotional learning and we're talking about all of these sort of skills, this was one that kind of topped the list. So again, I should have started this, but you see me, Ms. Johnson. And then Mr. Hansen is behind the scenes in the chats if you have questions or things like that. He'll also be sharing out some of the links that I'm going to be talking to you about today. And if you have any questions about this or anything else, then you can email whs.etec at ensic.net and either Chris or myself will be happy to reply. So I think it's always important to start with the why. And these are just some of the whys. So study skills, you know, they encompass more than just studying and you're going to kind of see that as we go into that. They're hugely integral in high school and in college. Yes, you might not necessarily study in your profession the way that you did in high school and college, but there's a lot of things within study skills like time management, note taking, you know, memory concentration, all of those things that are integral life skills, no matter what you're doing. So we thought this was important. And by no means am I saying, you know, you have to go make your kids or your students go take a survey and not at all what I'm saying. But when I was working on kind of some of the research, gleaning, I didn't feel like it was helpful to glean from other high schools. I felt like it was probably more helpful to glean from colleges and universities and then kind of pull from some of those study skills. So one of the ones I found and Chris can share the link in the back channel as well was from the University of Central Florida. And what was cool is I think they had about a 50 question survey. I can't remember exactly how long it was, but each section focused on a different study skill. So you can see time management, note taking, memory, test prep, textbook reading, concentration. And then, you know, it just asked a quick question. You answer it, what was nice is it gave you a readout and it said, OK, well, you know, it appears like note taking might be something that you want to focus on. This is, you know, one of the skills that, you know, based on the survey might be something to take a look at. So you don't necessarily have to do the survey, but you can tell just from the questions in each kind of category, which ones your student may have difficulty with and where you can kind of be of help. The other thing I wanted to mention to everyone is we've been posting, you know, working with both Christy and Katie and posting content on Healthy Chaps. That's the healthychaps.weebly.com, which is our counseling website. So we've been posting things there as well. There are how to organize your digital notebooks, study skills 101, vocabulary, study tips, the benefits of journaling. And tomorrow afternoon, you'll see a study tips bundle, which includes a lot of what we're, you know, sharing right now. So you kind of get a preview of that. So just like we did, if you joined us last time, or actually one of the first times where we did managing, you know, kind of social media and all of that, we thought that it would be a great idea to get some data from both our staff and our students, not just kind of, you know, wax intellectual about study skills without that information. So that's kind of what we did. So one of the questions that we asked and was in your opinion, what would be the one skill in reference to study skills that our high school students needed to improve? So we asked staff that. And then we also asked students the same question a little bit, worded a little bit differently, wasn't our high school students. It was, you know, you might need to improve. And what was really interesting, and you can see here that the two graphs. So on the left-hand side is the staff response, and on the right-hand side is the student response. And on the left-hand side, you know, the same three categories, effective note-taking strategies is an orange. And then I did not realize this when I was preparing that I would be matching the slide deck this morning or this afternoon, but it just so happens that I am. So kudos to me and my matching board group. All right, study skills and test prep is on, you know, kind of the bottom there. And then concentration and time management. And what's interesting is concentration and time management is clearly, you know, important to staff and important to students. That's something we're going to be tackling in January. We felt like a lot of that kind of circled around calendars and those sort of things. And, you know, with January starting, it kind of made sense to tackle that then. So the other one we really wanted to tackle this time was then the study skills one, which is quite a big of a chunk, as you can see for the students. So the other question that we asked was, what types of materials do you provide for your students? And this is asks of staff. You can see up in the upper right-hand corner, I have a little staff icon so you can kind of tell where the data is coming from. So what was cool was this is something we wanted to reiterate and we talked about this in the note-taking kind of webinar as well, that there's a lot of resources out there for our students. Sometimes they just don't know about them. So many of our teachers have in-class reviews. A lot of teachers provide out-of-class review packets and quite a few do practice exams and tests as well as recorded lectures. So it's just really a matter of asking what's out there from, you know, their teachers. Now, this is a student question and the student question was slightly different than the staff question. This question was, what types of study materials do you find most helpful from your teacher? You can see in class reviews, practice exams and tests are pretty high and out-of-class review packets as well as recorded lectures. So all four of these things, not every teacher provides these but quite a few teachers do. Not every content area does, but these are definitely things to ask about and to know, you know, which teachers do or if your teacher's gonna provide those things. The other thing that kind of came up and again, this is from students was the things that are helpful to them are learning targets. Quite a few classrooms have, you know, the learning targets and students are able to fill in, you know, which ones they've mastered, which ones they haven't. Quizlets, which is kind of like an online flashcard and studying sort of thing, PowerPoints, you know, any of the slide decks that they have. Online notes, quite a few of our teachers have those in some form or format. And then group work, reviews and tutorials. And I don't know if it was mentioned in the note taking one, but some people will, you know, end up doing outside tutors. But we also have in-house tutoring and you can contact the counselors to kind of find out more information about that. But we do have in-house tutoring here at the high school as well. No cost to our students. So the other question we asked was what strategies, digital or otherwise, do you use to study and or review the content for your class? And our student responses were pretty much, quite a few students use reviewing the notes. Quite a few students use the digital flashcards. Re-reading the material ends up being pretty high too. Now, granted, this is not out of 100% because obviously, you know, they can do multiple ones of these and they'll choose, you know, more than one that they would do. Digital quizzes, so sometimes our teachers will offer cahoots or that's K-A-H-O-O-T or they might do a near pod and those are all digital tools that students and a lot of them are self-correcting too. So they'll be able to take it and go, okay, I did pretty well or maybe this is what I need to work on. Study groups is really interesting. A fourth of our students have formed study groups and that was really new to me. I mean, I figured that they might but I didn't know how many of them were doing that. And analog flashcards, about 20% of them were that was one of the selections that they were using as well. So some other things that came up and I know I just mentioned this earlier was we do offer tutoring here at the high school so quite a few can take advantage of that. Other ones also have private tutors and then some other things that came up as best practices that students do, rewriting, paraphrasing their notes, redoing the homework, some of them will make their own study guide and again, getting back to learning targets, they'll go over the learning targets and figure out which ones, they know which ones they don't, so they're really kind of targeting what they need to study. But we felt like that wasn't enough. So what we did, one of the questions on the staff survey was open-ended and basically what the question said was what would you like students to know about studying for your class? And this is not meant to be comprehensive in any way, shape or form but I think it is a really good overview. So what you see in front of you, it is a four-page PDF document. Mr. Hanson will post the link to it in the back channel. It has already been sent out, actually sent out to all students yesterday morning via their email so you can always ask them to go back and they'll have a copy of it. And it will be posted tomorrow on the Healthy Chaps website. But basically what it is, is every content area, you know, they've kind of given some resources. Again, it's not meant to be comprehensive but it was really good information, you know. They talked about specific things that were available, things that they needed to use to study, all kinds of different practices and things like that. And so I think it's a really good overview. I think it should be helpful for students but also parents to kind of know where to begin. And honestly every content area is different. So, you know, you're studying practices that you might be using in a world language class, you know, with vocabulary and things like that may be very different to a social studies class if you're not working on vocabulary. So that kind of gives you an overview. And again, we'll post that in the back channel. The other thing I wanted to bring up because we haven't really touched on digital is, and by no means, even though we have technology in our names, I think it's a misnomer sometimes because there's so many other things that we do to impact students and staff that don't necessarily, you know, a pencil could be a technology, you know, paper could be a technology. So there's a lot of different things that we do to support students in a variety of ways that may not always be, you know, with apps. But of course, you know, those are definitely things that we support as well. So, you'll see five apps in front of you. The ones in whites I found, where their names are written in white, I found that those are not currently in self-service. All of them are free though, so we can look at getting them loaded into self-service, but, you know, they could obviously add them to a device phone or something like that if they have them. So my homework is in self-service. It's kind of like Google Calendar on steroids. It's almost like a digital agenda. And we're gonna talk more about that in January, we get into calendars and task management and time management, but I thought it was worth mentioning that it's already available for students, they can use it. There's another one called 3030. So a lot of the research talks about the fact that you really don't want to be cramming. I mean, we all know that cramming is not a great way to study for anything. I did get through college with a bit of cramming, but I probably would have retained that information better had I not done that. So the 3030, the whole idea of, you know, you should be taking about 25, 30 minutes of studying and then, you know, taking a break, doing something else and then coming back. That kind of thing. So 3030 is just, it's a visual task manager. And I played a little bit with it. I think it's worth checking out if you need to have something like that or if you want to share it with your students. Quizlet, I mentioned it's phenomenal. Quite a few of our students either create Quizlet decks to study or teachers actually create the decks and have them available. Study Blue is similar to Quizlet, same concept, kind of like digital flashcards. The benefit I will say to Quizlet is there's a, they have quite a few games that you can play with that content. It'll actually generate like a sample test for you with that content with like multiple choice and all kinds of different things. And it's really good because of the language component as well because you can have the audio portion of it too. So the words, you know, will be read to you or whatever. So that's helpful. And then Brainscape I found is similar to all of these. The only difference is that, you know, the whole idea of you don't want to be studying things that you know, you want to be studying things that, you know, you don't know, you want to spend more time on those. And so what the idea is, it has kind of like a color spectrum at the bottom of each question. And, you know, if you get it right, then it says, oh, I know this one really well. And it just, basically you're telling it, I don't want it added to the deck as I'm studying. So you're kind of managing that piece of it. So that was a good one. Now, if you've seen some of the previous kind of tech, tech talks, not tech talks, tech talks that we've done, I'm quite a bit of a research junkie. I enjoy doing the research. And so I spent a few hours looking at collegiate tips for study scales. And I've kind of compiled quite a few of them into the next kind of bit of this conversation we'll have. And then all of these links will also be available on the Healthy Chaps website tomorrow afternoon. So a few things that came up in quite a few of the research pieces that are coming out of colleges, as well as just the support stuff that they have for their own students was the first one was elaborative interrogation, which essentially means, you know, especially if you're studying social studies or science or something like that, you don't just want to read it and memorize it. You want to ask why, like, well, why does this, how does this relate to this or why did this happen before that? And so, you know, studying isn't just rote memorization. You have to use that sort of thing, but I like how they explained that. The other thing I kind of mentioned was the distributed practice, which essentially is you're spacing out your studying. You know, we all know cramming is not great in the long term, you know, you're not gonna really remember those things. You may not even remember them the next day. So the idea of, you know, and you'll see in the packet if you haven't already kind of opened that, many of the teachers have said, you know, you really need to study 30 minutes a night on this. So that's kind of what the other thing. And then the interleaved practice essentially means if you were studying for, like, let's say a math test, you wouldn't just want to study all of one type of problem. You know, let's say circumference, you might want to study some of these are circumference, some of these are diameter, some of these are, you know, area, whatever the case may be, you want to kind of pull all of those together. Other things that came out as some of those college sites were, be aware of the best time of day to study. So, and not necessarily that there's a best time of day. I mean, typically, you know, three in the morning, probably not the best time of day to study, but more just when does your body work best? You know, are you most awake and most alert, you know, before you get to school? Maybe, you know, you are here early and you need to study then. Or is it that perhaps, you know, you have some time right after dinner. That's a great time where you're awake. You know, that would be a good time to study. So just kind of being cognizant of that. Also using a regular study area, you know, whether it's the kitchen table or a certain, you know, place in your room, because your body gets used to certain things. And so, okay, now I've sat down, I know where I am and just kind of having a regular place to study. Keeping a calendar. Again, we'll talk more about that in January. Identifying goals for studying. So, and again, we'll talk a little bit more about goal setting in January as well. But, okay, tonight, you know, I've got 30 minutes, I'm gonna study 15 problems. And I'm gonna read 10 pages, just so you have some sort of goals because I know kids feel really overwhelmed. And so that's kind of to have those goals and be able to space them out. And then again, don't cram, study in chunks 25 to 30 minutes. All of this information is available from these sites. I pulled some from Concordia University. Some came from Berkeley Student Learning Center. They have quite a bit. Some came from Washington Post, a bunch of different places. A lot of these resources have multiple links. One of them, I think it was the University of Illinois, had a great checklist for, if you're gonna form a study group, what are the things that you should do? So there's lots of resources here. Again, all of these will be linked off of the website, the Healthy Chaps blog that goes out on Thursday afternoon, but they're here as well. And the last bit, I just wanted to reiterate was, all of these blog posts are here as well. So you can go back to them. That study tips bundle won't be posted until this afternoon, or I'm sorry, tomorrow afternoon. And we also wanted to mention that if you're just tuning in now, then you may not know that we have other ones available on our YouTube channel, which I think Chris will be able to post as well. So we've done one talk on social media and digital distractions and talked a little bit about time management and managing all those things. It's got a lot of student data and staff data in there as well. We've also done one on note taking and organization. And Chris has done one on common sense and digital assistantship as well. So there's a lot of resources that are already out there that we've kind of posted. This will be the fourth one in the series. And then the fifth one will come in January when we talk more about calendars and organization and student list and things like that.