This summer, I will be returning to my alma mater for my 20 year reunion, so I’ve had some time to reflect back on how different my college years were from my current experiences of being a student again in grad school.  As part of my transition to becoming a teacher, I decided to enroll in a Masters program to get a teaching credential.  While I could have started teaching at a private school that doesn’t require teaching credentials, I wanted to give myself the time to learn about the practice of becoming a teacher.  Now that I am a student again, there are three things I’m loving now that are helping me get the most out of my classes:

1. Listening to my Textbooks: My classes have a lot of reading assignments, and one of the first things I decided to try is getting electronic textbooks, if that was an option.  Aside from not wanting to lug pounds of heavy textbooks back and forth to class, one perk of having electronic textbooks is having the option to listen to my textbooks.  Some of my textbooks were available as part of an all-you-can-eat subscription to Pearson Plus.  Like a Netflix subscription, I paid $15 per month to access Pearson’s entire library of textbooks.  This not only saved me a lot of money from buying each textbook, I was able to have access to all my books from my phone.  Rather than read from the tiny screen of my phone, I could listen to my textbooks, over bluetooth in the car, with my earbuds while meal prepping, the possibilities are endless.  When I had to read other PDF articles or websites that weren’t part of the Pearson Plus subscription, I found another tool, called Speechify, to read to me.  This app was developed by someone who has dyslexia and it offers users tons of voices to choose from, speaking speeds and even highlights the text as it is read-aloud.  Now, I have the voice of Gwyneth Paltrow reading at 1.5x speed for all of my assignments.  Being able to listen at a faster speed, while visually following the highlighted text on my computer screen, has helped me focus more.
2. YouTube: As a student, I’m finding that my professors have sprinkled in a few videos as assignments, in addition to reading, and what a delight that’s been.  What better way to see a concept come to life than through something visual and audio?  I agree that as far as YouTube videos go, there are engaging and boring tutorials, but with feedback from thousands, if not millions of users, the very best YouTube tutorials are usually easy to track down from the number of views they have.  When I was studying to pass my CSETs (these are California’s subject matter content tests), I found the YouTube channels immensely helpful for cramming and enjoyed watching CrashCourse.
3. Taking Electronic Notes: Another decision I made when starting graduate school was to learn how to take electronic notes on my iPad with a stylus.  While I had filled pages and pages of notes back in college in physical notebooks, I rarely found myself reviewing those notes and ended up tossing them in the garbage.  When I entered the workforce, I switched to electronic notes, using tools like Evernote and Microsoft OneNote, because it was an elegant solution to keeping all of my to-do’s in one place.  But as I was thinking about being in the classroom, I didn’t want to be just mindlessly click-clacking away, just typing up what the professor was saying during the lecture.  I wanted to diagram concepts so I started using GoodNotes.  I’ve only scratched the surface of what this app can do, but already I’m enjoying the flexibility to move note pages around, search through my handwritten notes and draw straight lines and shapes.  My narrative isn’t doing justice to this app, so here’s a glimpse of my actual notes taken for one of my current classes: