Tonight we had a meeting to begin the set-up of our first practicum.
At the moment, I am internalizing the difference between motor output and sensory input.
My anatomy teacher is too easy, and I worry that I won’t know what I need to know.
I’ve fallen in love with a word I can barely pronounce: phenomenology.

Some days I am scared about the role I am being handed, about the role I have asked to be given.
Some days I embrace it and know in it hides all the amazing sides of myself I’ve yet to discover, in it I will find my life’s work.
Just turning it over in my imagination, I feel bubbling over excitement, creativity and wonder.
For now they’ve yet to tie the ribbon and release it’s weight.

One day I will be… a nurse.

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I love my technology. I love sharing it even more. Today I wanted to pass on the best pieces of my technological arsenal for nursing school: the myHomework web-app and Dropbox.

Now I do realize that everyone is different. We have our own systems and modus operandi, so I won’t say that these are for everyone. Personally I use them, they keep me sane. You may not realize you are in need of them, so here’s my story.

Way back in the dinosaur ages, I was in college in Louisiana. We didn’t have email addresses, we didn’t turn in papers electronically to check for plagiarism and we did our research leafing through actual books. In the same vein, I wrote to-do lists for homework, papers, assignments, readings and projects. Actually wrote them, with a pencil. Problem was that I had to continually rewrite them as I completed things. My name is Adrienne, and I killed some trees. Sorry. On the positive side, I was always reminded of what I needed to accomplish.

I started out this semester – I won’t tell you how many years later – the same way. But then the written to-do list got lost multiple times, was in the wrong binder that was not at school with me even more times and just… felt… wrong, palpably, as I went about my cell-phone wifi connected day.

So, I found an app for that. It’s called myHomework and there is an iPod *and* Android version. It’s accessible online from their web-app and on your smartphone. Oddly enough I primarily use the web-app. I find that interface faster to put in assignments and I work really hard to put readings in all at once, at least a week in advance.  When you’ve completed something, I can check it off and gleefully see the reward of the strike-through on the words of that item, bypassing the obsessive compulsive urge I have to rewrite an entire list because I finished one of twenty items.

So remember, SMART goals and try myHomework.

Also, college is powerpoints and papers these days. Lecture notes are sure not what they used to be. Neither is research. I have pdfs piling up already! Thank goodness for Dropbox because it makes my life much easier to manage.

Dropbox is a software that you install on your main computer/laptop at home. The Dropfox folder then becomes part of your computer’s file system. All my school work is saved into the Dropbox folder.

So, that’s not too exciting. But this is! I can access all my files from school by signing into the Dropbox website. I can access all my files on my ipod Touch. And best of all, they are kept synced for me. Changes I made to one file at school or files I added at school are synced up to my account once I am home without me having to think at all!

Your storage space is limited but there are ways to increase your limit without having to pay. But I think that the amount of space you get free is pretty generous. I have personal files in there plus my school stuff and am not at 50%. Worst comes to worst later, when my account gets full, I’ll only leave my work for the current semester.

Now you know all my bestest secrets. Here’s wishing everyone an organized and successful semester!

p.s. Dropbox is great, but back it up.

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This weekend I attended a session with a learning strategist.

It was one of five workshops available at a conference I was attending, and since going overseas to study/work isn’t a possibility and my facebook account is pretty locked down already, the only chance that I was there to learn something and not completely waste my time was with the learning strategist.

She was so good and taught me so much that I am here, duty bound to tell you on Sunday afternoon, share and divulge my secrets rather than horde them on this countdown to midterm weekend.

I thought I have great study habits. Guess who failed her little “how well do you study?” quiz? Yeap.

I’m nothing if not dedicated. Her presentation however was focused on efficiency and she showed me a few nifty tricks.

• Make a list of what you need to know. This is especially important if your teacher doesn’t give you any kind of review before an exam. She recommended showing it to your teacher and asking if it was comprehensive. In her experience, if the teacher did point out something that was missing, it was usually a crucial concept and on the exam.
• Summarize the book and what you need to know between your in-class notes and maybe through home notes, but put the textbook away after that. She says textbooks are too overwhelming. I heart my own, so I was 100% with her on this, but for those less bibliophilic than myself, I can understand it totally.
• Divide what you need to know into three piles.Think of a stoplight – red, green, yellow. She told us that research shows that we study what we already know (!) most. Apparently, we like the good feeling and positive reinforcement so much that we stick with it. Her advice? Put the stuff you know in the “green” pile and only bother reviewing it after a thorough going over of everything else. The yellow pile is for what you sort of know, and of course the red pile is what you do not at all know. Study the red pile first and most. Then hit the yellow. And later review the green.
• Here’s another statistic I had never heard. We remember 5% of what we hear audibly, 10% of what we read and a whooping 90% of what we teach. Go find a study group and teach ‘em something, man. Wow.
• Make up questions from the bold terms and headings in your texbook. She said this partly falls into the “How to take a test well” category because how well we do on a test is not necessarily a reflection of what we know. It IS a reflection of how well we study. And if you are always studying with the question AND answer sitting there staring at you, your brain will totally freak out on you when test time comes and ONLY the question is there.
• Another test-taking tip: cover up the answers of multiple choice questions as you move through them. Those answers are meant to confuse, as we all know only too well. Removing them from the picture allows your brain to recall the information without that distraction and you can proceed to picking a, b, c, d with much more confidence.
• My favourite variation of that advice was this keen idea: cover up those beloved power point slide formatted notes with post-it notes. Write the question on the post-it note, the answer is underneath, and voila! instant test question to quiz yourself or friends. I’ve been doing this as I go through my anatomy today and it’s a whole new world!
  
• Most shocking and revelational to me was the evidence-informed practice (lol) of how soon after a lecture you should be reviewing the material covered. Take a guess..
• Pretty picture break while you think.
• 
• 12-24 hours!!! no seriously, she says it’s proven that one of the best ways to move information from the short term memory into the long term is to review it within one day of the lecture. Obviously, I can’t do that now as I sit and prepare for midterms, but I am going to attempt to do this once we are back into the lecture cycle again. Her advice was not to take too long. A quick review… maybe ten minutes.
• Then the next step for memory retention is to spend an hour at the end of the week reviewing that week’s material. This I already sort of do, but I am going to work on improving.

Please know that this was not all of her advice, but only what stuck out as perfect for me, my life, habits, needs. I would highly recommend seeing a learning strategist yourself. They have so much to offer you.

Good luck on your exams!

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