May+3rd+Article



Stanberry, Kristin, and Marshall Raskind, Ph.D. "Assistive Technology Tools: Organization and Memory." //GreatSchools//. GreatSchools, Inc., Feb. 2010. Web. 10 May 2012. .

Studying is an essential component of the learning process, to reinforce knowledge and allow the individual student to tailor the information to what he or she will remember best and what is most meaningful for him or her.

A free-form database software can help students to study by allowing them to study more effectively and efficiently. Used in conjunction with word processing or other software, this tool allows the user to create and store electronic notes by "jotting down" relevant information of any length and on any subject. The student can later retrieve the information by typing any fragment of the original note. For example, when typing notes, possibly in multiple documents, the topic and the content would be categorized so that later all of the documents could be “searched” for relating to a search term. For example, if I used this, one day as a teacher I might want to review different assistive technology ideas and I would use the free-form database to search “assistive” and many documents from this semester will pop up. There is a similar tool for students to use online. When using the Diigolet toolbar, you can save links or whole webpages online and attach highlights and sticky notes to a webpage as a reminder of your thoughts or other personal ideas. When bookmarking a site or webpage, you can add tags that detail the content. For example, you could tag a website with the subject that the research is for as well as the unit of study, like “SocialStudies” “CivilWar” “Battles.” In that way when looking at all of the bookmarks, you can look for ones only about the Civil War, and more specifically the battles. Tags and lists are two different ways to organize information. Tags are best for diverse and disparate information, while lists are best for focused information. You can use lists to organize, share and display a specific collection of bookmarks. Annotations and highlights eliminate the issue of bookmarking a page, and later returning to it without remembering why you opted to bookmark it in the first place, or having to dig around to find the quote or piece of data you wanted to return to. When working in groups or with other people, you can create groups to pool findings, share resources or curate content.