College Academic Prefect, Grace Chang's Top Tips For Distance Learning

College Academic Prefect, Grace Chang submitted a video to last week’s full College virtual assembly, offering tips to help students stay on track during Distance Learning.

1. CREATE ROUTINE

I encourage you to create some kind of routine to your day, this includes the time you get up and then keeping the same school schedule that we usually have for each of our weekdays. This also includes giving yourself a set of time to study outside of these school times, just as we would with homework - but not too much, making sure you still give yourself time for breaks and other activities like physical exercise and socialising with your friends. 

There is a law called Parkinson’s Law where work expands to fill its amount of time available before completion. So, this means if you give yourself 10 hours to complete one piece of work, you are probably going to get distracted constantly and not work as productively. So instead, give yourself an hour or two each day outside of school hours to make sure that you get all your homework done and all your extra work done. 

2. MANAGE YOUR DISTRACTIONS WISELY 

Make sure you manage your distractions wisely, particularly while we are at home from school, as it will be too easy for us to get distracted by sites like Tik Tok and Instagram and end up just scrolling on our phones for two or three hours each day. While you are doing your study, it is really important that you get rid of these distractions so that you are in a school like environment and can focus as best as you can. So, this might mean putting your phone in a different room while you do your studies or give it to your mum or dad for an hour or two while you focus on something. This will help you keep on track with your work for the rest of the day. 

3. BE PROACTIVE AND TAKE CONTROL AND RESPONSIBILITY OF YOUR OWN LEARNING 

This is a great time for you to be proactive and take control and responsibility of your own learning. We don’t have a teacher in the room so it means if you are struggling or do have a question that needs answering, you need to be proactive and reach out to your teacher through email or through Teams chats. Make sure you actively get your questions answered. 

Also, there is a great range of YouTube tutorials and things that people have put out there on the internet, just for this particular purpose for online learning. We are at an age where we are really lucky to have access to these resources, so this is a great time to explore what is out there and see online if there is anything that could work better for you and the way that you learn things best. 

It’s also important to remember that this is the way that university works. You don’t get detentions for not doing your homework in uni, it is up to you to make sure that you are asking the lecturer if you have any questions!

4. SET GOALS FOR YOURSELF 

I encourage you to set goals for yourself or set ‘to do’ lists to keep yourself on track. Because we have so much of this time on our own, it is really easy to feel ‘purposeless’ and feel like there is just too much to do, or that you have too much time on your hands. So, if you give yourself some goals, it will give yourself a sense of purpose for each day - something to achieve. Then, at the end of the day, you can look back and reflect on whether your day was productive and if you achieved your goals - this will really help to keep you on track. 

5. CHALLENGE YOURSELF ACADEMICALLY OUTSIDE OF YOUR SCHOOLWORK 

I encourage you to find ways to challenge yourself academically outside of your schoolwork. We have so much time on our hands during Lockdown and there is so much that we can explore out there, other than just our schoolwork. For me, this is lots of extra reading that I haven’t had time for previously and also learning a different skill -  I have been learning to code. So, what this does is really help to sharpen my mind and keep me on track. This means I can study better when I am trying to concentrate on my school courses because my mind is already in a really sharp mental state. 

These are great tips Grace!

You can hear Grace’s video message here - https://youtu.be/UknLeUEuk9k