September 26th 2017 | 2/100 Days Of Productivity

50 Top Online Learning Sites

Rejoice fellow uni students looking for some studyspo, we urge you to take a few free lessons, as well as academic lessons provided from actual universities on several topics. Have a look at the 50 top learning sites you can find online to help you save some time.

Art and Music

Dave Conservatoire — Dave Conservatoire is an entirely free online music school offering a self-proclaimed “world-class music education for everyone,” and providing video lessons and practice tests.

Drawspace — If you want to learn to draw or improve your technique, Drawspace has free and paid self-study as well as interactive, instructor-led lessons.

Justin Guitar — The Justin Guitar site boasts over 800 free guitar lessons which cover transcribing, scales, arpeggios, ear training, chords, recording tech and guitar gear, and also offers a variety of premium paid mobile apps and content (books/ ebooks, DVDs, downloads).

Math, Data Science and Engineering

Codecademy — Codecademy offers data science and software programming (mostly Web-related) courses for various ages groups, with an in-browser coding console for some offerings.

Stanford Engineering Everywhere — SEE/ Stanford Engineering Everywhere houses engineering (software and otherwise) classes that are free to students and educators, with materials that include course syllabi, lecture videos, homework, exams and more.

Big Data University — Big Data University covers Big Data analysis and data science via free and paid courses developed by teachers and professionals.

Better Explained — BetterExplained offers a big-picture-first approach to learning mathematics — often with visual explanations — whether for high school algebra or college-level calculus, statistics and other related topics.

Design, Web Design/ Development

HOW Design University — How Design University (How U) offers free and paid online lessons on graphic and interactive design, and has opportunities for those who would like to teach.

HTML Dog — HTML Dog is specifically focused on Web development tutorials for HTML, CSS and JavaScript coding skills.

Skillcrush — Skillcrush offers professional web design and development courses aimed at one who is interested in the field, regardless of their background — with short, easy-to-consume modules and a 3-month Career Blueprints to help students focus on their career priorities.

Hack Design — Hack Design, with the help of several dozen designers around the world, has put together a lesson plan of 50 units (each with one or more articles and/or videos) on design for Web, mobile apps and more by curating multiple valuable sources (blogs, books, games, videos, and tutorials) — all free of charge.

General – Children and Adults

Scratch – Imagine, Program, Share — Scratch from MIT is a causal creative learning site for children, which has projects that range from the solar system to paper planes to music synths and more.

Udemy — Udemy hosts mostly paid video tutorials in a wide range of general topics including personal development, design, marketing, lifestyle, photography, software, health, music, language, and more.

E-learning for kids — E-learning for Kids offers elementary school courses for children ages 5-12 that cover curriculum topic including math, science, computer, environment, health, language, life skills and others.

Ed2go — Ed2go aims their “affordable” online learning courses at adults, and partners with over 2,100 colleges and universities to offer this virtual but instructor-led training in multiple categories — with options for instructors who would like to participate.

GCF Learn Free — GCFLearnFree.org is a project of Goodwill Community Foundation and Goodwill Industries, targeting anyone look for modern skills, offering over 1,000 lessons and 125 tutorials available online at anytime, covering technology, computer software, reading, math, work and career and more.

Stack Exchange — StackExchange is one of several dozen Q+A sites covering multiple topics, including Stack Overflow, which is related to computer technology. Ask a targeted question, get answers from professional and enthusiast peers to improve what you already know about a topic.

HippoCampus — HippoCampus combines free video collections on 13 middle school through college subjects from NROC Project, STEMbite, Khan Academy, NM State Learning Games Lab and more, with free accounts for teachers.

Howcast — Howcast hosts casual video tutorials covering general topics on lifestyle, crafts, cooking, entertainment and more.

Memrise — Lessons on the Memrise (sounds like “memorize”) site include languages and other topics, and are presented on the principle that knowledge can be learned with gamification techniques, which reinforce concepts.

SchoolTube — SchoolTube is a video sharing platform for K-12 students and their educators, with registered users representing over 50,000 schools and a site offering of over half a million videos.

Instructables — Instructables is a hybrid learning site, offering free online text and video how-to instructions for mostly physical DIY (do-it-yourself) projects that cover various hands-on crafts, technology, recipes, game play accessories and more. (Costs lie in project materials only.)

creativeLIVE — CreativeLive has an interesting approach to workshops on creative and lifestyle topics (photography, art, music, design, people skills, entreprenurship, etc.), with live access typically offered free and on-demand access requiring purchase.

Do It Yourself — Do It Yourself (DIY) focuses on how-tos primarily for home improvement, with the occasional tips on lifestyle and crafts topics.

Adafruit Learning System — If you’re hooked by the Maker movement and want to learn how to make Arduino-based electronic gadgets, check out the free tutorials at Adafruit Learn site — and buy the necessary electronics kits and supplies from the main site.

Grovo — If you need to learn how to efficiently use a variety of Web applications for work, Grovo has paid (subscription, with free intros) video tutorials on best practices for hundreds of Web sites.

General College and University

edX — The edX site offers free subject matter from top universities, colleges and schools from around the world, including MIT and Harvard, and many courses are “verified,” offering a certificate of completion for a nominal minimum fee.

Cousera — Coursera is a learning site offering courses (free for audit) from over 100 partners — top universities from over 20 countries, as well as non-university partners — with verified certificates as a paid option, plus specializations, which group related courses together in a recommended sequence.

MIT Open Courseware — MIT OpenCourseWare is the project that started the OCW / Open Education Consortium [http://www.oeconsortium.org], launching in 2002 with the full content of 50 real MIT courses available online, and later including most of the MIT course curriculum — all for free — with hundreds of higher ed institutions joining in with their own OCW course materials later.

Open Yale Courses — Open Yale Courses (OYC) are free, open access, non-credit introductory courses recorded in Yale College’s classroom and available online in a number of digital formats.

Open Learning Initiative — Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU’s) Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is course content (many open and free) intended for both students who want to learn and teachers/ institutions requiring teaching materials.

Khan Academy — Khan Academy is one of the early online learning sites, offering free learning resources for all ages on many subjects, and free tools for teachers and parents to monitor progress and coach students.

MIT Video — MITVideo offers over 12,000 talks/ lecture videos in over 100 channels that include math, architecture and planning, arts, chemistry, biological engineering, robotics, humanities and social sciences, physics and more.

Stanford Online — Stanford Online is a collection of free courses billed as “for anyone, anywhere, anytime” and which includes a wide array of topics that include human rights, language, writing, economics, statistics, physics, engineering, software, chemistry, and more.

Harvard Extension School: Open Learning Initiative — Harvard’s OLI (Open Learning Initiative) offers a selection of free video courses (taken from the edX selection) for the general public that covers a range of typical college topics, includings, Arts, History, Math, Statistics, Computer Science, and more.

Canvas Network — Canvas Network offers mostly free online courses source from numerous colleges and universities, with instructor-led video and text content and certificate options for select programs.

Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple — Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple” is, as the name implies, a set of just three lectures (plus intro) very specifically about Quantum Physics, form three presentations given by theoretical physicist Hans Bethe.

Open UW — Open UW is the umbrella initiative of several free online learning projects from the University of Washington, offered by their UW Online division, and including Coursera, edX and other channels.

UC San Diego Podcast Lectures — Podcast USCD, from UC San Diego, is a collection of audio and/or video podcasts of multi-subject university course lectures — some freely available, other only accessible by registered students.

University of the People — University of the People offers tuition-free online courses, with relatively small fees required only for certified degree programs (exam and processing fees).

NovoEd — NovoEd claims a range of mostly free “courses from thought leaders and distinguished professors from top universities,” and makes it possible for today’s participants to be tomorrow’s mentors in future courses.

IT and Software Development

Udacity — Udacity offers courses with paid certification and nanodegrees — with emphasis on skills desired by tech companies in Silicon Valley — mostly based on a monthly subscription, with access to course materials (print, videos) available for free.

Apple Developer Site — Apple Developer Center may be very specific in topics for lessons, but it’s a free source of documentation and tutorials for software developers who want to develop apps for iOS Mobile, Mac OS X desktop, and Safari Web apps.

Google Code — As with Apple Developer Center, Google Code is topic-narrow but a good source of documentation and tutorials for Android app development.

Code.org — Code.org is the home of the “Hour of Code” campaign, which is aimed at teachers and educators as well as students of all ages (4-104) who want to teach or learn, respectively, computer programming and do not know where to start.

Mozilla Developer Network — MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) offers learning resources — including links to offsite guides — and tutorials for Web development in HTML, CSS and JavaScript — whether you’re a beginner or an expert, and even if you’re not using Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser.

Learnable — Learnable by Sitepoint offers paid subscription access to an ebook library of content for computers and tablets, and nearly 5,000 videos lessons (and associated code samples) covering software-related topics – with quizzes and certification available.

Pluralsight — Pluralsight (previously PeepCode) offers paid tech and creative training content (over 3,700 courses and 130K video clips) for individuals, businesses and institutions that covers IT admin, programming, Web development, data visualization — as well as game design, 3D animation, and video editing through a partnership with Digital-Tutors.com, and additional software coding lessons through Codeschool.com.

CodeHS — CodeSchool offers software coding lessons (by subscription) for individuals who want to learn at home, or for students learning in a high school teacher-led class.

Aquent Gymnasium — Gymnasium offers a small but thorough set of free Web-related lesson plans for coding, design and user experience, but filters access by assessing the current knowledge of an enrollee and allows those with scores of at least 70% to continue.

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A User’s Guide To The Brain

More about the human brain and behaviour on @tobeagenius

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yesterday I realised that I barely know anything in maths so I’m having to sort myself out - trying to go over 2+ topics a day, making what I like to call “emergency notes”, so far so good but #prayforzoë

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04.29.20—It has indeed been a hot minute.

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idk just with school starting soon i thought it would be a good idea 

For Studying

formulas & equations fill-in sheet

organic chemistry resources

essay checklist

exam checklist

template for summarizing academic articles

language practicing pack

writing/planning essay pack

correction sheets

assessment schedule

pomodoro technique

primary source analysis

 exam study pack

overcoming the curve of forgetting

key people/character tracker

review pack

study schedule

vocabulary

For Sticky Notes

blank template

to-do strips

to-do strips, stickers, sticky note outline

different sticky note templates (water tracker, to-do, etc.)

For Note-Taking

blank dot grid pages

semi-cornell note taking outlines

novel note-taking

line/dotted note templates

several note outlines

unicorn notes!!

grey, pink, blue, yellow, & black grid paper

Planners

undated planner (365 days calendar, month calendar, & week  calendar)

undated academic calendars (May 2016-May 2017)

weekly goals

timetable schedule

daily to-do list

4 to-do list variations (one of my faves!!)

daily planner (fave!)

weekly dotted planner

dotted monthly planner

b&w serious weekly planner

daily planner v.1 v.2 (fave!)

weekly planner

to-do list (hackers/x-files/spy?? theme)

essay planner

full year planner inserts

monthly overview

habit/goal trackers

weekly planner

simple daily planner

long-term goals

daily grid planner

project planner

100 days of productivity & to-do list

steven universe planning kit

plain planner bundle

summer calendars 

blog planning kit

ultimate blog planner kit

habit tracker

20 to-do lists!

pastel daily printable

summer goals

august calendars

goal printables pack

Expenses

monthly budget

monthly in/out expenses and spendings (really useful tbh)

school supply list

finance tracker

Etc. 

reading list

song list/music log

productivity log

folder inserts

font references!!! (also a fave)

insp. posters 2

self-care 

water tracker

study break activity book

inspiring wallpapers!!

really good kit containing a planner, quote sheet, book tracker, & more!

class information 

Other Masterposts for Printables!

studiyng’s

studie-s’s

studywithnerdyglasses’s

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tips for organizing quals notes/general studying tips...I'm taking them at the end of the Spring semester eep!

i sure do have some! context: i’m an english lit phd, at an R1 institution, & my quals involved 

3 reading lists (for major, minor, & research fields) totaling about 300 items

a written portfolio (3 sample syllabi, a publishable article, dissertation prospectus)

& a 3-hour oral exam (30-min presentation, 2.5 hours of questions from reading list & portfolio) conducted by a 5-person faculty committee (3 direct advisors, one for each field, & 2 additional examiners).

i took mine 6 months early, so i only had about 6 months to prep instead of the usual 10 months to a year.

>> advice on reading for your quals, under the cut.

Keep reading

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In the process of making a cheat sheet for tomorrow’s organic chem test!

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Introduction to LaTeX!

No, not the rubbery plasticy stuff

LaTeX (pronounced “lay-tech”) is a free document-formatting system commonly used in STEM fields. This post is going to explain why it is really useful and where you can start!

So if you’re a STEM student, you’ve probably had to write a whole lot of lab reports and know how annoying it is to either figure out Word’s equation editor or screenshot a picture of whatever equation you’re trying to include in your report. Not to mention how awful Word is at formatting pictures, holding them in place and keeping things consistent. LaTeX solves most of those problems for you.

It works with some simple commands and packages that allow you to create journal-style articles, lab reports, and all sorts of other document types. You can include all sorts of mathematical and scientific symbols and equations and LaTeX formats them correctly for you. It might seem daunting at first, but most of the commands are very intuitive and you have a lot of easy customisation and consistent formatting. It can even do referencing for you. It has a lot of other cool things like generating a table of contents, automatically numbering your tables and figures, that contribute to producing a professional-looking scientific document.

All in all, the learning curve is very shallow, and the skill payoff is worth the small time investment it takes to learn. LaTeX typesetting is a very valuable skill to have in STEM.

Where to start:

There are dozens of downloadable LaTeX text editors, but I prefer to use an online one called Overleaf. It has several templates available for you to start from, provides shareable links, renders your document as you work, and, because it’s online, you can upload all your files to the server and work from anywhere.

I found the first chapter of this guice very helpful when I began using LaTeX  [x].

Some random tips I picked up so far:

1) Most problems/errors are easy to solve with a quick google search. Because LaTeX is so widely used, there are a LOT of stack exchange solutions to small problems. 

2) Manually creating LaTeX tables is a nightmare. It’s usually easiest to make them first in Excel, then copy-and-paste into an online LaTeX table generator.

3) Lots of journal articles have a pre-formatted bibtex citation linked somewhere. Using that citation works really well.

4) I like to open a text file, copy-and-paste all my bibtex formatted citations into it and convert it into a .bib file by renaming.

Some other useful links:

~LaTeX table generator [x]

~LaTeX reference generator [x]

~Find the LaTeX command for any symbol that you draw [x]

~List of mathematical symbols for LaTeX [x]

~LaTeX Stack Exchange [x]

I hope you find this helpful! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to send me an ask or a message. Check out my study instagram if you’re keen on seeing some of my studyspo. Happy studying!

xx Munira

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TERRAFORM: ambient electronic sci fi playlist for space kids trying to ace their finals

( listen on spotify / my other playlists )

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College Comparison and Application Checklists

Hi guys! As an obsessive spreadsheet maker, I am constantly using Excel for EVERYTHING, including when preparing to apply for college. I’ve just been told that, for once, the spreadsheets I made for comparing college options and organizing my application checklist are actually helpful, so I’m here to share them!

The first can be used for initially comparing and deciding which colleges you are interested in and the second can be used more as a checklist to see if everything has been submitted or completed.

To make things convenient, I’ve made them available in Google Sheets, from which you can copy to your own Google Drive or download as a Microsoft Excel file! They are also both editable so that you can add or remove categories and compare what’s important to you. Colleges are not one-size-fits-all, so feel free to edit the spreadsheets to cater to you. As a quick example, I’ve used Harvard to demonstrate what each category is for, but you can use it however you see fit. Since I personally have not looked into Harvard, the examples used are not the most thorough, but they should still provide a general idea.

**DISCLAIMER: I am still in high school and have not yet applied or gone to any colleges/universities. I am no expert on college admissions and do not know everything about finding and selecting the perfect college. Please keep this in mind. Any constructive feedback is welcome!

College Comparison Spreadsheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AVSidBtOpGOHafgkHVeKYSL0ceyaSZvx2VNzIG3uZTc/edit?usp=sharing

College Application Checklist:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ncT6dwddihoQOLsW17c6wZuXXqrp5F4hIqPWnop5M7M/edit?usp=sharing

To use, click on the link, go to “file”, then either click “make a copy” and save to your drive or click “download” and then whatever format you want. A guide to using each is below the cut. Happy college hunting and good luck!

Keep reading

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