Our Favourite Free Online Resources
We like to use all the help we can get when it comes to studying easily and efficiently. Here are our 3 favourite tools that you can use for free!
Desmos - desmos.com
Graphing has never been easier than with desmos. Its intuitive keyboard makes plugging in equations - even those with fractions, square roots or powers - simpler than ever. It’s a great tool for students wanting to check their answers for graphing problems. It’s also a wonderful way to answer those “what if?” questions. What if the y-intercept was 3? What if this coefficient was negative? What if I delete a term? Have fun and play around.
We especially recommend it to our older students (years 10-12) who are studying function transformations. Have a go at adding “sliders” by using a pronumeral instead of a coefficient or shift on the axes. Watch as your functions dilates and translates!
Once you’ve mastered all of that, you can even make some art! Would you believe this painting was created 100% using graphing techniques?
“The Great Quadratics Off Kanagawa” by Aabhisaar Shrivastav
Project Gutenberg - gutenberg.org
This website is a repository for digital versions of over 70,000 books, many of which are studied in schools! You can use this as a way to read The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, all the works of Shakespere, and much, much more. Almost any book that has lapsed copyright will be on there. There are heaps of ways to make use of this.
Read these texts from your phone while on the train, or when you forget your book at home!
Highlight the text and use a text-to-speech reader to turn it into an audiobook! Now you can churn through the chapters while walking the dog.
Our FAVOURITE way to use Project Gutenburg’s eBooks is to use it to track down quotes. Can you vaguely remember something about one of the characters in Little Women cutting her hair off? Open the eBook and use CTRL + F or Command + F and search for “hair”! You’ll track down that moment in no time. (Try putting a space before “hair” so that you don’t get results like “chair”)
““My dear, where did you get it? Twenty-five dollars! Jo, I hope you haven’t done anything rash?
”No, it’s mine honestly; I didn’t beg, borrow, or steal it. I earned it; and I don’t think you’ll blame me, for I only sold what was my own.”
As she spoke, Jo took off her bonnet, and a general outcry arose, for all her abundant hair was cut short.”
Grammarly - grammarly.com
Grammarly is an automatic grammar editor. It’s great for helping you to proofread your work, whether that’s essays, reports or creative writing. Grammarly can suggest commas where you might want one, or pick up on typos that other software doesn’t. It can even tell when you’ve rambled and might want to reword your sentence more concisely.
If you’re lucky enough to have friends or family who help you edit, use this as an opportunity to get all the grammar sorted out before you send them your work, that way they’ll have more time to help you with big picture thinking.
Now, there is a paid version of this one, but we don’t think it’s necessary to get a great deal of value out of the program.
We hope these websites can help you study more effectively. Keep an eye out for future newsletter issues where we will do a deep dive into all the helpful tools for specific school subjects!