Back-to-School: 5 Websites Every Student Should Know About
Back-to-school season is in full swing. To help students start the new year off on the right foot, it’s important to make sure they have all the resources and support they need to succeed. Whether your kids need a hand with writing, mathematics, or honing their research skills, these educational sites for kids can help you point them in the right direction.
Here are five of the best sites for kids for the new school year:
1) Quizlet
Originally designed in 2005 by Andrew Sutherland, Quizlet quickly became one of students’ most well-loved study tools, clocking 60 million monthly users. In fact, two out of every three high school students in the U.S. use Quizlet to help them study for everything from mathematics to medical exams to foreign languages.
Quizlet’s goal is to give every student the tools and confidence they need to succeed. With Quizlet’s online flashcards, games, and learning tools, students can get help learning basically any kind of material they need.
For example, have an upcoming biology exam? Start flipping through this deck of bone terminology. Getting ready for a semester abroad? Here are banking terms in Spanish. Or brush up on economics with an overview of bonds and stocks.
There are over 500 million study sets available for use on Quizlet—and they’re all free. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can also create your own flashcards. Keep them private for your personal use or share them publicly so the rest of the Quizlet community can study along with you.
2) OpenStudy
Quizlet’s online study flashcards make a great partner for late-night solo study sessions. But joining up with peers to study together is also important for students. In fact, research from Maryellen Weimer, PhD showed that 60% of students reported higher levels of learning when studying in groups than when studying individually.
And OpenStudy agrees.
OpenStudy describes itself as a community of like-minded academics. It began in 2011 as a Q&A platform for real-time, peer-to-peer study help. Today, the platform brings together 200,000 students every month, delivering all the resources students need to study both smarter and harder in one big, supportive study group.
How does it work?
The platform is founded on a network of expert tutors. Here, students can post questions they have while studying. Everything is even organized by textbook and chapter (like Introduction to Machine Learning, Fourth Edition and Indian Economic Development (2020-21)), so you can easily filter through the noise to get what you need. Then, expert tutors who answer questions can get paid real money in exchange for boosting the community’s overall knowledge.
3) InstaGrok
InstaGrok calls itself an “innovative educational search engine.” But it’s so much more than a traditional search engine. Instead, InstaGrok combines its sophisticated semantic technology with an interactive user interface to help students tackle research.
It starts with a simple search.
Whether you’re working on a paper about the Civil War or creating a presentation on the solar system, InstaGrok helps you begin your research with an interactive concept map that you can customize and share.
For example, a quick search will immediately show you important facts about your topic, alongside links to the original content page. The web-style visual interface then makes it easy for you to quickly grasp important concepts, key facts, and relationships. And you can even take easy notes while researching with InstaGrok’s integrated journals.
A small startup, InstaGrok’s mission is to make learning more engaging and more personalized in order to foster the love of learning in everyone. And better yet, InstaGrok is available on iPad and Android and is completely free for students (and everyone else!) to use to better their learning.
4) Koofers
Now a part of the Docsity brand, Koofers is an online interactive community for college students. It was created in 2006 by then Virginia Tech students Michael Rihani and Patrick Gartlan and Virginia Tech alumnus Glynn LoPresti who wanted to help college students navigate the difficult terrain of picking classes and charting their college careers.
With Koofers, students can read student ratings of courses and professors, check out professors’ grading histories, and participate in the online library to share and browse past exam and study materials. By getting insider knowledge on specific university professors and courses, students can better select classes that suit their individual needs and learning styles.
Since joining Docsity in December 2021, new and old Koofers users can now also take advantage of Docsity’s other education materials, like online flashcards, crowd-sourced study materials, video courses, quizzes, and more.
Plus, this interactive community is worldwide. With over 20 million users from around the world, college students can lean on Koofers for help during their higher education experience, no matter where they are in the world.
5) Wolfram Alpha
Finally, as you get ready to help students go back to school, don’t forget to introduce them to Wolfram Alpha.
It’s getting increasingly more difficult for kids to weed through misinformation on the web. For example, a recent study from Stanford University revealed that over 80% of middle school students believed that an advertisement labeled as sponsored content was a real news story.
That’s why Wolfram Alpha is one of the best kids sites for the growing student. Wolfram Alpha is all about expert knowledge and trustworthy information. Their goal is to bring broad, deep, expert-level knowledge to everyone—anywhere and any time.
But what exactly is Wolfram Alpha?
It’s a computational knowledge engine and answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It’s kind of like a search engine … but a lot more precise. Instead of just populating a list of relevant websites, Wolfram Alpha will actually give you specific answers when you type a search query. It even works for mathematical equations.
For example, students can type in a math formula and get step-by-step instructions on how to solve it. The possibilities are endless. From elementary math to physics to words and linguistics to nutrition, political geography, history, and more, Wolfram Alpha makes accessing expert knowledge easy and accessible for every student.
Back-to-school tech is about more than just having the right laptop or tablet—it’s also about knowing which websites and resources to turn to when you need help.
About Dan VanPatten: Dan is a full-time technology writer with interests in gaming, gadgetry, and all things PC tech related. He writes about a variety of topics including technology news, product reviews, and software. His experience stems from years of experience writing & producing content for technology newsletters & publications.
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