District Academy 20 is now on enforced BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). It only seems fair that if students are required to have an online presence with their education, they should be provided with useful online sources. There are plenty websites out there that offer a variety of help for students such as free literature, study tips and tricks, educational chat rooms, and general life advice for the struggling student.

If, for whatever the reason may be, you cannot get a physical copy of a book required for a class, there are many websites online that offer digital copies of most historical literature. http://bartleby.com/ and http://www.gutenberg.org/ offer anything from Shakespearean plays to biographies about anyone you learned about in history class.

Three apps/websites out there that are not the usual quizlet.com but still help you out with all your studying needs are: https://www.studyblue.com/, http://www.instagrok.com/, and an app called Studious. Studyblue.com, “the leading crowd-sourced learning platform, provides intelligent learning tools including flashcards, notes, study guides and more, that empower more than 10 million students to study smarter.” Both Instagrok and Studious are programs that help people understand the subjects they are learning to a fuller extent with things like quizzes and memorization games. Senior, Tamara Coy, told me, “I use several different websites to help me get ready for quizzes and tests. They help me feel reassured before I take tests and give me a better understanding overall.”

She also told me that when it comes to the stress of school, she goes on calming, anxiety relieving websites such as http://weavesilk.com/. If you need help with motivation and/or anxiety related to school, http://www.ted.com/ can help ease your troubles with a list of different speeches and presentations on these topics. And if your troubles come in the form of distractions, you might be struggling with BYOD. It’s difficult to be on technology to work when there are so many things you could be doing on the internet instead. http://selfcontrolapp.com/ can be downloaded to your computer to make sure you stick to your task.

If anything, BYOD provides more opportunities for the students of District 20 and Air Academy High School to use resources available online. These websites and apps are certainly not the only things that help; but they exemplify the kind of sites that are out there at just the stretch of your fingertips.