Students in my “Revision Skills” classes have been using a great BETT awarded site called Get Revising to make themselves exam timetables for their GCSE’s this summer. This tool allows you to enter the dates of all your exams, choose different slots for revising throughout the day, post in breaks for socialising and allocate varying amounts of time for subjects according to how you prioritise them.

But how useful is a website like this? At the beginning of our lessons I asked students through Surveymonkey about some of their existing revision habits. Less than half used a revision timetable and 40% had no set length of time for revising before taking a break! However listening to comments during the class made me realise that an online revision timetable is very useful in helping students to conceptualise the finite amount of time available before exams begin. And that’s a start at least

It is interesting also to see the students responses to the types of revison strategies they use. There seems to be a general lack of imagination in ways to revise. I find it quite depressing to see that 70% think listening to podcast unimportant and 20 out of 35 respondents have no time for Mindmaps!

The lessons have given all students a chance to “taste” some online revision tools through our OK Revision Blog and there have been some converts to new ways of doing things. As Pete comments “kinesthetic and audio are just not my style. Its all about the visual (yaaaah)”.