However, doing it manually at least in the beginning can help you use such programs more efficiently. Its also worth noting that the physical act of writing down your ideas can help you learn ideas much better. You may want to use colored markers or pens and draw different shapes in different colors and sizes too. You can also emphasize more important ideas by making their shapes outline thicker or their letters bolder. Here are more tips on how to manually create a good idea map: Our minds think better wider than taller and as such, its a better idea to use a landscape orientation for your idea maps paper; As mentioned earlier, its better to write the idea or point down first before drawing the shape to avoid making mistakes, i.e., ideas unable to fit within shapes; Write the highest level or main idea at the center of the paper; and Limit your ideas words to a few words or a very short phrase in order to ensure that your map fits i

12: Reading For Learning We all know that reading is an imperative for learning in most cases, especially in school. Personally, Ive learned so much since graduating through reading books and articles. Unlike going to classes at particular hours and having to adjust to the teaching pace, reading books and other materials offer the convenience of being able to learn at your convenient time and convenient pace. You dont adjust to the classes, the classes adjust to you. Reading for optimal learning isnt as simple as, well, just reading. There is a systematic way of reading materials for accelerating your learning experience the SQR 3 technique. SQR 3 stands for Survey, Question, Read, Recite and Review and is a good technique created to help improve reading recollection through different and repeated ways of engaging the material. One key to memorizing something is repetition the frequency of our engagement with something determines just how deep into our long-term memory i

Some students go through their assigned readings two times to be familiarize themselves well with the material. But as much as repetition helps us learn something, reading for optimal learning requires that such repetition also be systematic or methodical, i.e., there should be a method to the madness. One systematic reading technique was already discussed summarizing. Another is the SQR 3 technique. Lets take a closer look at the 5 important parts of this technique. SURVEY In this first step, you read the material simply by surveying it in order to get a general picture of overview. This step is also referred to as skimming or scanning. The reason behind this first step is that our minds prefer seeing the bigger picture in which to fit the individual parts together and see the general direction of the materials authors for deeper learning and understanding. Having an insight of the sequence, arrangement and structure of reading materials give us the opportunity to create

If we know, for example, that a particular reading materials author is constructing a cause and effect reasoning, we can anticipate that he or she will discuss at least one cause followed by an enumeration of the effects of such cause. It may be challenging to do this for relatively voluminous reading materials such as