GradeGuru was just featured on CollegeThrive a site focused on providing students with tips and resources to help them better prepare and manage university life.
GradeGuru was cited as a great resource to find course materials.
The post highlights some of GradeGuru’s key features including inviting your friends and classmates to join as well as earning rewards for your contributions to the community.
“Taking Notes Beyond the Classroom”
Below are a few highlights of the article:
Despite mixed reactions, note sharing has continued to grow in popularity. “Broadly, what we’re seeing is a trend in the increase of recognition that learning is collaborative. We’ve often treated what students do as private segments, they just go back to their dorms and study, when in fact they study together a lot,” said David Parry, assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the University of Texas-Dallas. Parry is also part of McGraw-Hill’s Academic Advisory Committee. “We’ve seen Facebook and MySpace collaboration to share information. There are opportunities for [the note sharing] Web sites to play that role for students.”
“From our perspective, we see note sharing as evolving into a more collaborative community of notes, more real time discussion, students helping each other in more real time,” Sawtell said. “If other social networks should be taken as an example, that is what may ultimately play out.”
Another concern about online note sharing is the fear that it is essentially spoon-feeding material to students and propagating a culture of laziness. However, supporters of the sites say they attract ambitious students, rather than class skippers. Keith Hampson, director of digital education strategies at Toronto’s Ryerson University, who is also part of McGraw-Hill’s Academic Advisory Committee, said that his original sense of skepticism has dissipated. “The more I’ve looked into this, the more I realized that the people who are using [note sharing sites] are proactive students. They want to have their notes in their hands before they enter class, they may want two or three copies of those notes when studying for an exam.”
The article ends with the following statement from Dr. Keith Hampson:
“I think there’s a real divide in higher education as to how we ought to be teaching, how students ought to be learning,” Hampson said. However, he acknowledged that whichever direction education moves in, change is inevitable. “We are obviously moving towards a more active and collaborative style of learning. These social technologies and practices enable to us to do this on a much grander scale.”
