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How SmartBook Can Help You Study

Studying is a way of life for students. While everyone has their own way of studying and different strategies work better for some people, there is a universal resource that is often overlooked when trying to find help with studying… your textbook.

It seems like a no-brainer that the expensive book that you had to buy at the start of the term would have everything that you will need to know in it. That’s sort of the whole point of them. The problem that I have personally found with studying from a textbook is that while it has all of the information that you need to know, it also has a ton of information that might not be necessary. It is so easy to get distracted or overloaded when you are just reading from the textbook.

That’s where McGraw Hill’s SmartBook comes in. SmartBook takes this a step further; creating tons of different ways to help you study:

  • Familiarizing Yourself with the Material.

While some college courses may cover familiar material, most of the stuff is brand new. That’s why we’re in college: to learn something new, right? When the material is brand new following all of the instructor’s lectures or understanding everything discussed in class can be tricky. It’s usually helpful to read through the textbook before class. SmartBook can help you prep by highlighting and showing you the main points of the chapter—something that your instructor is probably likely to spend time on in class.

  • Practicing While You Learn.

Unless you have an amazing memory, reading alone usually won’t help you learn something. The best way to really understand something is through practice. Instead of just reading a textbook page or chapter, SmartBook makes you answer questions while you read, forcing you to practice. This can take a little longer than just reading a normal textbook chapter, but it will save you time in the long run since you’ll remember and understand things much better your first time around.

  • Showing What You Know and Don’t Know.

So, you have reviewed the material, gone to lecture, and done your practice problems; but what do you really know? SmartBook has a way to help you with this as well! As you are answering practice questions, passages within SmartBook will become highlighted in green. This is the adaptive learning piece of SmartBook, telling you that you understand what is covered in that chapter or section and you can move on to something else.

This is really helpful when skimming through the eBook, because you can scroll through quickly and see, based on color (green: you know it, yellow: you need to reread/practice), what you know and don’t know. This helps you save time and avoid missing concepts you might struggle with.

  • Exam Prep/Memory Recharge.

When reviewing for an exam, your SmartBook is your best friend. SmartBook has a feature called “Recharge,” where it will ask you a series of questions about a specific chapter, and will tell you what information you have remembered since the last time you read/practiced. Recharge will also tell you what you likely have forgotten. Using this info, Recharge then creates an outline for you to study and provides you with the chapter excerpts and questions you should go back and practice from. This type of outline before an exam can save you tons of time and is extremely helpful as a review sheet to make sure you study what you need before the test.

As a student myself, I know that it is sometimes annoying hearing others tell you how to study. But I have found that reading, practicing, and note-taking really improve my understanding and memory recall. When it comes down to it, each person’s studying style is different. Some get bored easily, others aren’t sure where to start, some read the material and still don’t understand what’s happening, etc.

SmartBook helps solve a lot of these problems by filtering out unimportant information, asking review questions as you’re reading, and creating personal highlights and outlines of what needs review. Using SmartBook can help you save time and more efficiently learn material from your textbook and let you spend time working on the rest of your course assignments and projects.