Starting a Study Group

Modified on Thu, 22 Aug at 6:40 AM

How do I Pass My School's Hardest Classes, With 25 or More Friends?

To pass Biology, Spanish, Algebra II, Physics, European History, or other challenging class, together in a two to eight person Study Group:

Step 1: How to get people in a group:

In the library, at a study hall, start a playing-cards group, or join one. Get to know each other; find people like you who are having a lot of fun; and then give everyone a flier you printed out from the bottom of the landing page of the site, and talk about starting a study group.
Utilize classrooms where the desks are put into small groups, or groups of at least two people. Hand out fliers, and talk about starting a study group.
Sports teams are a great place to start, where people interact as friends. When you are in the van, going out to a game, or in the locker room, give your friends a flier, and talk about starting a study group.
Before class, or on the bus, when people are waiting around, hand out fliers to your friends, and engage them about the positives of starting a study group.
Go to the library and find one other person studying on their laptop, and talk about the flier that you printed out from the landing page of the site.
If there is already a presence of the site at your school, find others already on the site by searching the Tutor Search page from the button on the middle-right on the Home page. Make sure you fill out your profile first, which takes about five minutes, so others will be able to find you. Simply search for a class, book, and any specific person, for a Study Group that you can join, or use as a Tutor group member to.
Print out lots of fliers, and hand them out to your friends and colleagues in every class you have. Then tell everyone we ought to get together, and have fun. With activities on the weekend, and after school, and with Study Groups to all pass.
Meet up at a cafe or on the lawn, with your laptops. Hand out fliers, and begin to have fun. Or tell the cafe to hand out all these fliers that you print out, to students that come there. The more the site spreads at your campus, the more people there will be to have fun, and find each other.

Step 2: Starting the group:

After you get their attention, have a place in mind on campus with a wifi Internet connection, where you can sit down, at a table, and talk with each other. Or use it anywhere with a hotspot from your smartphone. This could be an outdoor table, a cafe, a library room, a cafeteria table, a dorm's general area, a fraternity's general area, a hallway at the gym, or even in someone's parked car.
Or, everyone goes home, and can use the site virtually, with Skype to talk to each other on the screen, from a desk with your laptop or desktop computer, and Internet connection. Or, do either way, whenever you choose!

Step 3: Then do these steps. (Have these steps in mind, before you start the group.)

Gather everyone's Class Notes and put them in the Sharing Folder on the Home Page, lower left. Then open a Split Screen from the top left, and “copy-and-paste” from each person's a) laptop, in-class, typed notes, put in a Notes folder you create, or b) hand-drawn notes, you take a picture of with your smartphone, and import to the site as a Scan, with the black bar's “image” button, near the middle-right-hand side of the bar- and make one final Class Notes document of everyone's notes for that day, and title and date it, and save it in a Class Notes folder on the left-hand side of the Home page.

Now, you can talk with everyone about the class, make sure you got all of the pertinent Notes, and save the material. You will be able to “copy-and-paste” from these daily Class Notes documents in a Split Screen to a doc on the right, for Homework problem solving, and Study Guide creation. It saves time. And you get the most out of your class.
Do your Flashcard Terms for the class from one long list of the terms one person types up and puts in the Sharing Folder on the lower left of the Home Page, that you break up into pieces, like each person in the group does 8. Start with a small screen for the terms, unless they need a picture, or a long description- then use the larger flashcard screen, and the picture import button on the middle right of the black bar. Then save those 8 as “Biology Cell 1-8” or “Biology Cell 9-16” or “Biology Cell 17-24” and put the docs into the Flashcards Sharing Folder. It saves time, and now you can study them at any time in the convenient Flashcards Player when you have time at school, or at home.
Work on Homework, as a group. For Math, Language, Chemistry, and Physics, or formula-heavy work, all you have to do is share hand-written formula Math work on a blank piece of paper, and take a picture of it with your smartphone, and upload it to the site, using the “picture-upload” button on the right-middle of the black bar above the white page, on the Home page. Since there are 2-8 other people in the group, making and sharing these pages to everyone at once is easy, and fast. While some people are talking about a problem, one person can be working on what's next, and import it for everyone to see.

Then, open a Sharing Screen from the top right of the Home Page, and work on the problem on the right-hand side of the page, as a group, by inviting whoever you want to see it and discuss it, in the drop down box- just check off their names, and it shows on their screens like a teleprompter. Then save the work, and file it in a special-named Folder on the left-hand side on the Home Page.

Use a Split Screen to put things on the left- like the problems typed out, and numbered, discuss, and then write your final answers on the right, that you will print out, and hand in, for Homework.

Or, put Class Notes on the left, from the Class Notes folder, discuss, and “copy-and-paste” the answers to the right, and then save. To print and hand in for Homework.

Or, put Scans on the left, write notes on the right, and hand-write Math or Chemistry formulas on a page on your desk, and hand that handwritten Math or Chemistry page in for Homework.

Or, put a Study Guide on the left-hand side, and “copy-and-paste” answers from it, to the right-hand side, to save, print, and hand-in, for Homework answers. Any way you do it, you can still save your Homework answers to the site. If the answers are hand-drawn, just take a picture of it, and save it into a Scans folder. Keep them for the Test or Final, to study.
Make Study Guides for the test. Simply “copy-and-paste” from any of your saved materials- pics and docs, from the folders on the left-hand side of the Home page, for the Test or Final. Then save time by studying only what is on that sheet. You will make them very quickly, and then have more time to study for the test. Keep all of your Test and Quiz Study Guides in a Study Guide folder on the left in the Home Page, to study for the Final.

Then, you can share your version, of what's going to be on the test, that the teacher gives you a piece of paper on, highlighting what will be on the test, in topics, your Study Guide, with others in your group, by putting your copy in the Sharing Folder, on the lower left hand side of the Home page. Then you can make a Split Screen, and put their Study Guide on the left, and “copy-and paste” what you are missing, on to the right, your document of a Study Guide.

In this way, you can break up the work, for a really hard class, so each person does one-quarter of the total material that's going to be on the Test, or Final.
Work in-person, or remotely, with Skype to talk through. You can do all your Study Groups from the dorm, (or your home), by meeting with certain groups at agreed-upon times of the night or day, so you can do multiple groups in one day.
Daisy-chain groups together and get more heads into the game, and all do your homework at once. Use the Tutor Group function on the Home page. Make one person of your group a “rep” that will share docs and pics with another group of six, who can talk with them on Skype, and then refer all the learning to your group. This is helpful if your group is stumped on a problem. Go to the Groups Management page to find another group, and have one person in your group join their group as a “Tutor” with the sliding bar on that page.

Then, use the Tutor Search page to find others to Chat with to get questions answered when everyone studies at the same time on that day. And from there, join their group on Skype, the same way, to share doc's and pic's and pertinent information about how to solve a problem. The doc's and pic's will be put into the Tutor Sharing Folder, and anyone in the group can then access them from there.

On the Tutor Search page, just ask questions in Chat after you search and find the people like you you need by checking off the boxes on that page. You can thus have a myriad of other people's Study Groups, for any topic, to answer your most urgent questions, and get on with learning about that topic in your hard class. Save time, get questions answered, and work together!
Keep a Journal. Of all your friends. Their names, your experiences, and pics of the activities. Add it up all your whole school career. And make progress.

Summary:

That's the genius behind Study Groups. Your support network of friends is what makes the whole thing worth it. Record all your positive experiences, and re-read your journals and see all your pictures of work and activities after. You got the best grades you could with social interaction and fun activities, and recorded the whole thing. Now you have a valuable reference for later in your career, and memories of those fun activities during this time in your life.