SleepTown

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Do you often stay up late scrolling your phone? Hit the snooze button too much? If you have trouble putting your phone down at night, or suffer from insomnia and want to attain a healthy, regular sleep schedule. SleepTown is your best solution.


It’s made by the same team who made Forest, one of our recommended focus apps so you can pair the two together and really focus your time and energy on things other than your phone.

How it works: 3 steps to a healthy sleep schedule

  1. Set your own challenging bedtime and wake-up goal.
  2. Open the SleepTown app before your bedtime goal and start constructing a building.
  3. Wake up before your wake-up goal, shake your phone to clear your mind, and see which building you got. Every morning the building is a surprise that will motivate you to wake up!

SleepTown Can Help You:

  • Beat your phone addiction and get more sleep
  • Maintain regular sleep hours between 4-10 hours a day
  • Construct amazing buildings by achieving your bedtime and wake-up goals
  • Wake up to a reward every day – your new building!
  • View your “SleepTown” and all your sleep statistics in the town page
  • Night shift mode helps reduce blue light

Head to this link to take a look at a video of how it works.

TypingClub

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TypingClub is an effective way to learn how to touch type for free! In this modern world, touch typing is an invaluable tool, for a lot of jobs typing quick is key to being efficient. It can also help in your education by allowing you to type your notes quicker when in a lecture.

Although the graphics and games seem to be aimed at a slightly younger audience, it’s free and makes it easy to learn how to touch type in your web browser, you can just log in and get started straight away. Anyone can do it.

There are 678 different lessons, starting from simple tests with a couple of keys to running through a whole paragraph with minimal mistakes.

But if you don’t want to start right at the beginning, there is a Placement Test that works out how well you can type at the moment and jumps you forward to a point in their program so you’re not wasting time on things you already do. When I took this test, it took about 5 minutes and bumped me up from lesson 1 to lesson 316 so I’m almost halfway through the test already.

If you create an account on the TypingClub website you can keep an eye on your stats and monitor your progress towards becoming a fluent touch typist.

I ran through the final test while I was writing this post. I managed to get 98% accuracy, high score of 3665 and 4 out of 5 stars. If you want to give it a go, make sure you are sat at a computer then head to this link.

Get Revising

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Get Revising is filled with smart revision tools and tips to help boost your grades. As part of The Student Room, you can be sure it’s got a good team behind it and a trusted name.

It’s filled with past papers and quick quizzes to help you learn more about whatever subject you need, all in all there are over 300,000 different learning resources with 192,564 resources just for A Level subjects (At the time of writing). Just over 140,000 of those resources are for GCSE subjects so if you’re retaking any of your GCSE subjects or want to help your friend or family member taking theirs, there’s enough resources to help everyone.

You can even search by exam board to make sure the information you use is relevant to your exact subject and exam.

It’s free for everyone, and teachers are regularly adding more and more quizzes and mindmaps all the time. Just a quick example, there are over 1,000 Spanish resources, 6,000 Law resources, and over 20,000 Biology resources.

If you want to be confident in the information you’re looking at, each resource has a rating system and some have Teacher Recommendations. Take a look at the example below, Art in Roman Britain has a 5 star rating meaning it is useful for A Level Classical Civilization, it also has a Teacher Recommendation which means a teacher has looked through the resource and found that it is of high quality. 

A great feature of Get Revising is their revision resource creation tool! These tools have been designed to make it easy for you to create something to test your knowledge, re-use it so you learn it best and share with others to help them too. Just look at all the tools available to you below:

Coggle

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Coggle is an online tool for creating and sharing mind maps and flowcharts. It works online in your browser so there’s nothing you need to install or download! Whether you’re taking notes, brainstorming, planning, or doing something creative. It’s simple to visualise your ideas and build a plan with Coggle. Share with friends, classmates or no one as you like. Changes are saved instantly so no worry about having to make sure you save it before closing.

You can create a mind map or flowchart for loads of different things, probably things you’ve never even thought of! From learning how to manage your stress in a way that’s unique to you, to creating diagrams to help you revise for your assessments. Check out these example boards below:

You can add floating text and images to your diagrams meaning you can annotate your map for clarity, you can create loops and join branches from multiple starting points for your different ideas and paths.

With the free version of Coggle you get access to all the features we mentioned above, as well as unlimited image uploads, access to over 1600 icons, a full change history and PDF & Image download. The free version allows you to create 3 private diagram boards, once you’ve used the 3 private ones then all others you create will be public so anyone may be able to look at it if they know how to find it.

Lexico

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Lexico.com is a new collaboration between Dictionary.com and Oxford University Press (OUP) to help users worldwide with everyday language challenges. Lexico is powered by Oxford’s free English and Spanish dictionaries and features multi-language dictionary, thesaurus, and translation content.

As it’s powered by Oxford, the world language data experts, you can be sure you’re getting the most accurate and consise information.

You can find the correct spelling, useage and history of words and phrases. For example, rhinoceros come’s from Middle English, via Latin from the Greek meaning ‘nose horn’. You can also find out about the word of the year and a new word of the day each day.

The complete list of features at the time of writing is below:

  • English Dictionary
  • US Dictionary
  • Spanish Dictionary
  • English – Spanish Translator

  • Synonyms
  • Spelling Tips
  • Punctuation Tips
  • Writing Tips

  • Usage
  • Word Origins
  • Language Questions
  • Word Lists

The extensive blog and articles are filled with tips and informative posts about the varities of words we use and how to use them right.

Did you know?

Trelson for Staff

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Teachers can set their own exams using the Trelson (previously ChromEx) platform for their students to access on a Chromebook.

There are some great benefits to using Trelson:

  • You can set it up yourself to be run in your lesson, no need to ask MIS to set anything up
  • Chromebooks are ‘locked’ so students can’t access the internet
  • Students can log in with their normal details so no need to remember an extra login
  • At the end of the exam, the work is instantly saved into the Google Drive of the teacher who set up the exam

Setting up an exam

Teachers can just head to this link and log in with their college Google account to get started – https://assessment.trelson.com/#/exams

Full instructions on Trelson can also be found in this presentation.

Note – The video below hasn’t been updated since Trelson was rebranded from ChromEx but the method remains the same. Just the colours and branding may differ.

How does a student take the exam?

A student just needs to select ChromEx in the bottom left of the Chromebook BEFORE logging in.

Then when they are asked to log in to the ChromEx platform, the just need to use their normal college Google credentials.

ChromEx – Exams on a Chromebook

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Link to below presentation

Students can use this presentation to see how they will complete an exam using ChromEx.

Staff can head to this link to learn how to create an exam.

Google Jamboard

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Google Jamboard is a digital whiteboard app that allows you to collaborate with others and join together your ideas.


Jamboard is Google’s answer to an Interactive Whiteboard, originally designed and marketed with a portable 55-inch, 4k display. Google have since released Android and iOS apps for it, perfect for touchscreen Chromebooks here at Barton! Even if you don’t have a touchscreen device you can still connect to a Jam on your web browser at jamboard.google.com

It is connected to G Suite so you can log in with your College credentials as normal giving you the ability to present, edit and share files with Google services like Drive, Sheets, and Slides.

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Google Classroom (Android App)

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The Google Classroom Android App is the best companion app for the Google Classroom system.


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