BBC iPlayer lets you watch BBC content from your computer, Smart TV or mobile device.


BBC iPlayer isn’t just for catching up on last night’s Eastenders or rewatching Gavin & Stacey for the 17th time, you can also find a lot of educational material in its depths. You can watch the latest episodes of QI to learn more quirky facts about the world or explore the hundreds of episodes of Science and Nature documentaries. There’s also great comedy and entertainment shows for when you have finished your work for the day and need to relax.

David Attenborough alone can take you through Climate Change for your Science lesson research, the different ecosystems around the world for your Geography research or even the early years of making nature documentaries for Media lesson research.

Some more examples of programmes that can aid your research are below:

Criminology – Jack the Ripper

Engineering – The Limit: Trickiest Tunnel

Music – Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool

Sport – Shane Williams: Rugby, Concussion and Me

Dance – The Royal Ballet: Mayerling

Don’t forget though that some episodes are only available for a limited time and can be removed from iPlayer at any time.

You can look through all the episodes and series available for each subject on the BBC iPlayer website or click one of these categories; History, Documentaries, Science & Nature, Music.

Pinterest is an online pinboard that allows users to pull in content from anywhere on the internet and keep it in one central place.



Pinterest is a great tool to use as a reference or moodboard, even for just keeping a lot of ideas together.

You can search Pinterest for ideas on a specific topic, theme or colour and if you install the Chrome Extension then when you are on a website you want to save, simply click the Pinterest icon in the Chrome Extensions bar and it will ask you to pick a photo to use as the Pin image, this helps if there is a webpage with hundreds of images but you want to make sure you remember just one. Alternatively, some websites have a feature where if you hover your mouse over an image, a Pinterest icon will appear on the image that quickly adds that page and that image to your Pinterest board.

I have used Pinterest personally a few times to build idea boards in the last few years, namely when I was moving in to my first home so I could get ideas of decoration and styles. I also used it when trying to design a nursery for my little boy.

SparkNotes is an online source for over 500 study guides. They host the full works of Shakespeare and literature guides along with a range of other subjects.



Have a look at some of the examples of SparkNotes below and then take a look at how the app works at the bottom.

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.

Put simply, it’s a Google Search just for scholarly articles.

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MyBib is a simple citation tool that allows you to store references for future.



MyBib is a one-stop shop for all your citation needs. It’s clean, simple and very intuitive to use. It stands for My Bibliography.

While Cite This For Me is one of the best-known citation tools, I found MyBib so much easier to use, it comes with some nice extra features and it’s not covered in ads.

The best bit? It’s 100% free!

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