April 16, 2021
How Ayoa helps students break down subject content when studying
The life of a student is often a busy one. With multiple lesson notes, assignments and research projects on the go at once, juggling your workload can be a tricky balancing act. With so much information to work through, it can sometimes feel like a daunting prospect to know where to start when it comes to putting together your assignments. This is something that can be difficult for every student, but for neurodivergent individuals, in particular, reading through dense information can easily become overwhelming.
Breaking down the content of your subjects into manageable chunks will make all the difference when it comes to understanding them more effectively and tackling your assignments with confidence.
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Read on to discover how Ayoa can help you break down subject content when it comes to planning essays, revising for exams and even taking notes in class.
Essay planning
The key to building a strong and well-presented essay is to have an effective structure in place before you start writing. No matter how strong your content is, the structure of your essay can be the make or break of a good grade.
Mind maps in Ayoa are a really helpful way for you to easily break down the information you will include in your essay so you can form a clear structure. This will give you a strong framework to start from when it comes to pulling your essay together, making the process quicker and easier when it comes to writing. In fact, the inherent structure of a mind map makes them the perfect tool for essay planning as they allow you to break each section of your essay into different branches.
When you start your mind map, begin by adding a central idea. This should be the title of your essay or the topic you will be exploring. Next, add each section of your essay as a branch that stems from your central idea. For example, this could be your introduction, the key topics your essay will cover, and your conclusion. You can then expand on each of these sections (or ‘branches’) by adding keywords and phrases as connected sub-branches. This will allow you to easily break down the information you aim to write about in your essay.
Finally, once you have your essay outline mapped out, Ayoa allows you to export your mind map as a Word document, ready for you to start filling in the content of your essay!
Ready to give it a go? Read our blog post here where we go into further detail about how Ayoa can help you structure your essays effectively.
Revising
When it comes to revising for exams, breaking down subject content into manageable chunks is vital. This process helps to aid your memory as it allows you to form memorable connections and associations between ideas that you can bring into your exam.
However, when faced with notebooks or Word documents filled with a term’s worth of lesson content, sorting through this information can be a time-consuming task.
Whiteboards in Ayoa are a useful and visually engaging way to group related information together and store your revision notes in one place – saving you from creating multiple revision cards for every different exam topic.
Using a tool like Ayoa also helps make the revision process more effective; with the ability to add images and icons to your whiteboards, as well as colour-code your work, you can create a visual mood board of revision notes for easy recall, which will help to boost your memory.
One useful way to use whiteboards when it comes to revising is to use sections. Sections in whiteboards allow you to sort your subject content into different groups and bring together related ideas. As mentioned above, you can also colour-code these sections to help with visual recall and to easily pick out the information that you need.
You can also add plenty of other visual elements, such as sticky notes, lists, images, flowcharts and more to your whiteboard to summarize complex topics. Displaying your revision notes in different formats such as these will help to add variety to your notes so you can absorb the information much more effectively.
Ready to test your knowledge?
If you decide to add your revision notes to a mind map, you can use Ayoa’s helpful auto-focus feature. Auto-focus allows you to hide the branches of your mind map and reveal them when you’re ready – perfect for putting your knowledge to the test!
Note-taking
When taking notes in class, you might be used to jotting things down in a notebook or adding notes to a Word document. But how often do you return to these notes only for them to make less sense out of context, or for some important information to simply get lost in the jumble?
Mind maps in Ayoa allow you to capture information quickly and efficiently, making them a handy tool to have in your classes. When using mind maps to take notes, you can add structure to them as you go along – saving you time from sorting through them later.
Ayoa offers three unique mind mapping styles for you to choose from: organic, speed and radial. Our speed mind maps are a great choice for taking notes in class – as the name suggests, speed maps are designed to help you capture ideas quickly as it automatically keeps your notes neat and organized, so you can focus on your work. All you need to do is add your notes to different branches, and Ayoa will take care of how they look.
Our mind map styles are also completely interchangeable – so if after your lesson, you decide to add a bit more styling to your map, you can simply turn this into an organic map, which allows you to add a touch more of your creative flair to your design.
Try creating a mind map for each lesson, then use branches to break up your notes into the different topics discussed in class. This will help you easily sort through your notes at a later date, which will be particularly helpful when it comes to preparing your assignments, setting study goals, or starting your revision for any upcoming exams.
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