When Luke Saunders decided to change careers and returned to the classroom as a secondary school teacher, he was surprised at how little things had changed since he did his Leaving Certificate almost a decade earlier.
“There seemed to be almost no access to online resources,” according to Luke, a zoology graduate who had previously worked as a builder, door to door salesman and creative in an advertising agency.
After a lot of consultation with colleagues and students at the Jesus and Mary Secondary School in Enniscrone Co Sligo, Luke and his business partner, software engineer Keith Wright, launched a website, www.studyclix.ie, at the ASTI conference on April 10 last. One month later it had received over 19,000 hits.
“We wanted to create on online learning community which would complement classroom learning and make life easier for Leaving and Junior Certificate students, and their teachers,” said Luke who teaches both Junior and Leaving Certificate students.
The site took over two years to build and was done after the teacher and the software engineer availed of the CEIM programme for start-up businesses, based at the Innovation Centre in IT Sligo.
Studyclix divides all the main Junior and Leaving Certificate subjects into topics ranging from The Renaissance for History students or Macbeth or Yeats’ poetry from the English course. Students can access all past exam questions, as well as marking schemes, sample answers, videos and free study notes.
“The best preparation students can do for any exam is to constantly test themselves by attempting questions from previous years and Studyclix, not just provides all the questions, but lets them see how they would have fared in a previous year”, explained Luke .
As a teacher and a former Leaving Certificate student- who despite getting six As in that exam is all too aware of the stress involved – he was keen to provide plenty of useful tips aimed at reducing pressure on students. “The Leaving Cert is one of the most stressful experiences in any Irish person’s life – some people still have nightmares about it years later – we wanted to try and alleviate that,” he said.
Some tips on the site may seem blindingly obvious but amazingly many students just don’t think of them without being prompted, according to Luke. “Students don’t realize how crucial timing is when they are actually doing the exam,” he pointed out. “The most common reason I see for students under-performing is not so much that they answered some questions badly, but that they did not do all questions, perhaps because of spending too long on an essay”.
Another Studyclix tip is not to waste time revising what you already know. “I know it sounds obvious but the key to getting an A in an exam is to find out what you still don’t know and learn that – not to keep going over the areas you already know inside out,” said Saunders.
The new website has a blog and a Facebook page, reflecting students’ preference for social media over many other sources of information.
Studyclix has also been a hit with teachers as it hosts thousands of web videos assembled by colleagues with tips on teaching many study topics. Teachers have also been using the site when preparing end of year tests.
“Students are using the Studyclix forum to talk to each other, air concerns and reassure each other,” said Luke.
The site is currently free for both students and teachers.
Enterprise and Innovation Supports at IT Sligo:
CEIM was an enterprise development programme offered by IT Sligo and Letterkenny Institute of Technology in association with Enterprise Ireland, providing participants with training, financial and other business supports, networking opportunities and incubation space.
It has now been replaced with a new programme, New Frontiers, which was launched earlier this year. Further details from the Innovation Centre at IT Sligo here.
Image Caption (above right): 6th year students from Jesus and Mary Secondary, Enniscrone who played a key role in building and refining Studyclix pictured with teacher and founder of the website Luke Saunders: From left to right Eoin Flynn, Bernadette Kilcullen, David Doherty, Luke Saunders and Deirdre Whitt.