Review about the app related to my study skill

Before I introduce the app, I would like to talk about my study skill. Since I was in high school, I used the traditional studying skill: reading the book, memorizing, and writing in my own words. It wasn’t a bad skill because I got good scores in many tests and felt rewarding feelings when I saw the neatly handwritten notes I took. However, that was all I got. I still couldn’t get good scores in every subject and most of the contents I learned disappeared after the exam. That was a big dilemma for me. While I had such concerns, our high school teacher recommended a new studying method: Mentoring. It was not a special method and many people already taught about the advantage. However, I didn’t prefer it at first, cause it was inconvenient. You need to find some friends to study and find good content to share. It was not familiar since I was used to studying alone.

However, by using this app you can study more easily and efficiently.

The app’s name is “Connects Q&A” This app connects the mentor and mentee in any subjects they want. If the mentee has a question or any problems while studying, he or she can take a picture of the problem and send it to the mentor. The mentor gets the message and answers with a detailed explanation.

You can use this application after signing up with your Gmail or any other methods. After you log in, you can choose whether to ask or answer. This application is free for question/answer activity, however, if you buy a premiere version, you can have access to other useful information such as consulting your studying plan, tips for a university entrance exam, and so on. There are no special financial or other rewards for teaching.

I used this several times when I came to university. I answered questions as a mentor and thought this app was a good tool for both mentors and mentees.

First, this app provides overall study skills that we have learned. You take the picture of the problem and the mentor can use visual contents to explain how to solve the problem (visual skill). Also, you can make a video to tell answers to the mentee (listening & visual skill) and write 1 or more paragraphs to add some specific answers (writing skill). For example, if the student has trouble solving a math problem, he or she can take the picture of the math problem, ask the mentor, and get the answers or additional feedbacks.

① Take a picture of the problem and choose what subject it is.

② Ask the mentor you want.

③ Get the answer and detailed explanation (you can ask for detailed information or feedbacks if you want)

This app has lots of advantages for both mentors and mentees. Mentees can not only have correct answers but also learn new knowledge from the explanation. Mentors can also review what they know and get new knowledge to explain to others. In my case, I had to explain a problem related to ethics so I reviewed the note I wrote and search for additional information. (I wish I had a captured image, but unfortunately, I deleted). I could learn that teaching to others can also be a skill to learn and realized why my high school teacher recommended this method.

However, there were also side effects. First of all, I only answered to problems that were easy. Though the aim of this app is to learn new and diverse subjects by challenging to new subjects, I got lazy of studying things that I wasn't used to. The diverse option was an advantage for students but the disadvantage to mentors, as they can choose what they know well. Also, there was some problem with my personal information. I had to fill in my personal information in my profile, and students were able to look at the information and choose the teacher. Sometimes people who had bad intentions tried to act like they were students and ask my personal information (there were also people who sent advertisements, weird photos) I really liked this app and could study efficiently but nowadays I don’t use this app because of these flaws. Instead, I meet people and do mentoring or nowadays with zoom.

Reflection: It was quite hard to analyze this app because I only thought that technology helped our efficient studying. However, as I searched for more reviews of other people and recalled my experience, I could find there were also side effects of the developed tools. By this task, I could enhance my critical thinking skill and analyzing skills. I would like to show my review to other colleagues so that they can use this writing as a guide line for new tools for their studying.