Nail Your Next Assessment With These Digital Tools

Do you find yourself wincing every time your teacher asks you to put together a research task or a presentation? We totally feel you, which is why we wanted to share some of our best wisdom about the digital tools out there that can help you get your work done easier, faster and with less stress. With just a couple of skills under your belt, you’ll be serving up amazing work in no time!

Canva

Canva is a free all-in-one tool that you can use for graphic design, video editing, building presentations - just about anything really! The thing that makes it worth chatting about is that it’s super user-friendly, with loads of templates and drag-and-drop features to help you put something together that looks professional.

While it’d be ideal to brush up on some graphic design skills or learn video editing software, for most assignments having a good submission is mainly about it looking nice and being easy to read and understand.
There are a couple of cool features on there you might not have heard about. You can create talking presentations, where you record your voice to play alongside your slides! Also, it’s great for group projects. You can create something called an online team, which lets you collaborate and comment on the same design.

If you’re interested in becoming a social media professional, you’ll find that loads of businesses use Canva to create and even schedule their assets.
Also as a side note - did you know Canva was founded in Sydney only 10 years ago? It’s now valued around $40 billion dollars!

Google Search Operators

Having a hard time finding what you’re searching for on Google? The trick might be that you’re not asking the right question. While Google is designed in a way that you can ask a question, e.g. ‘where are the best schoolies destinations?’ and it’ll  produce a fairly good answer, it can start to struggle when you’re getting a bit more specific. That’s where the search operators come in handy. A couple of golden ones to look out for:

• “site:” - put this one before the site you want to search. This one’s great if the site you’re looking at has a poor search function. So for instance if you search “best headphones for study 2022” you’ll probably get results from electronics stores or old blogs - but if you search “site:reddit.com best headphones for study 2022” you’ll only get results from Reddit.
• “Filetype:” - this one is amazing if you’re trying to find downloadables like excerpts from readings, ebooks or even lecture slides from other university courses. If you’re trying to learn from some experts about something you’re reading for English, you could try searching for something like “filetype:pdf othello”, and you’ll find essays from scholars about Othello that you could use in your next essay.
• Quotation marks: Google works by using key words, meaning that you could put a nonsensical set of words into the search bar like “of type cheese swiss where” and it’ll list sites that contain those words in a bunch of different orders. Most of the time that’s a useful feature, but if you’re looking for something like the discussion of a quote, or which song some lyrics belong to, quotation marks are your best friend. Put the phrase you’re looking for in quotation marks like so: "we're no strangers to love", and you’ll find the song or text that it belongs to.

Citation websites

From around Year 10 and upwards, some teachers will start asking you to put citations into your essays or research projects, usually in a particular style such as Harvard or APA. ONce you get beyond high school, some teachers can get pretty harsh with whether your sources are in the right style or not, and it can get tricky keeping all of your bibliography notes in order.

This is where citation management software and sites come in. Sites such as citethisforme allow you to put in the details using a form or a URL, and they’ll arrange the info to match the standard you need. You can usually stockpile the citations, making doing your bibliography an absolute breeze!

There’s a big reason as to why we didn’t talk about stuff like coding or how to work at an IT helpdesk. It’s because whether you realise it or not, you’re using digital skills every single day, and you’re definitely going to keep using them as you progress in school or your career. If you wanna take a bigger look at what the future holds for digital skills, in-demand tech jobs and more, make sure you check out our academy DigiSkills.