Why having a tablet can help your Studies.
Tired of hauling round chunky textbooks? Bag breaking and your back aching? Sometimes different subjects at university require a different level of resources, and doing a subject like English or History, you require a lot of extra materials with you at all times, as well as your laptop, your lunch, your stationary, your folders.
But there is another way, and it’s really a lot less expensive than you think…buying a tablet.
When tablets such as the Blackberry Playbook and the iPad came out severa years ago, they were mega bucks. Slowly as the boom of them went down, and they became more affordable, they have become a new way to do your school work. By doing everything on one tablet screen.
Take reading for example, with an Amazon Kindle, you can upload up to 10,000 books on one memory, and a lot of classics are free. You can edit, annotate, highlight and even writes notes to help you with your studies.
iPad is by far the best for use in lectures. With its touch screen keyboard, and handy clip on keyboard for those who prefer to touch type, you can take them anywhere. With their sleek design, you can literally slide them into your bag, and they don’t take up much room at all.
If you’re against Apple products or simply prefer the android way of working, then the Samsung Galaxy tablet is for you. It does everything the iPad does, but it runs on android.
All these tablets are great for different things and they simply free up space physically and mentally by keeping everything organised onto one mulitdimensional piece of software. Prices start with the Amazon Kindle Fire, currently on offer for students at £99 instead of rrp of £139.
How to Save Money Whilst Being a Student
Being a student at university, you learn quickly that you’re going to be pretty skint for the duration of your 3 year stay. Over time it’s a thing you come to accept, and further still, your mind becomes adjusted to bargain hunting. Here a few tips on how to savemoney whilst being a student and still enjoying yourself. Here’s how to live off a $50 budget a week.
Monday- Buy the Basics- when you go food shopping, see if there’s a free bus to a supermarket near you. Abuse this priviledge. When you shop, choose the basics range, it might be a trolley full of tesco value, but it’s all the same stuff as brands, just not as pretty looking.
Bus= Free
Shopping=£10.
Tuesday- Make your lunch the night before to avoid spending unnecessary money on campus on overpriced food. Treat yourself and buy a chocolate bar if you must
Chocolate Bar= £0.50
Wednesday- You have the urge to go shopping, you’re going out tomorrow night and you want something new and different. Raid the local charity shop, score a skirt and a top for the combined total of £5.
Charity shop buys=£5
Thursday- It’s student night and you’re hitting the town. It’s £1 drinks and you take out a tenner with you. You buy 5 drinks, still have money for entry to the club and a couple of quid to share a taxi home.
Night out= £10
Friday- You want a hangover pizza, you put in for the takeaway you’re all sharing.
Take Away=$4.50
Saturday- You and your uni gang decide to go to the cinema cos it’s student night, you treat yourself to some popcorn.
Cinema and Popcorn=£10
Sunday- You decide that you’re going to be good and save this £10 for transport, or whenever you need an extra couple of quid.
Lasting total- £50 (£10 into savings)
Well done, you have sucessfully lived off £50, well £40 this week.
Volunteering
There are a lot of different ways that you can take part in volunteering, as there are so many places and roles involved with the activity. In your local community alone there is most likely a wide range of volunteering opportunities, ranging from volunteering in a charity shop to helping out at an animal shelter. There will probably be a type of volunteering to suit most people’s work ethic, experience, tastes and interests, so with a little bit of research it can be possible to engage in a highly rewarding form of volunteering.
Volunteering can be a great way to enhance a CV, to start up a new hobby, or just to pass your spare time, though different volunteering opportunities are better for different purposes. If you are interested in going into children’s nursing, then spending six months volunteering at a day care centre or something similar would be a great way to gain experience of working with children, as well as being something useful to include on your CV. It can also be a good way to get an opening for a future job. A lot of places employ people in a voluntary capacity, and depending on how well they do and fit into the place, they may be kept on full time in an employee capacity. This is especially prevalent in vocational positions, where learning on the job is a required part of gaining experience, and it can be impressive to potential employers that see you are willing to work and learn without being paid.
Saving Energy
Energy consumption in Britain is at an all time high. However, with the cost of utilities soaring and natural resources being depleted globally it is more important than ever to save energy around the home.
Thankfully, significantly reducing your energy bills can be accomplished quite easily. There are plenty of changes that you can make around the home to save money. Simply remembering to turn off appliances can make quite a difference, you’d be amazed to find out just how many people waste electricity by leaving their TVs or computers on stand by twenty four hours a day.
Of course you can always make some more drastic changes which could see your energy bills being slash. For example, solar panels are becoming quite popular as an increasing number of people have them fitted to their homes in a bid to cut back on energy costs. Solar panels can make quite a difference to your energy bills, particularly during the summer months. There are many other renewable energy sources that can be utilised to reduce your domestic energy consumption such as ground source heat pumps too.
If you’re considering investing in an renewable energy source for your own home then you may be interested to know that the government is able to provide grants to help you cover the costs. Find out if you’re eligible for a grant and save money on your utility bills.
Environmental Issues
All over the world there are issues surrounding the environment. These have slowly started being addressed over the past couple of decades, but, this has been a huge struggle as many people thought issues such as global warming and the greenhouse effect were myths and just would not happen. However, in recent years many natural disasters have shown that the environment has been damaged and as a consequence many people have lost their lives to natural disasters such as hurricanes, flooding and tsunamis.
There are many problems with the environment and most of these can be minimized by everyone taking small steps to cut down on carbon emissions as one of the main pollutants is carbon dioxide and it is produced readily by everyone’s day to day living. Many scientists worry that the damage that has been done up to now is here to stay as it will take many decades to repair it and with the rate of population growth and the projected carbon emissions that even if everyone was to be careful it still would not be enough to protect the environment sufficiently to keep the world a stable place for future generations.
Many governments have produced plans for the next few years of ways to cut down carbon emissions and reduce the damage to the environment, these include more recycling facilities, for example food waste recycling has recently been introduced to the country, this happened just after recycling for many household waste products was introduced. It is useful to have easy recycling facilities as many people just weren’t bothered to take recyclable materials to a recycling plant and just threw them in the bin, however, now that it is more accessible more people recycle and this helps to reduce carbon emissions along with other emissions such as sulphur dioxide which are harmful to the environment.
Petitions
If you are concerned with a particular policy, or there is a matter that you think is insufficiently addressed, then it is possible to try to change this by use of petitions. They work by gathering signatures of people who agree with the motion you are putting forward, and if enough signatures are gathered then things can start to happen.
In recent years the capabilities and possibilities of petitions have been underestimated, most recently in the decision not to privatise Britain’s forests, when the outcome of so many signatures against the measure was totally unexpected.
Petitions can be used in all kinds of circumstances. A number of petitions were used to demonstrate people’s opinions of Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment, and while they had no legal effect as such, the signatures of millions of people represented the people’s moral values against apartheid. Other types of petition do have legal and political influence, such as a petition to stop the closure of a local swimming pool. Chances are that the council would benefit financially from the closure, but the local community would suffer as a whole.
Non-government organisations such as Amnesty International often use petitions in order to support various cases, as they lend a degree of moral authority to the proceedings. While many petitions hold little legal value, they represent the moral values and political inclinations of all that sign them, and as such they can be seen to be representative of people that are not always given a voice in a political sense.
Local Government
The term local government refers to the small part of the government that looks after a smaller area of the state. The United Kingdom is made up of many different constituencies; this means that each area in the United Kingdom is part of a constituency. In each constituency there will be a local representative that is responsible for that area. During the general elections a vote is made for the candidate that the constituency want to represent them, there is generally one candidate per political party, for example, one from the Labour Party, one from the Conservative Party, one from the Liberal Democratic Party etc…
In the United Kingdom there are a total of 433 local government authorities and these are spread across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The English local government system is the most complicated and this is product of many reforms and numerous reorganisations throughout the last few centuries. There are nine regions that England is separated into and these all have their own Governmental offices, the regions are also separated to provide statistical data.
The local government is made up of a parish council, however, most parish councils are in rural areas, but, sometimes the parish is a town, in these cases the parish is called the town council. Similarly parishes are sometimes cities and then will be name the city council. The parishes, town and city councils are responsible for maintaining its local area; this includes the schools of that area, the police forces, hospitals and many other aspects of the area. The country is split down into smaller areas to ensure the entire country is looked after responsibly.
Politics
Politics can be defined as the process by which collective decisions are made by groups of people. This term is administered to the behaviours within civil governments, however, politics are not just used in governments, and they also apply to corporate, academic and religious institutions. Politics are put into place to make and enforce a policy; this is generally done to produce benefit or to make a system fair.
In the United Kingdom a constitutional monarchy makes up the framework of politics. This means that there is a Prime Minister, the Monarch who is the head of state and the head of government. The Prime Ministers has executive power over the UK government. There are two chambers of parliament of which legislative power is settled in; the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
In the UK we have a multi-party system, this means that there are several different political parties that are able to canvas for votes to come to power. From 1920 onwards the competition has been dominated by two political parties, the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. However, in the 2010 general election a coalition government was formed between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrat Party. This coalition was formed because the voters did not make a uniformed decision about who should be in charge of the country. The Prime Minister position was filled with a Conservative Party member and the Deputy Prime Minister slot went to a Liberal Democrat Party member. This type of parliament is also known as a Hung Parliament.
