The links below are sites that offer free, streaming “white noise.” You will need to experiment and click around a little on the sites to see how they work. A couple of them are designed to help you sleep, but I tried them and found that they seemed to drown out the office noise around me. You ay also want to share these with your students.
Recently, a study (University of Wales Institute in Cardiff, United Kingdom) demonstrated that, unlike what they actually practice, students probably do better at memorization tasks if they do not listen to music while studying. The full article may be found here: http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/27/music-may-harm-your-studying-study-says/.
If you are overwhelmed by ambient noise, whether grading or doing office work, there are online programs that offer “white noise” to help you concentrate
Published: Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 by y.vannier