Back-to-School Toolbox For Students

Written by Mark Family WebWatch | Fave FWW | Subscribe to FWW

It’s that time of year when parents are celebrating and the kids are depressed. Yes: it’s back-to-school season. To help them get off to a great start, I’ve collected some online services meant to help them get and stay organized with their studies.

Note takers
What’s the key to good grades? I’m sure we’d all agree note taking is a critical skill for sure. You may recognize some of these from an earlier post here, but they’re so appropriate to this topic I just couldn’t pass them up.

Notefish – Just make annotations on a Web page and they’ll be there when you return. You can even share with others. It requires an add-on for Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Google Notebook – One I use quite often, this add-on is quick to get to and is flexible to allow me to organize the way I like it. If you’re maxed out on add-ons, then you can still use it, but you’d be losing a bit of the power it provides.

Studicious – more than your average note-taker tool, but this one does the trick, for sure. You can share notes, automatically link note keywords to Wikipedia and Google, you can even store documents and to-dos.

mynoteit – Something that was just suggested to me is this nifty tool. It, too, has a nice batch of features: calendar, notes (duh!), bookmarks, and more.

Office Applications
College is expensive. Can I get an “amen”? Adding software can make the price tag go even higher, so why not try these freebies? The plus side to all of these is that they’re compatible with Microsoft. Can I get another “amen”? 🙂

Ajax13 – create presentations, spreadsheets and drawings. Yep, even word processing is part of the pack. They all look and feel similar to Microsoft applications, thus reducing the learning curve.

ThinkFree – the grandaddy of online apps, this one continues to improve with age. And in case your student has some extra time on his hands (and why not if he’s going to be all the more efficient using these tools?) he can collaborate with other students on documents easily, and store their work on a generous 1GB account.

Zoho – when you visit this site you’ll think Christmas has arrived what with all its offerings: a project management tool, a notebook, a wiki, chat, planner, web conferencing, and a few others. Most are free, but some have the option to upgrade to gain more features.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets – As the name implies, Google has a rather nice free alternative to paying big bucks for Microsoft counterparts. It also has a cool calendar, which is separate tool all its own.

OpenOffice – one of the first ones to go up against Microsoft, you’ll find all the heavy hitters to Word, Powerpoint, Access, and Excel. The difference here is that you can download OpenOffice right to your desktop, which will come in handy for laptop users who can’t find an Internet connection (are there really places without that?). I’ve seen this set of tools used in businesses before so you know they have to be good enough.

Organizers
I think it’s safe to say that behind every good student is a good organizer. Each has their own way of doing things, so one of them is sure to fit your student’s personality and study method.

HipCal
This little hippo has got it all: calendar (group sharing too!), to-do list, address book, and alerts that can be sent to your email inbox or cell phone.

Backpack – just like the name implies, this backpack packs the essentials: notes, lists, writeboard, and reminders, all of which are free. Pay a little something to get the calendar added, if you want. Very easy to use. Add list items in a flash and reorder by drag-and-drop.

30Boxes – no logo on this one, but it only goes to show you that they’re really more about functionality than glitz. You login to a full-size calendar that fills your screen. But what I also like about this service is its to-do feature. You can quickly add to your lists and add tags to them while you’re typing. This means that you can save yourself a few clicks AND find your stuff easily in the future.

Kiko – Keeping track of class schedules and homework is easy to do with this little niche on the Web. Powerful features make it easy to add events, notes to those events, reminders, labels, contacts to attend, and lots more. Did I say contacts? Yes, as a matter of fact I did, which means you can store contacts for easy storage. Rolling over an event gives you a quick pop-up showing you the important details of that even. Wrong date? No problem, just drag the event to the right day. Yes, there’s group sharing, too, for those study groups.

Organized Home Printable planners – not much for keeping your schedule online? No worries because printing out your schedule still has a purpose. This site offers you a variety of pre-made planners for easy download and printing.

Bonuses
FutureMe – No matter how organized your student is or will become, there’s certainly going to be a time when they forget something. This service can help them plan ahead and have an email sent to them as a reminder for whatever they need to be reminded about. Just enter your name, email and message. Then enter the time you want to receive the email, and boom! – you’re reminded when the time strikes.

Spambox – who doesn’t hate spam — the email variety? Well, students don’t need to sift through all the junk in their email inbox, so to help them keep their junk to a minimum, this service helps protect their true email address by providing them (for free) a temporary address that sends messages to the email of their choice.

Diigo – a bookmarking service with punch! Not only can you save your bookmarks, you can also add notations to any Web page you visit. When you return, they’ll be there waiting for you. But there’s more. You can share your bookmarks with others, tag them for easy retrieval, and even save copied content from the Web pages that you’ve viewed all within your account.

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