Communiversity is a new site which allows students of various colleges to post pictures and comments on their own school. Though opinions on the site can vary greatly and maybe leave visitors more confused than informed, this new service is an interesting and creative way to find out a little more about your next potential college.
College.SparkNotes and Collegeboard are two other sites to visit if you're researching new places to get those degrees. These sites are great sources of concrete information like tuition estimates, average SAT scores of attending students, majors offered, etc, and SparkNotes even conducts surveys on the general experience. But the sites still lack in information on the real student experience.
That's why Communiversity exists. Every school's page is managed entirely by students, so future undergrads get the info right from the horses mouthes. The site also allows students to upload pictures, so it's likely visitors will see portions of the campus less advertised. Though the new site is still small relative to its potential, news of Communiversity is spreading fast.
I was fortunate enough to see David Pogue's keynote on the opening day of the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Conference this Monday in Hershey, PA. PETE&C is a state-wide conference aimed at bringing together school technology directors, teachers, principals, IT professionals, and vendors to advance the state of technology in education.
While listening to Pogue briefly touch on many emerging trends and technologies like VoIP, improved text-to-speech, "Web 2.0" sites, and ubiquitous wireless, it became clear from the audience gasps and collective jaw-dropping that educators are not keeping up with technology changes. Demonstrations of technologies that have been around for more than two years were causing the educators to feverishly put pen to paper so they can take things like Skype back to their schools to use in the curriculum.
Mozilla is jumping on the 'back to school' bandwagon to ensure that students get the most out of their online experience with a new "Firefox Campus Edition" download.
Announced last week, the Campus Edition of Firefox comes bundled with a few extras including:
FoxyTunes - allows you to control almost all media players, find videos, CD covers, videos, band bios all within Firefox.
StumbleUpon - browse the web and find websites, videos, images all based on your interests.
Zotero - collects, manages and cites research sources from within Firefox.
All these tools help students with productivity and mostly allow them to engage more with their favorite web browser. Check out the Firefox Campus Edition download here, and get set to get those computers ready. And hey, if you are already in school, download away and get on with the rest of your semester with Mozilla's help.
As kids the world around get ready for "that time of year" and the sense of dread excitement builds, we find ourselves looking for ways to make this school year a little easier than the one before it. Being nerds, we turn to software. This year, Download Squad has hand-picked some promising shareware/freeware tools for that should come just as handy as the mandatory two boxes of tissues required by the school of each student.
The first is a crossword-puzzle generator for Mac and Windows called Crossword Forge. Now, crossword makers have been around for a while, but this one gets an A+. It does crosswords and word searches (complete with accidental profanity filter--a must) and a spelling checker. It will even spit out a Flash-drive online puzzle so your students or kids can go the paperless route.
It's back to school time, and you know what that means. You've got a good excuse to try out some new software for your PDA.
Windows Mobile devices include some great tools for students, including a basic calculator, calendar, and mobile versions of Word and Excel. But if you want to get the most out of your PDA on campus, you'll probably want to check out some more advanced tools for text entry, note taking, and organization.
Let's start by taking a look at some applications designed with students in mind.
The Dog Ate It
Windows Mobile PDAs and phones include a basic calendar for jotting down appointments. But it's not much use if you need to view a week's worth of information at a glance. For day to day use, we're big fans of Pocket Informant. But for students, The Dog Ate It offers a great calendar with a few extra features.
First of all, you can enter a list of classes and times and they'll automatically be added to your calendar. For each class you can specify your instructor's name, contact info, and required textbooks.
The Dog Ate It also lets you keep track of your grades and homework assignments. There's a free trial available, but a full version will cost you $15. There's also a desktop version of the software which can be synchronized with your PDA.
With some students already in school, and some preparing to enter yet another journey into a new semester, let DLS make your studies that much more organized with a few free desktop and web applications that will make your school life that much more enjoyable.
From free document creation applications, online to-do's and organization applications, users are faced with a decision, go for the costly desktop versions and upgrade every few years, or stay ahead of the curve with free web based applications that are constantly updating with new growing feature sets. The choice has never been easier.
This DLS special feature lists out current tools that are floating around the web as highly competitive alternatives for both students and professionals.
Remember the Trapper Keeper? That faithful notebook saw many a gen-Xer through his or her awkward teen years. Flash forward to today, and so much classwork is done online that the Trapper Keeper has nearly gone the way of the sulfur tipped match.
We don't know why they're accusing high-school students of drinking, but it's a neat service and worth a look if you're headed back to campus this fall.
Applying for college or graduate school can be a nerve-wracking experience. You spend all this time and money filling out your application and financial aid forms and send them off to begin the waiting game, only to spend that time wondering if there's some other amazing school you forgot to apply to.
Campus Explorer makes it a lot easier to research colleges and universities. Want to go to school in Chicago? Just enter a city, region, or zip code, and Campus Explorer will spit out a list of universities with basic information like the average annual tuition. You can also search by degree type or field of study.
Want to find out more about a particular institution? Click on a university to read an overview from Wikipedia, a "mission statement," and statistics about part time and full time enrollment, how many students live on or off campus, how many receive financial aid, the breakdown of male to female students. You can also see the application fee, acceptance rate, and what scores the institution expects on standardized tests.
Oh yeah, there's information about courses of study as well.
You can still get much more detailed information for most colleges and universities by visiting their homepages directly. But Campus Explorer is a great place to start your college search, as it gives you most of the information you need all in one place.
The only thing that would make the site better is a space for users to leave comments about various schools. This would probably have to be a highly moderated feature in order to keep trolls from bashing rival schools. But it'd be nice to get a sense of what actual students think .
There are many task-list applications out there, but not many with the impressive feature set that Toodledo has. Its deceptive simplicity of task entry using inline editing via AJAX makes for lightning fast tasking and better productivity, while providing integration with Google Calendar, Google Personal Homepage, Firefox, and IMified.
One of the best features of Toodledo is the distinction between folders (for projects) and contexts (the many hats you wear). Contexts allows only your current frame of mind for work, and doesn't show you your home tasks. This keeps the honey-do list away from your work list, so you aren't thinking about that darn swing-set you have to put up in the middle of working on Mr. The-man's presentation.
If that isn't enough to make you jump over and check it out, they also have a printable tasklist, email alerts for your top tasks (called a hotlist), but also the ability to import/export tasks to iCal, Palm OS, XML, CSV, and text. Task lists can be published to the web if you want to share your inner-workings with the world, and with a non-free but reasonable price ($14.95/year) you can have others edit and append to your task list among other things. Toodledo offers a free 7-day trial of their pro account for your enjoyment.
Wait, there's even more. There is a developer API, it fully supports GTD, tags, history and stats, a scheduler, some goal-setting functions, RSS support, SMS support, WAP support and more. Tasks can be imported from Outlook, Apple iCal, and Remember The Milk. Seldom is there such a complete feature set in a free application. It is a major time-saver for the quick-and-dirty type task person who doesn't want to spend 8 years filling out a task form. If you don't have a solid task-list manager yet, this is the ticket.
There are few more entertaining ways to pass the time on a flight than to pull out your copy of Skymall and begin inscribing funny quotations and thought balloons above the heads of the models hawking their wears. StoryTop takes that concept and makes it web based.
StoryTop is a little JavaScript tool that lets you include elements from their library of people, animal, and background clipart and then assign text and comments to the action taking place. The site is very easy to use and very kid and teacher friendly. Drag elements onto the canvas to start manipulating them, drag them back into the library to delete them. You can even create stories that develop over multiple pages. Editing and changing the size of the elements is very easy and has virtually no learning curve.
The example of the left took just thirty seconds to build.
No signup is required but you can create an account to save your stories and share them with friends or groups.
Getting and staying organized in any school level can be a little difficult, now there is a free online application that could help.
mySchoolog is an online application that students can easily use to track and organize their school lives. Users start off by entering lessons they take and organizing them into categories, and make weekly schedules. Schedules can be made through a drag and drop lesson planner with times associated for each class to keep them organized. Of course it has a to-do area where appointments, homework and anything else can be added, and reminders set to be sent out by email or sms. Lesson notes can be entered online, searched, exported and printed so they can be kept and used when required. 20GB of File storage is available for documents, audio or images, and can be categorized by lesson.
But really, is there any time to organize yourself while in school? Sometimes not, so hopefully this might help a bit.
NoteCentric is a web based note taking application, that allows for easy storage, and sharing of class notes. One thing that students aren't is organized. You know it's true. There are too many school functions (parties) going on, that it's sometimes hard to keep track of, and organize your notes. NoteCentric requires registration for access. Once you're in, Adding classes and notes is a breeze. Friends can be invited to the specific notes you are writing for sharing and collaboration purposes, which is a very handy feature. RSS feeds are available for each note that is taken, allowing for easy sharing, and reading with any feed reader. The search functionality built into NoteCentric was not working in the demo version. If you could use a little more organization in your scholarly endeavors, try out the simplistic NoteCentric.
Many people are now heading back to school, for the fall semester. A new service aims to make the learning experience a socially-sharable one. NoteMesh is a collaborative wiki-like way for students to share their class notes, helping other students who missed a day, are out "sick" or help for exams and term-papers. Finally the collective knowledge of the masses is put to good use in the classroom. I could see online-only students benefiting from the service as well, since the service caters to students who are online anyway. One thing I don't like about the service is that you can't use it if you don't have and use your school's provided email account. I understandd the need for authentication, but they can't possibly verify that each person is a part of a certain class anyway, so what's the point?
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but for those readers that are in school, the new semester is coming up fast. So grab a hold of your laptop and check out stu.dicio.us.
stu.dicio.us has the potential to become a students dream. It's an online note taking site. Students can publicly save notes and manage class schedules. It's a dream to use. No thinking required, which comes in handy after late nights of studying or partying.
Schedules are easily entered, tracking class name, day, time, school, and professor. You can also input to-dos, which make it easy to remember things that you have to do for the day. The Notes section in stu.dicio.us is pretty powerful. Users can search for notes in the database based on their particular subject or class. Making it extremely useful if you forgot or missed something from a lecture. Notes in the system can be exported in HTML or DOC formats for viewing, storing and printing.
When more people sign up for stu.dicio.us and use it more to store notes, I can see this as an extremely useful and beneficial online tool for students worldwide.
It's back to school time, and you know what that means. You've got a good excuse to try out some new software for your PDA. 
NoteCentric 
