As the Internet continues to play an increasingly integral role in our lives, there are already tools developed that are freely available to students.
These tools can be extremely useful in organizing daily activities, writing papers, managing your online social life, etc. Here is an attempt to bring you the top five most useful Web-based tools for students and why they are better than the competition.
5. Mynoteit.com is a really interesting concept that can be extremely useful. You can also access your notes from your mobile phone, store word files or scanned images and create class groups so you can easily share notes with other members of your group.
Creating an account with Mynoteit.com is free and allows you to store all of your notes online.
4. The next tool on the list is essential to writing those long and painstaking research papers. Bibme.org makes creating a bibliography for multiple sources an easy task.
Simply go to the homepage and type in the ISBN number, author or book title. In seconds, you can create a perfect MLA, APA, Chicago or Turabian style bibliography.
3. One of the most essential aspects of running a student group is being organized and keeping everyone in the loop. The best tool to accomplish this task is available on Backpackit.com which allows you to keep all of your information organized and coherent while keeping everyone informed. Though it has a simple interface, Backpackit.com allows you to stay extremely organized. You can set Backpackit.com to send you e-mail or text messages in order to remind you of upcoming test dates, appointments and assignment due dates. Backpackit.com also allows you to create to-do lists and collaborate with a group for projects.
2. At the No. 2 spot is another extremely useful and free Web-based research tool. The URL for the site is http://www.citeulike.org, and its purpose is to help you store, organize and share scholarly papers that you are reading. For instance, if you come across a paper you like, with one click you can add it to your Citeulike.com personal library. This library not only stores the article but also creates a citation for it, so that if you choose to use it in your paper, you already have a citation handy. With research being conducted more readily on the Internet these days, using Citeulike.com makes it easy to keep track of all of your research online.
1. The most essential and often most overlooked Web tool is a backup of all of your important files. You’ve spent years collecting digital documents and writing papers, and it would certainly be a shame if a hard-drive failure caused you to lose everything you worked so hard for. This is where the a-drive service comes in. The free a-drive basic plan offers you 50 GB of online storage that is secure, and you can store all of your most important files. Most students don’t realize the importance of backing up their files until it is too late, and for this reason a-drive is the most important Web-based service that should be utilized.
Don’t be afraid to fire up your favorite browser and search around to see what you can find. You never know, but you just might come across something useful.
Horowitz is a member of the class of 2012.
