Category — College Productivity

If you are looking to find cheap books dont worry there are a handful of sites you can navigate to help curb your reading and research dollar issues.

BookSwim.com
BookSwim remedies the high cost of purchasing books with a Book Rental Service that allows unlimited rentals each month on a monthly subscription plan. Like a revolving door of books, subscribers send back a few at a time and are promptly mailed more from their online Rental Pool .

Amazon.com
Amazon has a huge collection of used books that will curb your monthly Barnes and Noble spending habits.

Half.com
Half.com an ebay affiliate often has a bundle of cheap books just waiting to get snatched up.

A recent Newsweek article asks an important question. How much longer will we live off our parents beef?

As you begin to exit grad school you may have assumed all your daily living costs, or your parents may still be footing the bill. Either way you should take a look at how to trim your finances and curb your debt. Especially if you are headed to rent heavy areas like the east coast where Rent Costs can eat up 80% of your salary. Ouch.

Have you ever used Web Based Services to increase productivity and collaboration, well one great service that does a great job of this is Acrobat.com

During school projects it can be used to share files,communicate with Voice,Chat, and do advanced word processing without worrying about formatting.

Here is a description from Adobe on their new online platform:
Buzzword – an online word processor, allows us to write together and have it print exactly as it shows on the browser. One can add comments inline and drag and drop images to precise spots in the document! ConnectPro – a virtual meeting tool, allows us to conduct impromptu meetings and have synchronous VOIP/telephonic conversations. Screen sharing helps in maintaining reference to the context while video chat allows for an implicit transfer of more contextual cues. Share enables document sharing using URLs, thereby eliminating the numerous back and forth emails. No more scattered information as all of these services are accessible from one seamless account id!

Here are some great neccesities in the whole Web 2.0 space:
common virtual space
open access to services and data
user-defined structure and tools
simple applications and services

The web can be a great place for Grad School classrooms,students and organizations to converge for learning,sharing, and educational development inside and outside the classroom.

Do you have any favorite apps that you would like to share post them in the comments.

I rely on Google for just about everything. I was horrified when i read this article on a tech news website i frequent.

Nick Saber isn’t happy now. Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn’t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn’t get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:

Sorry, your account has been disabled

That’s it.

So remember to keep backups for everything whether online or offline or maybe both otherwise you could be out in the cold fighting for your account, and having no access to important contact information and data that you badly need.

I still remember when I was stuck out on the cold when I couldnt access my AIM for a few weeks.

My professors often sent out large PDF readings for us to read/study for our courses. Enter BookletCreator. Not only does it help you organize your PDF into a booklet, it also saves paper! Just upload your file, and get it back in a book-like format. See some screenshots at MakeUseOf.

Like I’ve said before, scheduling those group projects can be a pain in the butt. Timebridge takes some of the guess work out of this by letting people suggest times to meet up according to your schedule. I would probably use this app, but not put my entire REAL schedule…just the school related one. My group mates don’t need to know where I am 24/7, but it does make it easy to see who has what class when and such. Visit Timebridge here.

Scribd is a website that allows you to upload and post documents on the internet, and allows them to be viewed in their viewer iPaper.

One of the bonuses of Scribd is that it offers unlimited storage and supports all major document formats (pdfs, docs, excel, etc). The documents can be embedded in any website, and can also be shown to other Scribd users so you can receive feedback.

Check it out here.

Website Empressr allows you to create a presentation on the web that can be embedded in your blog, webpage, or anywhere else you want it to be really. Right now Empressr is in its beta form, registration and the hosting of your presentation is currently free. This is a good alternative to paying for Powerpoint, and since it is loaded on the web, you’ll never have one of those embarrassing “Why won’t my presentation load on the classroom computer?” moments. Learn a little bit more about Empressr above.

Downloadable Firefox toolbar 8aweek tracks your wasted hours on the computer and tells you where you spent them. I always have trouble taking a "few minutes" to surf the net while I’m writing, and then a few minutes turn into an hour…you know the drill. Procrastination is not my friend! Once you figure what websites you are wasting your time on, you can block them with the toolbar, and set a timer where you can only spend a set amount of time on that particular site.

Source: MakeUseOf