Here are a few tools we wish we'd had when we were still dorm-dwelling nobodies. Forward these links on to the collegiate folks in your life, and add your own favorites to the list. Together, we can rid the world of dropped classes and "ramen starvation."

BigWords is a site and iPhone app that source a slew of online retailers to get students the cheapest possible textbooks, taking the legwork out of online comparison shopping. BigWords also claims to optimize prices by looking for multi-item specials, shipping discounts, coupons, and other exceptional deals. Students (or textbook-shopping parents and guardians) can also share "bookbags" with others, and the site claims an average $225 savings on multi-item orders.

Study Socially

When students can use Facebook Connect to sign into an app designed to optimize study time, you know the world has changed. StudyBlue takes advantage of your virtual Rolodex to help you share notes, flashcards, and other study tools. Notes can be recorded as text or as multimedia content - that means you can share audio and video with your class-skipping colleagues. If only it counted as attendance, no? Best of all, the StudyBlue team has announced mobile capabilities for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Another app we like in this space is Quizlet, an online flashcard and quizzing resource that also uses Facebook Connect.

Rent and Return Textbooks

BookRenter soothes the eternal frustration of spending a triple-digit amount on a textbook you'll use for four months and then resell to your college's bookstore for a princely ten bucks. Renters register and have access to the company's catalog of millions of titles. Prices are refreshingly reasonable; shipping options and rental periods are flexible; and return shipping is free.

Situate Yourself

DesignYourDorm is a new-this-year app that allows college students to design their dorm room interiors in 3D and purchase their decor selections online. Not only can students often choose their exact room dimensions and layout from the DYD database and collaborate with dormmates to get rooms furnished based on thorough checklists; parents can also send care packages from a gallery that calls to mind an edible version of 1800Flowers.

Mobilize Your Textbooks

Coursesmart, a leader in the e-textbook game, just released an iPhone app, which we reviewed recently. Their catalog so far includes 7,000 ebooks, and their software works for both Macs and PCs. The desktop apps also allow students to take notes while reading, and both desktop and mobile apps have built-in search function.

Research on the Fly

The mobile version of Wikipedia has long been available for on-the-go consumption, but did you know Wikipedia also just released an official iPhone app, which we recently reviewed? You can also try iPhone apps such as Wapedia, Wikiamo, or Wikipanion.

Get Yourself and Your Group On-Task

Remember the Milk is one app we like for individual or group tasks. This full-featured program allows users to keep track of tasks through RSS feeds, share tasks via email, add tasks via email or SMS, and even assign tasks a specific location. There's an iPhone app, and RTM plays nicely with Gmail, Twitter, and Google Calendar, as well.

Hit 'Em With Your Best Shot

Finally, after all your hard work and study, you'll need to create a certain number of papers, presentations, projects, and perhaps even a website or two during your time in school this year. We have a whole list of code-free website creation tools that range from easy to use to ridiculously easy to use, and with a little finessing, they'll definitely impress a professor or two. For creating multimedia presentations, we like Empressr, Drop.io, and SlideShare, all of which have different social sharing/embedding and multimedia capabilities.

Back to Basics

For staying organized, keeping in touch, taking notes, and generally keeping yourself sane, your old friends are more useful now than ever. And by "old friends," we mean those apps you already use so much you don't even realize they're apps anymore. Try seeing Facebook, Google Docs, Google Notebook, Gmail, Twitter, and Skype as study and communication tools rather than just time-wasters, and you'll notice that you can get a lot done on your favorite sites.

So, what apps are you using to get organized, get smart, get together, or just get it right this year? Let us know in the comments!

Universities such as Duke, Stanford, MIT, and the University of California, among others, already post videos online both to YouTube and in iTunes U, a section of iTunes featuring audio and video podcasts. However, what UNSW is doing is unique - they're providing college credit to those watching the YouTube recordings.

YouTube U

While there's really little difference between physically showing up in a classroom to sit and listen to a lecture and viewing a video of the same lecture, few universities have allowed this type of unstructured remote learning to count as college credit for those who are not already enrolled in the university. Instead, colleges that support distance learning initiatives usually require students to apply for admission and pay tuition, just as any other student attending classes on campus would have to.

The fact that Buckland is not charging the high school students who are remotely attending his courses but is still giving them college credit is what makes what he's doing so different...and perhaps groundbreaking.

The process of UNSW's "YouTube education" is not entirely without structure, though. Only a limited number of high school students are chosen each year for this opportunity. Those who wish to attend must submit a statement as well as an academic reference from a teacher. In other words, receiving college credit for watching the videos isn't something available to anyone, anywhere - there is still a selection process that is adhered to.

Higher Learning or Marketing Campaign?

Colleges who want to follow in UNSW's footsteps could easily take this idea and turn it into a recruiting or marketing campaign for their university. By offering high school students transferable college credits valid at their particular institution, they could encourage the brightest young students to consider their university over others long before it came time to fill out the admissions packet.

No matter what reason a college may have for pursuing this type of remote learning, giving students the chance to work ahead - and at no additional expense to them - is an idea that hopefully spreads to other institutions worldwide.

Half the students (32 of 64) skipped the class and listened to the podcast only. The other half attended in person, where they also received a printed handout. A week later, the students were tested on the material.

Podcast Listeners Did Better

The students who downloaded the podcast alone averaged a C (71 out of 100) but those who attended class averaged a D. And those who listened to the podcast and took notes did even better - their average was 77.

Before university classrooms empty out, it's important to note that this is only preliminary research. McKinney's study involved only a single lecture. Also, motivation may have come into play as well. Her experiment didn't count for class credit, so students were encouraged to participate with iTunes gift cards. The high scorer from each group was awarded a $15 gift certificate for use in the online store.

McKinney now plans to further study podcasts in the classroom over the course of an entire semester, instead of just one class. She wonders if students might find podcasts more useful early on in a class, when the material is still new. Still, McKinney is a big believer in the power of technology and its impact on education. "I do think it's a tool," she says. "I think that these kids are programmed differently than kids 20 years ago."

Zotero also announced a new online component to its plugin, which, in conjunction with the new synchronization features, automatically creates an online backup of your database on Zotero.org.

Zotero, which we highlighted as one of the top application for students last year, features an extensive set of tools for creating and managing bibliographies. While it started out as a very basic tool, its feature set is now up to par with that of other commercial bibliography tools like EndNote or RefWorks.

Zotero integrates tightly with Firefox 3 and allows you to quickly save articles and easily create bibliographies for your papers and articles from most of the major free and for-pay research databases and online newspapers.

The synchronization feature works exactly as advertised and allows you to keep your bibliographies in sync, even if you work on different machines. If you have access to a WebDAV enabled server, Zotero can also sync your attachments automatically.

Needs Firefox 3

Whenever Zotero recognizes that you are surfing a supported site like Google Books, Amazon, YouTube, the New York Times, or JSTOR, it will simply add an icon to your Firefox address bar that allows you to save the bibliographic entry for that page or article with one click. Zotero will automatically extract the bibliographical information for you and it can even create a full-text archive of your saved documents.

Social Networking

Zotero.org now also includes a number of social networking features. You can, for example, search for other users by name, email, affiliation, or discipline. While this feature is still very new, and hence only has a few users so far, this could turn out to be a real boon for academic researchers (and others) who could use this to share their bibliographic databases with colleagues. In the future, Zotero plans to extend this with a Twitter-like stream of your friends' research activity.

Zotero also integrates with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice (though the 1.5b1 version is not compatible with these plugins yet!), and supports over 1,100 different styles, as well as the ability to create your own. You can also just drag and drop entries from Firefox to any other document and it will create a bibliographic entry for you on the fly.

Verdict

Zotero was already one of the best tools for managing large bibliographies. These updates make it even better and allow it to compete directly with its commercial brethren. The new synchronization feature allows you to work on different machines, without having to constantly save and update your database, something that used to give RefWorks (which is essentially an online tool) the upper hand.

Note: While the new sync feature worked great for us, Zotero rightly recommends that you back up your database before you update to version 1.5b1.

Google experimented with the first official Google Doodle, a series of revisions that played out a story of "alien intrigue" over the course of a week in May 2000.

Bastille Day 2000 marks the first appearance of the current Google Doodler, Dennis Hwang. Also worthy of note is the fact that Google used to provide some reference copy for the tweak, a motif that has since faded from the tradition.

In 2001, Google took the opportunity to recognize 100 years of the Nobel Prize. The doodle replaces one of the "O"s with the sought after medallion each Prize winner receives.

In 2002, Scott Adams took a turn at providing a doodle, doing away with the Google altogether and replacing it with characters from Dilbert. The pointy-haired boss provides his usual insightful direction.

Google Doodles have always had a soft spot for artists. (Which only makes sense, given that each doodle is a work of art in its own right.) Because of that, you'll see a number of famous artists appearing in our favorites. The first to make the list? A doodle from 2002 where Picasso-inspired figures poke their heads through the Google logo.

Obtuse references have also become one of the mainstays of the doodles. And that makes St. George's Day easily one of our favorites, not only for the artwork but for the choice of subject matter.

Pop artist Andy Warhol inspired a colorful Google Doodle in 2002. The doodle holds the distinction of being the only doodle so far to include multiple logos in a single doodle - a nod to Warhol's use of repeated popular imagery with varying color treatments. Being in front of millions of Google searchers definitely extends his "15 minutes of fame," and it lands him on our list of favorites as well.

Science achievements always appeal to the "geeky" and technical types, especially when they offer some interesting visual opportunities. The celebration of the 50th anniversary of understanding DNA took some liberties with the letter forms to represent the double helix in Google's colors.

There's no greater inspiration for scientific pursuits than Albert Einstein. So this doodle was easily a shoe-in for our favorites. Of note, the incorporation of Einstein's most famous formula into the artwork.

MC Escher is another artist whose work has inspired hours of contemplation. Staring at his interpretations of optical illusions still continue to delight - and confuse - fans to this day. Google picks one of his most famous works, Drawing Hands, to round out the "O"s.

The Masters inspire masterful doodles - if you can even classify this nod to Michelangelo as a "doodle." It makes our favorites for the tasteful use of nudity on a page that always has to be "safe for work."

Combining technology, artistic talent, and obtuse references is arguably the Google Doodle trifecta. That's why we like doodle for the birthday of Gaston Julia, the mathematician who devised the Julia set equations for fractals. These graphical representations, popularized by Mandelbrot, retain their resolution no matter how much you magnify them, making them a natural for the site that allows us to find minute details on the Web.

Sporting events - especially those that impact the whole world like the Olympics - often garnered a few Google Doodles over the course of the Games. The 2004 Summer Games series - highlighting the events held in the birthplace of the Olympics, Athens, Greece - was especially compelling.

One of the doodles that Hwang mentions as memorable is the Venus transit of 2004, which only happens once every 122 years. The idea for the doodle was submitted by a French astronomer. We're happy he made the suggestion, because It's one of our favorite doodles.

Not to be outdone by Michelangelo, the Da Vinci doodle of 2005 - celebrating the anniversary of Leonardo's birth - incorporates a number of the famous renaissance man's sketches into the Google logo. The wing on the "L" is an especially nice - if subtle - touch.

Google's initial success came from taking a different approach to solving a common problem. And that's what makes Frank Lloyd Wright - an architect who took a different approach to his craft - such a fitting tribute. The doodle features some of Wright's most famous buildings, with a repainted Falling Water replacing the "L" and "E."

It's hard not to pick every single artist that Google picks, because each doodle does a great job of representing the works in small form. Van Gogh was an easy - and obvious - choice for one of our favorites with Google's rendition of Starry Night.

Easily my personal favorite is the most visually illegible Google Doodle ever released: Louis Braille's birthday which appeared in 2006. The doodle serves as a gentle reminder that not everyone "sees" the Web in the same way.

Another recurring theme in the doodles is the nod to Earth Day. The 2006 rendering of the Google logo features renewable energy resources - like solar and wind energy. This doodle was a favorite of ours for its creative - and informative - doodling, reminding us all of our responsibility to the earth.

One of the first doodles to downplay the logo in favor of the artwork it's referencing is a tribute to Edvard Munch in 2006. The doodle, which features his most famous work The Scream, is striking, even if the initial "G" is almost imperceptible. Like so many artists before him, we're adding Munch to our list of favorites.

Earth Day 2007 made the favorite doodle list, as well. Unfortunately, there isn't much left of that Google iceberg below the water and that serves as a chilling reminder of the effects of global warming on the planet.

Space exploration got another nod in 2007 as the doodle captured the 50th anniversary of the first manmade earth-orbiting satellite in space, Sputnik. Humans using technology to explore the unknown seems to be a perfect theme for a company like Google - and an obvious addition to our favorites.

Google has made it a habit of recognizing its own birthday with a doodle. So we would be remiss if we did not include one of those examples in our favorites. The 10th birthday doodle in 2008 seemed the most appropriate choice, especially given its retro look resurrecting the original Google for old times' sake.

We've touched upon a number of obtuse references. What about an obtuse representation of the logo? The doodle honoring modernist Marc Chagall in 2008 makes it difficult to even discern the "Google," but it's one of our favorites, nonetheless.

One of the most momentous occasions in United States history, the 2008 US Presidential election, resulted in a doodle that hid most of the letters from us behind the curtains of voting booths. I wonder who the letters voted for? In any case, we're voting for it as a favorite.

What's a list of favorites without the Large Hadron Collider? Not a complete list, we say. That's why we've been sure to include the 2008 doodle - celebrating the first time they sent particles screaming around the loop of the LHC - as one our favorites.

The final artist to make our list of favorites - Google's celebration of the 110th anniversary of Rene Magritte's birth - has Google taking a backseat to the artist's most famous facade, The Son of Man, with its iconic green apple.

We're going to wedge one last space-oriented doodle into our favorites. And nothing seems more appropriate than the doodle celebrating the 50th anniversary of NASA, the organization behind the US space program.

It seemed a shame to close out our list without a representative from 2009, so we've also included the New Year doodle, a whimsical representation of the jungle that is the growing Google ecosystem.

Inspired?

So there you have it. Thirty of our favorite Google Doodles.

As you can see, a number of our favorites have centered on artists and accomplishments, making these doodles the perfect complement for the Doodle 4 Google contest. Hopefully, they've provided some much needed inspiration for the students who will be participating in that program.

Need even more inspiration? You might want to take the opportunity to review Google's complete collection of holiday doodles. Or it might help to look over the shoulder of the official Google Doodler.

Now, it's your turn to doodle - or more appropriately, your kid's turn. If grade school age students want the chance to have their artwork in front of millions of searchers, they'll need to convince their schools to let them get to doodling about "What I wish for the world."

At the very least, the participants are sure to do better than the original Google logo, Backrub.

We had always heard, anecdotally, that the only reason teens today would even bother signing up for an email account was so they could register with social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. However, 36% of those surveyed said they use email alerts to stay on top of what's happening on the social networks. In other words, they don't just create emails to sign up - the emails actually become a part of how they interact with the networks they join.

When it came time to pick their email provider, Gmail was the clear favorite. Nearly one-third (32%) of college students choose Gmail, while 19% use Yahoo, 18% use MSN/Hotmail and about 17% use their school email.

How Often They Check the Inbox

Students also regularly check their email inboxes. More than two-thirds of students say they check email at least once per day, and 55% of those check more than 3 times per day. This is especially interesting when you compare this data to that that came out of the Pew Internet Project (PDF) only a few months ago. In that study, Pew found that half of corporate employees checked their email constantly, while only 32% of those who work in small businesses did.

Comparing those numbers with the data on the students seems to imply that the only people who become email-obsessed are those for whom email is the major, and sometimes only, form of communication. That's definitely the case in big corporations where the people you need to speak to are buildings, cities, states, or even half a world away. For everyone else, there are other alternatives. In small businesses, for example, there are probably more chances to have face-to-face time. For the students there are social networks and, of course, text messaging.

Mobile Communications

Only 12% of students currently check email on their mobile, but eROI predicts that number will increase quickly, especially given the recent explosion of smartphones on the market. In the meantime, though, it's text messaging that remains supreme with 37% selecting that as their preferred method of communication. Email is second at 26% followed by social networking IM (15%) , IM (11%), and social networking email (11%). We're also surprised to see social networking networking email rated last - we always imagined students using social networks more for communication purposes. Then again, it appears that the survey neglected to ask about Wall posts and profile comments - those are also important ways to communicate. We wonder where they would have fit in.

In the end, the survey finds that students do use email - perhaps even more than we realized - but if you really want to reach them, you should do it via text or IM. For marketers, this means that the easy method of sending out newsletters and coupons to mass email lists may become a thing of the past - only 16% of students read marketing email. Companies will have to come up with new ways to to advertise to this demographic. May we suggest social media? 

According to Tapscott, the existence of Google, Wikipedia, and other online libraries means that rote memorization is no longer a necessary part of education. "Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is," Tapscott told the Times. "Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don't need to know all the dates. It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorize that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google," he said.

He doesn't feel that method of learning is anti-education since the information we must all digest is coming in at lightning speed. "Children are going to have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple times," he continues. "So for them memorizing facts and figures is a waste of time."

For the older generations who grew up having to memorize historical dates and mathematical formulas, the idea that memorization shouldn't be a part of the educational experience is somewhat shocking. Of course you need to know the exact year something happened...don't you? Or is it better to just have a general idea so you can focus on better understanding the context and meaning?

Our Wired Brains

Today's students are growing up in a world where multi-tasking has them completely immersed in digital experiences. They text and surf the net while listening to music and updating their Facebook page. This "continuous partial attention" and its impacts on our brains is a much-discussed topic these days in educational circles. Are we driving distracted or have our brains adapted to the incoming stimuli?

A new book on the subject, "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," states that our exposure to the net is impacting the way our brains form neural pathways. Wiring up our brains like this makes us adept at filtering information, making snap decisions, and fielding the incoming digital debris, but sustained concentration, reading body language, and making offline friends are skills that are fading away.

If our brains are, in fact, becoming rewired, wouldn't it make sense that the way we teach students to learn should adapt, too? Actually, there aren't too many people who think so. Most educators, like Richard Cairns, Headmaster of Brighton College, one of the U.K's top-performing independent schools, believe that core level of knowledge was essential. "It's important that children learn facts. If you have no store of knowledge in your head to draw from, you cannot easily engage in discussions or make informed decisions," he says.

Do you agree?

Paid Version

DeepDyve also released a paid version of its service for $45 a year month, which will also allow you to refine your searches by content type. Other features of the paid version include dynamic clustering, visual clustering, and advanced search.

Verticals

DeepDyve is slowly expanding into more search verticals, but for now, its focus is on life sciences, physical scienes, and patents, though it also indexes a few humanities journals. The service also indexes newspaper and lets you search for Wikipedia articles as well. Overall, DeepDyve's index consists of about 500 million pages.

What's New?

DeepDyve launched with a good amount of hype this morning, but after our initial tests, we have come away somewhat disillusioned. Most users who need to search academic sources can already do so through databases like Academic Search Premier, Lexis-Nexis, PubMed, or Science Direct. These services also typically feature more advanced search functions and often give you direct access to the full text of your sources as well.

Information is Still Behind a Pay Wall

As useful as it can be to be able to search the deep web, most of the articles retrieved by DeepDyve still sit behind paywalls anyway, and you either need to have access to an institutional subscription to access these sources or pay a hefty fee per article.

DeepDyve markets itself as being the first search engine that allows its users to "access a wealth of untapped information that resides on the 'Deep Web'" - and if you forget about Google Scholar and the myriad of subscription databases, then that is surely true. In its current incarnation, however, DeepDyve is mostly an interesting technical experiment.

The SMC is meant to supplement, not replace, the face-to-face interaction that occurs in the classroom. According to Howard, when he tried to introduce new media tools into his first Wi-Fi-equipped classroom, he was surprised by the blank looks on so many of the students' faces when he told them that he expected them to blog and edit the wiki. Since he was so familiar with the power of Web 2.0 tools and was surrounded by people who felt the same, he hadn't realized how many college students didn't actually have experience using these types of 21st century tools. This sparked an idea to build a new social media platform designed specifically for use in an educational setting. And thus, the Social Media Classroom was born.

What's Included

The SMC includes all the familiar social media tools from blogs to RSS to videos and wikis and even microblogging. All are integrated into one seamless environment where the different applications are available from navigational tabs at the top of the page just like any ordinary web site has. Everyone who is a member of a particular instance of the Social Media Classroom will initially see a personalized start page upon login that aggregates their own different posts to the various parts of the site.

The SMC will be available to educators both an installable version for self-hosting and as a hosted version (coming soon) for those less tech-savvy.

The Classroom and The Collaboratory

The project itself has two components called The Classroom and The Collaboratory. The The Collaboratory (or Colab) is simply the web service part of the project which is also made available to anyone, even non-educators. It includes both the downloadable install file and the soon-to-launch hosted service.

The Classroom, on the other hand, is the entire web site available at www.socialmediaclassroom.com which contains, among other things, the curriculum materials. In these materials you'll find all sorts of information about the different types of social media as well as links to various resources across the web.

21st Century Education

Social media and the participatory web have had a greater impact on our world beyond just how we connect and socialize with our friends online. The base concepts surrounding how these interactions take place has influenced a whole new generation of web users who now expect to participate in discussions and not be dictated to...whether online or offline. We've seen this influence occur in the workplace, where millennial employees demand to know "why" they're being asked to do something instead of just doing it. We've also seen it effect the business of marketing as social media users now feel strongly that brands (companies) should be listening and conversing with them in an open, transparent matter. So why not bring the social media revolution to the classroom, too? It only makes sense.

Those involved with this project believe that today's students need more than a class where a professor lectures for an hour - that has no hope of engaging their interest. Students need a classroom where learning is a more participatory experience and where the tools they use in their everyday lives - social networking, videos, chat, aren't checked at the door. The Social Media Classroom is an important project to make those types of tools available to educators who might not be as up to speed with the latest technology, while also simplifying the use of those tools through the introduction of a single platform that integrates the best of the Web 2.0 world.

Perhaps the project doesn't introduce anything new that hasn't already been available to the tech-savvy, but its ease-of-use and educational slant make its introduction an impressive and potentially game-changing move for the educational system as we know it.

Members can participate in forums about homework, get quick answers to questions 24 hours a day and access explanations of problems from more than 200 of the most popular text books in 7 subject areas. There are free and paid membership levels at $10 per month and users deemed helpful by others can receive financial rewards like gift certificates.

Limitations

We did have a hard time viewing the videos. The topics are also limited to math and science, but we can see how that makes sense. The highest rated user on the site is one who has never asked a question, only answered thousands of other peoples' questions, and claims to be a monkey.

Joseph Weisenthal at PaidContent, who found the funding announcement first, thinks that study groups are best appreciated for being distracted from studying with social activity. That might be the case for many people, but there is clearly also a lot of interest in getting help to hard math and science problems on Cramster already.

All in all, the service looks great. With $3 million more in the bank, we expect to start seeing Cramster around a lot more. We wrote last month about 10 great apps for college students - we can certainly foresee this one making that list next year.

But given how fast things develop on the web, we thought we would revisit this topic again this year and look at some of the most useful Web 2.0 tools that have the potential to help students do better in school, collaborate with their fellow students, and save them time.

1) Evernote

Evernote is a great note taking application, but that only scratches the surface of what it can do. If you are in a lecture, for example, you can also take a picture of the blackboard with your phone, upload it to the Evernote server, and thanks to Evernote's clever OCR algorithms, even pictures of handwritten notes become instantly searchable.

You can also use it to bookmark web pages and write down your own lecture notes. Best of all, you can use a web app, a Windows or Mac desktop app, or a Windows Mobile and iPhone app, all of which seamlessly synch with each other, so that your notes are always up to date.

2) Google Notebook

The Google Notebook is one of Google's lesser know products, but, thanks to a very well designed Firefox extension, it's a great tool for when you do most of your work in a browser already. If you do some of your research in Google Books and Google Scholar, you can also easily clip excerpts from books and articles into your Google Notebook.

One additional nice feature is that you can invite collaborators to work on a notebook with you. If you are doing a research project in a group, for example, you can easily share your research with your whole group.

Online Office Suites

3) Google and 4) Zoho

Word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation apps are probably the single most often used tool among college students, and while none of the online offerings can yet beat Microsoft Office (which, for students, now only costs around $60 for the Ultimate Edition), the online office suites from Google and Zoho do have some distinct advantages. Office obviously has a lot more features, but not only are both Google Apps and Zoho free, they also allow easier sharing of documents and working on projects collaboratively.

And while the online tools to create presentations are still a bit crude compared to Powerpoint or Keynote, they are both worthy contenders, especially if you don't feel the need to add lots of fancy transitions to your presentations.

If we had to choose between Google's and Zoho's offering, our vote would probably go to Google, as the Google apps have a slightly more organized and professional feel to them, which, in the end, is going to make it easier to focus on the content of your documents.

Bibliography

5) Zotero

The standard tool for doing extensive bibliographies in academia is Endnote. While that is a great tool if you are writing a dissertation, Zotero is a great choice for less extensive research projects - and it's free. Zotero is a Firefox extension, so it is not technically a web app, but in its next version, the developers are promising the ability to synch your bibliographies to a web version of the tool, so that your books and notes will become available everywhere.

For now, Zotero lives in the status bar of Firefox, and it pops up a little icon in your URL bar every time it recognizes a compatible website. Zotero already supports the databases of a huge amount of libraries worldwide, as well as a lot of standard academic databases such as JSTOR, LexisNexis, InfoTrac, PubMed, or ScienceDirect. Besides curating your citations, you can also add notes, tag items, or add attachments (like pdf files of articles). Once you are done, Zotero will create a bibliography for you in most standard formats, including APA, MLA, or Chicago style.

6) EasyBib

If you just need to create a short bibliography, Zotero might be more than you need. EasyBib will just help you to quickly create a bibliography entry in MLA format - a favorite among literature teachers. It can also handle the APA format, but you will have to subscribe to the pro version of EasyBib.

If you really hate figuring out where to put a comma and where to put a semicolon in your APA style bibliography entries, those $7.99 a year for the pro version might just turn out to be a bargain.

Also, if you only need a quick bibliography entry for a book, check out OttoBib, where you just have to enter the ISBN number and it will give you a fully formatted citation.

Staying Organized

7) Google Calendar

There are lots of great online calendars out there, including 30 Boxes and Yahoo's calendar app, but our favorite is the Google Calendar, simply because it is dead easy to use, integrates nicely with GMail, allows for importing and exporting your calendar, and lets you publish a site with your free/busy information with the click of a button, so that your friends know not to bother you while you are cramming for that test.

8) Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk might just be the tool that will keep you on track. And to make things even easier, Remember the Milk also integrates nicely with Google Calendar, so you can manage everything in one place.

Picking the Right Class

9) Rate My Professors

As much as teachers don't like sites like these, Professor Performance and Rate my Professors can be useful tools when you decide which class you want to take. While almost every university makes you rate your professor at the end of the semester, schools never make this data public, so whenever you get a choice between professors, you really have no idea who the better teacher is. We like Rate My Professors a bit more than Professor Performance, simply because its search is a lot easier and the site is a bit more up-to-date. The site now also features a Facebook application.

Keeping in Touch

10) Meebo

As much as your teachers would like to think so, college isn't just about classes, papers, and long ours in the library. If you want to stay in touch with your friends no matter what computer you are on, Meebo is a great universal IM client that lives on the web. It supports, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber, and Google Talk, as well as Meebo's own IM architecture.

What are we missing?

Are there other tools you use in school that we missed here? Let us know in the comments.

Flickr image by laffz4k.

While the legislation will not pass until later this year, a number of schools are already looking at high-tech solutions to proctor online exams for them. The most sophisticated of them is the Securexam Remote Proctor, a small device which features a fingerprint scanner, microphone, and a video camera with a 360 degree view. In order to start an exam, students have to prove their identity by fingerprint and during the exam, while the microphone and video look out for anything suspicious like an unknown voice or movement on the camera.

While Securexam advertises its system as promoting 'integrity and convenience,' the device looks to be anything but convenient. It only works on Windows machines and only with Internet Explorer. Given how popular Apple's computers are with students, this clearly creates problems for a large number of students.

The Remote Proctor is currently being tested by Troy University and costs around $150.

Other programs, like Kryterion's Webassessor, use a somewhat simpler solution based on webcams and biometrics. Webassessor users human proctors that watch up to 50 students each and its software analyses a student's typing style and alerts the proctors if there is a change (like when somebody else has taken over).

Challenge Questions

Axicom Corporation, which is being used by quite a few universities for their online courses, uses personal 'challenge' questions to establish the identity of a student. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, these questions are based on data Axicom gathers from publicly available databases such as criminal files and property records (surely, nobody would want their friends to have to answer a challenge question about whether they were first arrested for arson in 1995 or 1997).

Privacy

All of these systems carry a good number of privacy issues with them, but they are also all relatively expensive. Then, of course, there are questions if cheating on online exams is even a real problem. As the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education points out, most teachers in online courses rely less on major exams and more on projects and group work anyway.

Also, no matter what the technological solution is, chances are that an intrepid cheater will always find a way around this system. Should Congress decide to make systems like this mandatory, however, then we will soon see a whole new market open up and surely other companies will come up with more solutions. The question that remains, however, is if there ever really was a problem in the first place.

What is your take on this? Do you have experience with these systems? Do you think online students need to be monitored more closely?

Photo by Flickr user dcjohn.

Hiring college students to work online is desirable for a number of reasons. Below we discuss some of those reasons and offer a short list of alternatives to working on the dark side online.

We hired our two newest because they are awesome, but here are some general themes underlying why college students in general have some key advantages in the new online economy.

Why Hire College Students?

Schedule flexibility

While some news blogging work is done on a strict schedule, it's also regularly going on at all hours of the day and night. Presumably that's even more the case for online criminal organizations - the labor being hired for can go on at any hour but sometimes there's probably some code-busting that needs to be done in a hurry. College students are more used to working in short bursts, at odd times, than a typical family-aged full timer responsible for a mortgage is.

In the competitive worlds of professional blogging and organized crime, you can either work 24-7 or you can be ready and able to work at just the right times, no matter when those might be.

They have at least some training

New tools have enabled a far wider number of people to work online than ever before. How many of us bloggers would be writing online all day were it not for easy to use CMS software? Similarly, the barriers to entry in coding get lower every day as well. While all of that is wonderful for the world at large, when companies are making hiring decisions, it's nice to have access to some candidates with at least some formal training in the basics and beyond. It's great when people come up from outside academia (it's better than great - it's fantastic), but for day in and day out hiring - college students are very nice to be able to evaluate to fill positions.

High turnover is OK

The new economy of online work is one of high turnover, including quick occupational advancement. Students are often available for a summer, or a single year, and are far happier with such arrangements than the vast majority of people would be.

They are affordable

Let's not kid ourselves - the traditional reason businesses hire college students is that they don't have salary requirements as high as other people. An interesting wrinkle to this part of the story, though, is that the organized criminal groups hiring students are paying them particularly well.

Paul Simmonds, chief information security officer for AstraZeneca, commented on the original story linked to above, highlighted in subsequent coverage on Geek.com:

The root cause of the issue is that the bad guys are better funded than we are ... They have research and development programmes, they are putting people through university, they are calculating return on investment and they have better quality assurance. By comparison, the legitimate security industry is under-funded, under-resourced and constantly on the back foot.

Ouch, that hurts. Insurgent blogs challenging traditional mainstream media cannot say the same thing - we are not in a position to outbid old media in pay. As web-based new media grows more competitive, though, we may find more startups changing their priorities to offer premium pay to hot college workers.

Resume driven

College is a time in a person's life when building up the resume from scratch is a top priority. Right now this is mitigated to some degree by the relatively low profile of even most top players online (low brand recognition) but that's sure to change soon.

While students working legitimately online have a great opportunity to work as hard as possible and greatly strengthen their resumes, it's sad to think about students unwittingly hired by black-hat firms they thought were legitimate security consultancies. They may very well find themselves in a endless downward spiral of code-breaking, long nights of opium smoking and a resume that grows increasingly seedy every day. It might not be all that bad - but we're sure there are some people who would like to avoid such a fate!

Other places you can look for work

Are you a coding or social media savvy college student? Consider looking for tech work in the non-profit world. Sites like Idealist.org, NetSquared or NTEN are good places to find nonprofit tech jobs or introductions to organizations that might be hiring.

They won't pay you as well, their tech will be lagging behind the bleeding edge (that's where you come in?) and you'll likely spend a fair amount of time frustrated watching the for-profit sector eat your lunch - but for many people it's a great arrangement.

Or, if you'd like to get a job blogging - that's a great option too. You missed your chance for now here at RWW - but try checking out the top blogs in any other niche, keep your eyes peeled (or a spliced feed filtered for keywords) and you may very well get a chance soon. The opportunities for students to work online, for good or for evil, are growing in number quickly.