Websites for Students
Student Software and Websites
The following websites offer a variety of capabilities to college students. Many of the software and tools listed below are free and will help you to get your work done more efficiently, collaborate with your peers, and make life easier. We have selected several sites that we found particularly useful and placed them into categories below. Additional sites, and we’ve found many of them, are linked at the bottom of this list under the heading “even more.” Explore them, find new ways to get your work done, and share them with friends.
New sites are being developed all the time. In the spirit of collaboration, please let us know of any new sites you find that you think would be useful for students. cetes.org@gmail.com
| Free Software |
| http://www.openoffice.org/ |
| OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute. |
| http://www.gimp.org |
| GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. |
| http://blog.lorla.com/uncategorized/opensource-software/ |
| An amazing list of free softwares for almost any purpose. |
| Life Hacking |
| http://www.mynoteit.com/ |
| Take and store your notes online. Edit and revise notes with peers. Look-up and define words with your Workspace Utilities. |
| http://www.mygrademate.com/ |
| GradeMate is a free, online course organizer to keep track of your classes, tests, assignments, and everything else. With GradeMate you can upload files, save reminders, and manage your grades all in one place. And its completely free! |
| http://www.notely.net/ |
| Notely is a collection of online tools designed to help all you crazy busy students out there to organise your hectic lives. Whether you are in University, College or High School Notely has the tools to help you get organised and achieve better grades. |
| http://www.toodledo.com/ |
| Having a single place where all your to-dos are permanently stored and easily accessible will allow you to relax, knowing that you will not forget anything. Toodledo hotlist, email and sms reminders, and sortable online to-do list will help you remember to complete tasks on-time. |
| http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ |
| More than just a to-do list manager, Remember the Milk acts like a full-blown calendar, but without the row-and-column display. Separating your life into Personal, Study, and Work tasks (categories you can change), you enter task reminders as you would in any other calendar; you can even create shared calendars for your group projects. |
| http://www.bookfinder.com/ |
| BookFinder.com is an one-stop ecommerce search engine that searches over 150 million books for sale—new, used, rare, out-of-print, and textbooks. They save you time and money by searching every major catalog online, and letting you know which booksellers are offering the best prices and selection. When you find a book you like, you can buy it directly from the original seller; they never charge a markup. |
| http://www.calnewport.com/blog/ |
| Have you ever noticed that some college students make it all look too easy? They never seem to study, yet they earn fantastic grades. They always seem relaxed, yet they keep knocking out head-turning accomplishments. Study Hacks seeks to demystify their success. Based on the philosophy described in the booksHow to Become a Straight-A Student and How to Win at College, this blog presents student-tested strategies for getting more out of the college experience. |
| http://www.hackcollege.com/ |
| HackCollege aims to assist students of their generation “hack” the elderly generation of our professors and school officials. Work smarter, not older. Technology can either help your cause or hinder you from your goal: graduating. |
| http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ |
| More than just a to-do list manager, Remember the Milk acts like a full-blown calendar, but without the row-and-column display. Separating your life into Personal, Study, and Work tasks (categories you can change), you enter task reminders as you would in any other calendar; you can even create shared calendars for your group projects. |
| Communication |
| http://skype.com/ |
| Make calls from your computer — free to other people on Skype and cheap to landlines and cell phones around the world. |
| Instant Messaging |
| http://www.pidgin.im/ |
| Pidgin (formerly named Gaim) is a multi-platform instant messaging client. The software supports many commonly used instant messaging protocols, allowing the user to log into various different services from one application. |
| http://meebo.com/ |
| Meebo, the web messenger that lets you access IM from absolutely anywhere. Meebo supports msn, yahoo, aol/aim, google talk (gtalk), jabber and icq. |
| Backup |
| http://mozy.com/ |
| Mozy is a simple and safe way to back up all the important stuff on your computer. A copy of your data is stored in a secure, remote location for safekeeping, so that in the event of disaster your data is still retrievable. |
| http://www.zotero.org/ |
| Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. |
| File Sharing |
| http://www.filedropper.com/ |
| FileDropper.com was created as a fresh alternative to sites like MegaUpload and RapidShare. Unlike those sites, FileDropper.com do not reel the user in and make them wait for annoying countdown timers. FileDropper.com do not hide the download link with aggressively placed ads. |
| http://sendspace.com/ |
| Sendspace users can send large files to family and friends around the world, completely free - all with a few clicks of the mouse. |
| Digital Casting |
| http://www.hipcast.com/ |
| With Hipcast, it's just as easy to add video to your podcast as it is audio, and most podcast readers, even iTunes, support video files in podcast feeds. |
| http://www.gcast.com/ |
| Your own audio broadcast, where you can easily record voice messages, mix in your favorite music, and share it all for the world to hear. |
| http://gabcast.com/ |
| Gabcast.com is a podcasting and audioblogging platform that offers an easy way to create and distribute audio content. Most people will use a touch-tone telephone to make their recordings but we also provide worldwide access to the service through VoIP. Once you have made a recording and have published it, a newsfeed is immediately and automatically updated to alert subscribers to your channel. |
| http://voicethread.com/ |
| A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world. |
| Media |
| http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ |
| VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. |
| Copyright |
| http://docly.com |
| Docly, the Web 2.0 online word processor with copyright protection, automatically assigns copyrights (both All Rights Reserved and Creative Commons) licenses to all published Docly Documents. Copyright licensing is provided through Numly and the Numly Number (ESN) is automatically embedded into the Docly Document. All Numly Numbers can be tracked in your Numly account under the Manage ESN link in the web portal. |
| Printing |
| http://printsmadeeasy.com/ |
| PrintsMadeEasy's design software is the most innovative on the web for creating personal artwork designs. It is simple to use and allows unlimited customization for advanced users. PrintsMadeEasy's selection of professionally designed templates enables even a beginner to create color business cards that looks amazing! |
| http://www.lulu.com/ |
| Lulu.com lets you publish and sell print-on-demand books and e-books, online music and images, custom calendars and books. |
| Sharing Knowledge |
| http://www.wikipedia.org/ |
| Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project. The name Wikipedia is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information. |
| http://commoncraft.com/ |
| Common Craft uses a simple format and real-world stories to make sense of complex ideas.Common Craft presents your products and services in plain English using short, unique and understandable videos in a format they call Paperworks. |
| Wikis and webdesign |
| http://joomla.com/ |
| Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable. |
| http://www.wikispaces.com/ |
| Wikis can be revolutionary tools for building communities. But most wikis are very engineer-focused: hard to use, buried under busy user interfaces, full of features only a geek could love. Wikispaces is an attempt to build a wiki that's easy to use and easy to adopt for all kinds of audiences.You can focus on building content, talking with other members, and growing your community. |
| http://textpattern.com/ |
| A flexible, elegant and easy-to-use content management system. Textpattern is both free and open source. |
| http://www.nvu.com/ |
| A complete Web Authoring System for Linux desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu (which stands for "new view") makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML. |
| http://pbwiki.com/education.wiki |
| PBwiki lets you quickly set up your own free, hosted, password-protected wiki to edit and share information. It's as easy as a peanut butter sandwich. |
| Aggregration Sites |
| http://www.netvibes.com/ |
| Netvibes pioneered the personalized startpage, an alternative to traditional Web portals. With millions of users in more than 150 countries, Netvibes lets individuals assemble all in one place their favorite websites, blogs, email accounts, social networks, search engines, instant messengers, photos, videos, podcasts, widgets, and everything else they enjoy on the Web. |
| http://suprglu.com/ |
| Do you already use services like del.icio.us, flickr, blogger, typepad, etc? SuprGlu is a new way to gather all your content from those sites. In a nutshell, SuprGlu gathers your content from popular webservices and publishes them in one convenient place, presents your content with simple, great looking templates which you can customize and its free to use. |
| http://digg.com/ |
| Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. |
| Tracking and Filtering Content |
| http://technorati.com/ |
| Technorati is the recognized authority on what's happening on the World Live Web, right now. The Live Web is the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. Technorati search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as “citizen media.” |
| http://blogpulse.com/ |
| BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. Blogs, a term that is short for weblogs, represent the fastest-growing medium of personal publishing and the newest method of individual expression and opinion on the Internet. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs. |
| http://del.icio.us/ |
| del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website. The primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders. |
| Mindmap |
| http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page |
| FreeMind is a free mind mapping software written in Java, used both as mind mapping and knowledge management software. |
| http://www.zotero.org/ |
| Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. |
| http://www.bubbl.us/ |
| Bubbl.us is a simple and free web application that lets you brainstorm online. |
| http://www.mindomo.com/ |
| Mindomo is a versatile Web-based mind mapping tool, delivering the capabilities of desktop mind mapping software in a Web browser - with no complex software to install or maintain. |
