Recently the Dumb Little Man blog made a back to school post, which included Qipit! The post got me thinking how close we are for school to be back in session. As I live in downtown Austin, home to well over 100,000 College Students (not including faculty), back to school means everything downtown gets more; more cars, more people, more everything! So in the spirit of reducing the need for students to leave the dorms, apartments or libraries, I thought I would share a few more online services.

First things first, pick the best professors. There is nothing worse than getting a professor who doesn’t inspire you to learn, or one who you can’t even understand. Checkout PickaProf to see who everyone thinks is the best. There is even a PickaProf facebook application.

Online Books

Rather than buying paper books and having to go to the store, get your books online. Read them on your computer, and print the pages you need.

Questia is the world’s first and largest online library of books and journal articles. It even includes textbooks. Yes there is $14.95 per month fee, but it is much more complete than Google Books, this is much cheaper than purchasing your textbooks.

Google books is Google’s answer to Questia, it is free, but it is not as complete. Not sure why they just didn’t do a deal with Questia, but that have to do something with all that money.

Online Study Guides

Pink Monkey and Spark Notes offer free online study guides, book notes, book reviews, online chapter summaries, and analysis for literature.

Get Organized and Stay Productive

DailyLit manages your class reading schedule by sending you regular installments of your latest reading by email (on your PC, mobile, etc.). Helps keep you on track, so you don’t have to cram.

Remember the Milk is an easy to use online to-do-list for all of those activities and projects students always have.

Drop.io is a very simple way to share files online with other students. It is really quick and easy and does not require others to sign-up, nice!

Timebridge is a tool that helps you coordinate meeting times with others for those projects you get assigned. This tool makes it easy, rather than playing middle man with 4 or 5 others.

Online Reference Resources

BBC Languages offers resources in multiple languages including Spanish, Mandarin, English, French, German and more – resources include MP3 downloads, tutorials, and testing.

Ninjawords is a free online dictionary that emulates three ninja characteristics – they’re smart, they’re accurate, and they’re really fast. Plus it is just cool use the word ninja in a blog post!

Refdesk is a great all around reference resource. Interested in learning the value of a dollar in Mongolia, how to make soap by hand, what happened on this date 20 years ago, which are the top 100 US newspapers, and the definition of “omniscient” – it’s all here.

Wikipedia is the mother of all encyclopedia Wikis. It is a great place to start your research. Just don’t copy what it says, because your professor certainly uses it too! He may have even written or contributed to the article.

Other Lists

Here are a couple more links to some of the better comprehensive student resource lists I have stumbled upon over the years.

100 Insanely Useful Web Tools You Never Knew You Needed

Top 50 Web 2.0 Tools for Info Junkies, Researchers & Students

And of course, Qipit has a facebook application called Qipit NoteShare, specifically designed for helping students share class notes. If you have more student friendly services to add, please share the knowledge.

~ Conrad