Tech for Students

Get tuition-free college education from University of the People

techforstudents — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:27:59 +0000

When college education is becoming expensive every year, University of the People has emerged as a promising alternative being the world’s first tuition-free, online college dedicated to advancement of higher education on a global level.

University of the people aims to utilize the global presence of the Internet to conveniently educate people from around the world via one single web site. It is a nonprofit organization founded in California by Shai Reshef, an experienced academic and is backed by a team of distinguished academics and humanitarians from around the world.

Applying to the university is as easy as ABC. Students can simply fill out an online application. There are certain requirements to be accepted like availability of a place in the course chosen and the final judgment from the university staff based upon the applicant’s ability to succeed in the course.

Students do not have to pay any tuition at all. However there are some fees like enrollment fee, which can range from $15 to $50 and exam processing fee for each course ranging from $10 to $100. These fees are based on student’s country of residence.

Academic programs provided at the university are categorized into two academic fields – Business Administration and Computer Science. Each field has various courses with study option of full 2-year or full 4-year programs.

For convenience of students, there are five different terms each academic year. Students can enroll in any of these terms and continue as they wish.

The university is a pioneer in terms of creating a global higher education community. Since the virtual classrooms will have diverse group of students from every corners of the world, they hope to provide a peer-to-peer teaching method backed by a defined curriculum and the support of educators working for the university.

Some quick links for interested students:

[Photo - screen shot of UoPeople logo]

Free Online Courses for College Students

techforstudents — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:44:28 +0000

With thousands of free courses available, the web can be a very useful hub of educational materials for college students.

The Internet is no longer just a place to check emails or chat with friends. It has developed into an information hub. There are all varieties of materials available online for everybody. With the use of right tools and websites, college students can take advantage of the free courses available online as reference material or even use them to get college education fro free for the comfort of their home with a click of a button.

This article lists some of the most useful websites from top universities offering free online courses as well as some tips on using iTunes U and Google to get free online education.

MIT Open Course Ware
They have over 1900 courses available online to choose from. Courses are categorized by departments and contain actual classroom lectures including handouts, video lectures, quizzes, tests and exams.

Webcast Courses from University of California, Berkely

They have wide range of courses available ranging from Biology to Statistics. The drop down menu on the top right lets you choose courses from different semesters. They have courses from recent semesters including ongoing Fall 2009.

Free Online courses from Utah State University

They offer wide range of courses for free online. Topics range from Anthropology to Physics. The courses are available for anyone to download for free in zip format or can be viewed online as well.

Stanford on iTunes University

Stanford offers its free online courses via iTunes U. You can easily subscribe to their courses via iTunes, which automatically downloads courses, including video and audio lectures, as they become available online.

The Open University from the UK

The website offers free access to hundreds of courses online for free. Topics range from Arts and History to Technology. You can easily study independently at your own schedule or join online group to collaborate with others and help each other learn.

Online Books Page from UPenn

This online library from University of Pennsylvania has listing of over 35,000 books available for free on the web. It has an easy-to-use search page to dig into the vast collection of books. You can search by author, titles, subjects, serials or simple enter a phrase to search the catalog.

Use Google to find online notes, lectures, tutorials, podcasts
With a simple trick you can find useful notes, lectures, tutorials, podcasts, etc from various educational websites using a simple Google search query.

Simply use this form of query – “site:.edu keyword”. Replace keyword with lectures to search lectures and so on for notes, tutorials. This simple trick can be very useful to search for online educational material. For even more specific topics simple add more keywords like searching for “site:.edu biology lectures” will bring up lectures on topics from Biology. You can also use quotes along with the keywords to filter searches containing the actual phrase you are looking for.

Academic Earth (not a university website)

This website has collection of thousands of video lectures from several universities. The courses are categorized under universities and subjects. They also have playlists of related lectures so you can easily follow a specific topic. The website is very easy to use and is indeed very useful for college students. Time.com featured it as one of the 50 best websites of 2009.
Click here to view an example of a video lecture available on the site.

All photos used in this blog were shot by Mukunda KC.

How to get organized using free Google Calendar

techforstudents — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:18:37 +0000

People often find it hard to keep schedules organized but with use of Google Calendar, a free web service from Google, it is easy to keep track of all the important events from a single web page.

This article explains how to use Google Calendar to keep your events organized, so you don’t forget that important meeting or miss out a due date.

Advantages of using Google Calendar

• Organize all of your schedules from a single place: This is a all-in-one place organizer for all kinds of events, schedules, reminders and even to-do lists.
• Share your Calendar: You can share your calendar schedules with your friends, family or co-workers. They can easily see whether you are free or busy at certain time so it makes event planning a breeze.
• Never forget any event: With all events stored online, you can chose to get notifications via email or text message so you don’t forget any of your appointments.
• Access you calendar on the go: Google Calendar is accessible via array of devices including mobile phones and PDAs. With two-way sync available, you can keep your calendar synced with your phone’s calendar or your computer’s calendar applications like Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook.
• Send event invitation: You can send invitation to other people to attend events on your calendar. Your guest can then send you RSVP so you can keep track of how many people will be attending.
• Cost for all these great features?: ZERO. Yes, all these useful features are available for anyone to use for free.

Steps to create a personal calendar with Google Calendar

Sign up for a Google account. If you have a Gmail account, you already have a Google account.
Go to Google Calendar website.
Log in with your Google account and you will be redirected to default view of the calendar showing a table which looks like an Excel spreadsheets with links on the left column of the page.
Now, start adding events to your calendar using the “Create Event” button on the left. Enter event details as required along with notification option, if you desire to be notified.
Add as many events as you like and they will be stored online for free.
Next, select the view you desire for your calendar. You can view events for a day, week, and month or just view the upcoming agendas.

Tips

Create events in seconds with the Quick Add feature
Quick add is a very useful feature available on Google Calendar. It lets you add an event instantly with a single click and a simple phrase describing the event. For e.g. entering “Lunch with John tomorrow at 11″ creates an event titled “Lunch with John” for the next day starting at 11am.

This video, from YouTube channel Google Calendar Help, demonstrates use of the “Quick Add” feature.

Use ‘Tasks’ to manage to-do list
Google Calendar integrates the “Google Tasks” that lets you store to-do lists. To add tasks simply click the “Tasks” link on the left column. This will add a separate column on the right side where you can quickly add tasks. The tasks added in this manner are also available via Gmail.

Share your Calendar
You can share access to your calendar to other people. You can control what kind of access people can have. You can make your calendar public or only share it to a group of people. People like sport team coaches who want to share their calendar to the team members and others with practice and game schedules can use public calendar.

This video, from YouTube channel Google Calendar Help, explains how to share your Google Calendar to specific people.

Add more than one calendars
You can add public calendars to your Google Calendar. To add more calendars go to Settings and click on Calendars tab, scroll to the bottom to add calendars. Some useful calendars include US Holiday, Various Sports Team like Dallas Cowboys or Mavericks. Once you add these calendars you can view Holidays and the schedules of your favorite teams right from your personal calendar.

Sync it with your phone
Google Calendar can be accessed via varieties of mobile devices like the iPhone or any Android phone. Syncing calendar lets you make changes to your schedules right from your phone and they are automatically synced with the Google server.

More Help
If you ever encounter any problem or want to learn more about using Google Calendar, visit this help page from Google.

Using the Latest Technologies in College Classrooms

techforstudents — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 04:23:47 +0000

According to Mary Ann Young, a senior lecturer at the School or Arts and Humanities in UTD, there are several technologies that can used by college students and professors to facilitate learning, but the choice of which depends upon the cost, usability and the length of training required to adopt them.

Below is an interview with Mary Ann Young regarding the use of latest technologies by students and professors in college classrooms.

Your thoughts on the use of latest technologies in college classrooms?

I recall the “Twitter Experiment” by Monica Rankin, a professor of history here in UTD. There is a fantastic YouTube video about it.

She implemented the use of twitter in a large classroom where students could use twitter to comment on class room discussion, which would come up on a big screen and she could direct the discussion based upon students’ comments both verbally and via Twitter.

[Video from YouTube user kesmit3]

Other than that Internet based communication like use of Google groups and Facebook groups is very popular among students mostly because of conflicting schedules. This allows them to communicate easily outside the class.

In terms of teaching courses using these technologies, I have used Facebook in few of my classes. It is very useful and convenient in terms of how it facilitates communication outside of the classroom. But I found that large number of students are not familiar with Facebook. So, I had to teach students how to use Facebook as part of the class.

Similarly I have seen the use of audio and video supplement outside of the classroom and there are various types of trainings available for that. This includes making video and audio lectures available online so students can view them conveniently and use them as reference outside the classroom. However, there are lots of controversies regarding use of video lectures.

I am doing a research on visual ethnography and the use of hypermedia. Hypermedia meaning the juxtaposition of visual image including still images, moving images, audio and standard text – all incorporated into a large presentation that would allow audience to interact with that presentation in different ways than the standard listen-to-me kind of lectures or read this text or even communicate back and fort. This type of technology is fairly new and involves large amount of training and technological capability to implement.

It is usually seen that students who are in IT related majors or have use of computers in class tend to adopt to new technologies but others stick to traditional medium of classroom learning. How can students from all majors make use of the latest technologies?

It is true that there are lot of students who do not take advantage of new technologies.

Primarily we see, at least in Arts and Humanities, there are two groups of students. One group of students, who do not know much about new technologies like use of Twitter, Google groups and so on, like to stick to traditional forms of communication and there is another group of students who use these technologies on day to day basis.

It is always beneficial to make best use of the latest technologies available. One example of this – in my Music class I try to show how students can make use of computer software to help them learn the music. These software allow them to see how loud a particular pitch is or how to distinguish between rhythms. Basically they allow students to see music visually. But very less students take advantage of it.

Most students like to go for much familiar means of communication like tradition hard-text copies of handout and syllabus and so on instead of learning new technology.

However, I have had some students contact me via Facebook to ask certain question or find out where I am so that they can come see me.

When should students be introduced to new technologies so they can take advantage of them?

Each year many freshmen come from different technological backgrounds. The trend in use of technologies in classroom this year can be very different from what it was three years ago.

I am not sure as to how to universalize the use of technologies. For example the use of Google calendar can be very interesting to a certain group of students but next year who knows.

There is also lot difference in technologies available. For instance, Wikipedia seems so 2005 and Youtube seems so 2009 in terms of new contents being added to it all the time.

There was a Youtube video that even professor Johnson circulated around was on “How to lengthen your paper” – that talked about how one can go to Word find a period and change the text size to around 16 point which would drastically lengthen the paper. This is not noticeable to somebody unless they completely reformat the paper.

[Video from YouTube user raseru]

Large numbers of lecturers are using YouTube for instructional purpose. In my music class I always try to show students how to find videos on YouTube that are relevant to the course and how to use it for educational purpose versus just purely entertainment.

To conclude, would you say that college students should look for a change in the way they use the latest technology or stick to traditional means of communication?

I have suspicion that students will tend to stick to whatever is familiar to them – whether it is traditional technology or whether it is something that is new. I am not sure how likely are students to learn new things unless it is something easier. So it depends on how easy it is and how much training is required.

Mary Ann Young is a senior lecturer at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Texas at Dallas.
She can be reached at maryann@utdallas.edu.

Ten Most Useful Websites for College Students

techforstudents — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 16:20:37 +0000

Choosing the most useful websites from among millions of choices online can be mind boggling, but it does pay off to do a little research because there are very useful websites available that can prove to be very beneficial to college students in number of ways.

The Internet is crowded with millions of websites – some are very useful while others can be just waste of time. Since college life is the time when students prepare themselves for the rest of their lives, getting the best out of available tools must be everyone’s goal while in college. Online webs tools like Google Calendar can help students organize their schedules and get everything done in timely fashion while website like Twitter can help them socialize as well as find information efficiently. Below is a list of ten most useful websites for college students with a brief description of each.

1. Google Calendar

Time management is very important to succeed in college. Google Calendar is a free web service available to anyone with a Google account, which is free too. It lets you save your schedule and events online and is accessible from variety of devices like a mobile phone, PDA, or a personal computer with Internet connection. Apart from being very easy to use, it has a nice and clean look and is packed with numerous features. Some notable features include the ability to quickly add an event, with click of a button after specifying the event with few words like – “Lunch with John tomorrow at 11am” creates an event for the next day at 11am with details of the event as “Lunch with John”.

Google calendar also includes feature to add publically available calendars like US Holidays or schedules of a sports team to your personal calendar. This will let you view upcoming events, holidays and sports events right from your online calendar. It also lets you share your calendar with your friends or families, so they can quickly check your availability before planning any future event.

2. Academic Earth

This website is packed with thousands of academic video lectures from leading universities like Harvard, Stanford, etc. The lectures available are categorized into subjects and topics for easy search. The homepage includes links to featured lectures and videos for quick access to the best lectures available online. These video lectures can be used as a reference for your current class. Watching and listening to lectures from professors of the best universities in the world can definitely be very useful. In other words, you can get the Harvard education right from your home with a click of a button.

3. Evernote

This website can provide the best online note taking experience. The best part of the website is that you can take notes on a variety of ways – you can type them online, type on a mobile phone or a PDA or write on a paper. Notes written on paper can be scanned and uploaded which are then converted to text format automatically. However you choose to write, your notes get synced up together. Your notes are saved online and you will never have to worry about losing them again. Both free and paid accounts are available.

4. Wikipedia

Wikipedia has changed the way people find information online. In few years after its launch, the website now boasts an incredible collection of millions of articles written on hundreds of languages. It seems to have information on almost any topics. The most interesting part of the website is – the articles are written by thousands of volunteers from around the world and anyone can edit them. There are however certain rules to be followed – sources must be cited properly and plagiarized contents are automatically deleted by the system. In addition to that, there are people actively going through various articles to make sure they are credible.

5. Mint.com

Most of the college students are not aware of budge planning. They just like to spend the money on whatever they want. This can easily turn one into a spendthrift. In no time there will be a huge debt piled up and students find themselves confused and stressed.

Mint.com is there to help. This free web service lets its users do their budgeting online. It can keep track of your bank account, credit card accounts, loans and even investment accounts. You can quickly go over all of your incomes and expenses from a single web page. The expenses are also categorized based on types and vendors. You can track your expenses by weeks, months and years and compare them to get an idea about your spending habit. It also has useful features like alerts for payment due dates. This site definitely can keep you on top of your budget and finances.

6. Half.com

This website is very useful especially during the back-to-school days. It lists textbooks for sale. Most of them are available at a very discounted price compared to college bookstores. If you know your books before classes start, you can simply buy them from this website and save a huge amount of money.

7. RateMyProfessor.com

This website lets its users rate their professors in terms of overall class performance. Students can also leave comments about their class experience. This can be very useful for new students registering for classes. Every professor works hard for their classes but the need of students can vary. Some professors emphasize homework while some give more importance to tests. After reading the comments and ratings posted by students who have already taken classes with the professors, you can choose the best one available for you that match your preference.

8. StumbleUpon.com

This is a very useful website where you can find interesting and popular websites shared by millions of people around the world. It also has channels like University Sites, US Government Sites, PBS, BBC, etc via which you can stumble the most useful contents available online. This can be very useful for general knowledge or for research purpose. It also lets you browse videos and images liked by other users so you get the best web contents all the time. You can be friends with others and share your favorites with them as well. Moreover, you can also use it as online book-marking service. Your favorite websites, videos and images are saved online and you can access them whenever you want from anywhere in the world.

9. Youtube.com

Youtube can serve the need of online entertainment along with very useful source of news, tips and other useful videos. People upload videos on topics ranging from travel to research. There are videos explaining how to use the Internet. There are interviews, reviews, tips, tutorials along with news videos from news agencies like the Associated Press and even innovative talks from websites like TED.com. College students can use Youtube for both entertainment as well as for academic purpose, watching videos from popular Youtube channels like MIT, Stanford, BBC and many others.

10. Twitter.com

Twitter is one of the most innovative and very useful website ever launched. It is growing everyday and is a useful tool for social networking and finding useful contents online easily and conveniently. You can use twitter to keep in touch with friends, communicate with classmates, follow news from various sources and search for real-time information with a click of a button. Millions of people use twitter to post updates related to varieties of topics ranging from personal thoughts to a live news update. Twitter can be a very powerful tool to get your voice to a mass audience. A very interesting example is the 2008 U.S. Presidential election campaign when Predident Barack Obama used Twitter to send his updates to all his supporters.

Disclaimer – The list of websites on this page is based on author’s personal web experience as a college student.

Hello world!

techforstudents — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:27:55 +0000

Hello everybody

Welcome to our blog. This blog will be featuring articles related to use of new technologies to help students do well in their classes. Blog articles will include tips and tricks for better use of the Internet for academic purpose and use of new technologies to prepare oneself for the new challenges. Your comments and suggestions are always much appreciated.

Thank You