Studying is not an easy task. It has never been. It is often said that technology makes academic life much easier nowadays, but that is not always true. Sometimes it complicates it even more.
Finding the right resources, such as PaperHelp, so that we can focus on achieving our goals is an art. There are so many options to increase student productivity that hours are often wasted with the least appropriate tools, and our job, as trainers, parents, and bloggers, is to help make that path easier.
Wikisaber
In Wikisaber, I usually publish one or two articles weekly related to tools that students can use to improve their results, and today I leave you with 10 that, if I had them 20 years ago, would have helped me a lot, mainly in group work.
Dropbox
Who says Dropbox says any of its alternatives? A tool that allows you to share large amounts of material without sending emails or having a version management system is a must in any subject. With cx.com, fiber, Dropbox, and other similar solutions, we don’t have to worry about those issues. We can decide which directory on our computer will be synchronized with another user’s, keeping the group work material centralized and always up to date.
Edmodo
With this famous educational platform, we can create digital libraries with the most important files of each subject, being a good solution to save notes, papers, lectures, and videos of each subject. We can also post messages on a group’s wall, helping organize the information related to the work.
Studyboost
To create questions and answers, classifying them by subject and allowing them to share them with the rest of the group is very useful to define the key points to be addressed.
Mikogo
To communicate in real-time with other members of the group, being possible to share the desktop and hold meetings with several people simultaneously.
OpenStudy
A kind of Yahoo answers for students, where we can ask questions and wait for other team members or network users to respond. It is possible to create and consult various study groups, with several very interesting ones worldwide.
Diigo
An ideal place to save and share links of interest with other people in the workgroup. It is one of the main competitors of delicious in the social bookmarking category.
Google Docs
An online platform for creating documents collaboratively (text editors or spreadsheets) is essential. Being necessary to bet on the quality of big ones like Google Docs or Zoho to ensure that our content is always available in the cloud.
Remember the Milk
To keep pending tasks organized and visible to all team members, there is nothing like a good task manager. Remember the Milk is a good option. Being possible to replace it with Google Calendar, Toodledo, and other similar solutions.
Pbworks Education
To be able to publish and find useful content to enrich our work. The free version includes the possibility of working with a control panel and up to 100 users on it.
Blogger/WordPress
A blog publishing platform is important to be able to write the sections of our work in an organized way. It is possible to have private blogs to transform them into good tools for publishing academic content.