Around 2004, I sat in on a meeting of reporters at the Akron Beacon Journal, wherein one of them asked a college student what were the hot new websites that younger people liked at the moment. “We’re all on this thing called Facebook,” she said, and it was the first time I remember hearing about the website, which – at that point in time – you needed an EDU email address to enter. Alas, college students are generally good at spotting web trends. It’s also important for them to know how to use the web effectively and to their advantage, especially as a college student who might need to ace an exam and perfect their study habits in order to gain passing grades for expensive courses. Therefore, give these 21 websites that are either growing in popularity or already well known and highly useful a try:
1. Ice Cream Apps
The Internet-based world we live in means that common web-based homework tasks need easy and fast solutions. Ice Cream Apps fills the bill by providing students the software to take care of tasks like capturing screenshots, converting video formats, making slideshows and all kinds of stuff that college students’ coursework can require.
2. Flvto
With Flvto, students are afforded an easy way to listen to video presentations on the go, even when they don’t have Wi-Fi access or their data plans are hitting 90% and they need to lay off all that streaming because Mom and Dad are getting Verizon Wireless warnings. If you need to write an essay about the
3. Photius
Photius is a weird little website with a throwback homepage look from the 1990s, but the best part is the fact that college students can save money on shopping by getting 20% off with a Nordstrom coupon, for example.
4. Slack
Slack is a website that helps not only business people improve their communication efforts, but students as well. It integrates with DropBox, always keeps your place when you jump around various applications and it connects teams, so it can be used by study groups and project partners with open, efficient communication.
5. Pocket
With Pocket, college students can save articles they come across for later reading. If you’re writing a paper about “voodoo economics” for instance, it even lets you save the articles into a folder under the same name for easy reference later.
6. Rate My Professors
Want to know which teachers to avoid and which professors’ classes to take? Using the website Rate My Professors, you can find real-life reviews from real college students about their real experiences with real teachers – good, bad and ugly.
7. Glass Door
Want to know the straight dope about what it takes to gain an internship or a permanent job position with a certain company after graduation? Check out Glass Door, wherein actual employees have left reviews about specific firms and have spilled the beans about the true corporate culture.
8. Mint
During college, it’s especially important to know where you’re spending your cash, and Mint helps you do that for free and get supremely organized financially.
9. Study Blue
With Study Blue, college students can use the convenient service to make flashcards that help them create notes online without wasting paper. It represents a supremely portable way to create formal study guides and freshen up prior to tests without going through piles of text.
10. Study Hall
Study Hall helps students find jobs and start-ups get access to the top “hackers, hustlers and social media influencers” on college campuses.
11. EssayTyper
EssayTyper is one of those confusing yet funny websites that claims it uses a combination of Wikipedia and magic to help students craft their essays fast – but also warns not to use it legitimately. If anything, the site can help spark imaginations that need to be rewritten – heavily – to likely get a passing grade. (Don’t forget, teachers have access to Copyscape, too.)
12. Copyscape
Speaking of Copyscape, it’s a great website that college students can use to check out the plagiarism level of the papers they construct. Use their premium services to copy and paste the things you’ve rewritten and essays constructed from multiple sources to ensure that it’ll fly with your teachers. There’s a nominal fee of five cents per search conducted.
13. Overdrive
Who wants to pay for books when they don’t have to spend anything to read them? Thanks to Overdrive, when you discover, for example, the 10 bucks that Amazon is charging for the Kindle version of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, use Overdrive and your local library account to have it sent to your iPad or other devices to read for free in its entirety.
14. OpenStudy
If you’re the type that doesn’t do well studying alone, use OpenStudy to meet other likeminded college students to study along with based on a variety of topics.
15. CollegeRuled
Students are using CollegeRuled to make class schedules online and find their classmates in order to launch study groups and get the answers to pressing questions.
16. PostYourBook
Using PostYourBook, college students can make back some of that cash shelled out for expensive textbooks by selling them to other students, who can save money by getting discounted books.
17. Go Abroad
Using Go Abroad, students can learn the ins and outs of becoming an exchange student.
18. The College Investor
If you hate incurring student loan debt and want other financial tips that are helpful to college students, give the College Investor website a gander.
19. College Tips
College Tips calls itself a college survival guide for students.
20. Hack College
Using the website called Hack College, students can discover the articles written specifically from the paradigm of their campus-life plights.
21. Unigo
Unigo helps students discover which colleges they should attend by providing a plethora of reviews for more than 7,000 schools, along with plenty of other helpful information.
Featured photo credit: education, technology and internet concept – smiling teenager in eyeglasses with laptop computer and take away coffee or tea via shutterstock.com
