Every day, college students around the globe are participating in the phenomenon that is labeled Web 2.0, yet many of them have no clue. Some techies debate whether it really needs its own title, but they can agree that the idea behind Web 2.0 is an Internet that focuses on people and community. Facebook, now a college student’s life and blood, is a perfect example of a Web 2.0 application, one that connects people and puts the focus on the individual. This blog, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, all of these are applications that empower people to communicate, create and share their passions. This philosophy has spawned literally thousands of applications deemed Web 2.0 for every known area of interest. One such interest that we all here at Mission Tuition share is academics, particularly in doing well in them.

Below you will find a guide we have compiled that features some of the best and most helpful Web 2.0 applications for college students and their academic pursuits. We’ve divided them into six major categories: notes, research, writing, study, tutor and organization.

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Notes Sharing notes between classmates has been practiced since college began. Nowadays with computers, you no longer have to worry if your buddy Mike is going to spill soda all over them, lend them to his girlfriend or lose them entirely. As long as you can keep yourself from checking Facebook every two seconds, taking your notes on the computer will allow for easy editing and back ups, in case anything **Mike** happens to them:

    NoteSake: With their own online note taking program, NoteSake has created a simple yet powerful tool for college students who want a distraction free environment to take notes and an easy way to share them with their classmates. Using their own online word processor, college students can easily take, format and save notes without the distraction of the rest of the internet. Afterwards, sharing them only takes creating a group and inviting your friends to join.

    NoteMesh: With a different and more collaborative take on notes, NoteMesh is a Wikipedia-like application where classmates work together to create a unified set of notes. Each individual class lecture or discussion is given its own page where students are invited to work together and add or edit notes as they like. It functions the same as Wikipedia where editing is open to the community in the effort of producing the most accurate and useful set of notes.

    NoteCentric: Providing both an online note taking application and a place to store and organize your notes, NoteCentric works perfect for students who need access to their notes from multiple computers. In your account you are able to add both classes and events to take notes on in a continuous or one time basis.

Research College students nowadays need to remember something. We were blessed even eight years ago when we were still using Microsoft Encarta from a CD-ROM, never mind the countless ways to research things on the internet now. My parents always remind me of how they had to find things when they were in school - books. I just laugh, flip open my laptop and start finding quotes, statistics, dates and names like I find drunken wall posts on Facebook:

    Wikipedia: The mother of all that is web research, Wikipedia is the perfecting starting point to any information that needs to be found. Although many college professors will not accept Wikipedia as a credible source, it is a perfect way to get a basic understanding of a topic or use it’s list of resources (at the end of every article) to explore and then quote in your papers.

    Schoolr: Rather than jumping from Google to Wikipedia or Dictionary to Translator, visit Schoolr to see a collection of the top search engines any college student would use while conducting research. All on one page, the search engines include Google, Wikipedia, Dictionary, Thesaurus, Acronym, Urban Dictionary, Encyclopedia, Citation Builder, Book Summary, Text Translator and a Unit Converter. That should provide a pretty good start to your research.

    Footnote: For those looking for a more comprehensive search engine that will provide copies of original and historical documents, Footnote provides access to both free and paid documents from dozens of major categories such as Early America, Civil War, WWII and more. This service is more well suited for serious research projects, in particular anyone working on final thesis papers and the like.

Writing Writing is a core component to your success at college, which is why high school has it drilled into you. I probably wrote two hundred of those five paragraph essays before I came to college but then I found out freshmen year that they wanted us to write ten page research papers, not tiny-midnight-bang-em-out five paragraphers. It was a shock to the system, but I have survived so far by using these tools:

    Ottobib: College is notorious for acronyms: SGA, CAB, RA, GPA, SAT, FIN AID, TA . . . and I’m sure all of you have heard of the ever famous MLA. College professors take MLA very serious, I have heard of kids failing classes and even getting accused of plagiarism because their citations were wrong. To avoid any cases of cheating, check out Ottobib, an amazingly easy MLA citation generator. I have used it for all of my papers since I discovered it and have not had a single problem with any of those professors.

    Ninjawords: If you are looking for a fast, smart dictionary, Ninjawords provides an easy way to look up any definition. Just type your word in the search engine and Ninjaword will auto correct any misspellings and record all of your previous searches.

    Zoho Writer: For a really simple way to create and access your word documents from any location, check out Zoho Writer. The service allows you to store, share and collaborate on all of your papers. You can even upload existing documents from Microsoft, open office and image files.

Study With Flash Cards Aside from anxiety, having to study has produced some of the best known excuses for procrastination the world has ever seen. I’ve heard students who could reason their way through a hostage situation before they could bring themselves to sit down and work the books. Ninety Nine percent of cases, doing the actual work takes less time than thinking about it and coming up with excuses not to do it:

    Quizlet: A flash card generator on speed, Quizlet allows students to enter any list of words or data and in turn will produce online flash cards, tests and collaboration tools for you and your classmates. The program is smart enough to only test you on the words that you don’t know, allows you to instantly share tests with classmates, works in any language and has an easy important feature so you don’t need to retype words into Quizlet.

    Rememberize: Another online flash card system, Rememberize uses the Leitner method, which tests questions you get wrong more heavily, to help you master foreign languages, science data, history dates and more. Their tag based search system makes finding yours and other’s flash cards, well, a flash.

    Brain Tune: Focused more on sharing topic specific flash cards, which they called catalogs, Brain Tune enables its community to compile a highly relevant and expansive database of flash cards. They also display stats on individual community members’ overall performance, indicating how many total questions you have answered correctly.

Tutor There are two sides of the coin when it comes to college tutors. You can either be one and make good money or you can need one and get better grades. Either way, college tutors are an important part to academic or financial success. With video conferencing and all of these note sharing applications, students are no longer campus bound and restricted to their own local tutors:

    BuddySchool: A marketplace for students and tutors, BuddySchool allows tutors to list their field of expertise, availability and pricing information so students can browse through and submit a lesson request. Once the tutor agrees to the lesson, it’s scheduled into both their calendars, held over Skype or GoogleTalk and timed by BuddySchool. When the lesson is finished, the tutor bills the student and another lesson, if needed, can be scheduled.

    Cramster: Rather than pairing students and tutors one-on-one, Cramster is a community where students with questions can post them for other community members and experts to answer. The system is based on karma points which can be traded in for free months of membership. The basic services of the website are free, but limited, so the more help you give other, the more help you will be able to ask for.

    Tutorz: The largest network of tutors on the web, Tutorz allows students to search for, contact and review tutors in their area. Each tutor works independently, so the subjects covered is quite vast. They have over 10,000 tutors listed in their database and cover most all major college areas.

Organization College is going to pass you by quicker than a freshman pledge doing the naked quad run. So it’s important to stay on top of your game and keep yourself organized so you can get work done efficiently and still have enough time to pledge. Organizing your class schedule, meetings, campus events and homework shouldn’t be a difficult task and with these Web 2.0 applications will actually be fun. Taking a little time to plan each day will result in both less stress and higher grades:

    mySchoolog: Providing a weekly schedule, task list, note manager, grade calculator and file manager, mySchoolog is pretty much everything you need to be organized for school. With a very simple and clean layout, plus easy drag and drop features, mySchoolog demonstrates an ideal Web 2.0 application as well as great overall functionality.

    Stu.dicio.us: Pull together a great note taking platform, grade calculator, task manager, document organizer and link it all up to Facebook and I bet you will get something like Stu.dicio.us. Although it is an organization powerhouse, I am really impressed with the note taking features such as shortcuts (ex. type govt and they spell out government), Cornell note taking and automatic Google/Wikipedia links inserted for any reference words.

    CollegeRuled: Although we have already done a post on CollegeRuled, we thought we would mention again this class schedule application. Easily create, print and share your class schedule, even on Facebook, with your friends.

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Applying for online universities can be a life changing decision. You will potentially be spending a couple years working to earn a bachelor’s degree. Once you do earn an online MBA, you will have an in-demand skill that may help you in a future interview.