Finals have just ended, but a new semester is around the corner for a lot of online students. Even if your most recent classes were brutal, don’t take it easy just yet. Keep your motivation levels at their peak by creating a schedulefor your upcoming semester. You can create your own through your smartphone, a wall calendar, or by using a virtual calendar tool and timer. Whatever method you choose, seeing the actual assignments you have coming up will keep you in check.

Remember: “Out of sight, out of mind.”

Students and professionals everywhere depend on computers and other digital tools for everyday work and assignments. Here are some tips for protecting and organizing your classwork, starting with best practices for creating and storing files.

Whether you’re building spreadsheets, creating presentations or writing text, these habits can be real time savers.

Working with files

Save often. If you’ve ever had a power outage or computer glitch in the middle of writing your most brilliant ideas, you’ve already learned this hard lesson. Get in the habit of hitting control-s (or Apple-s on a Mac) every few minutes. Then if your computer decides to take a break, your work will be safe.

Learn the basic keyboard shortcuts. (These are common to most applications.)

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Say you’re not the type who wants to learn yet another piece of software that syncs with your cell phone, work and home e-mail. Never fear – the good old daily/weekly/monthly planner is still in existence in every office supply store in the country.

You may be thinking, “isn’t that a little old school?”  Why, yes it is. And, that’s the point. Sometimes taking it back to the purest way of doing something keeps you focused.It could be as simple as a color code system for the date blocks: green for tests, pink for quizzes, orange for papers – etc. Keep it with you at all times and even add in your personal stuff so you’ve got everything in one place.

(Source: Evolve.com)

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….or a minimum of 5-6 days a week. That sounds like a lot. But, each of your visits don’t have to take that long. Would be as quick as any of your daily social networking, Internet surfing, online shopping habits. Trust, once you get into the online classroom, you will be eager to see who has commented on your postings and read the feedback of your instructor and peers. You will also be curious to see who has posted something new that you can comment on. If you let too many days go by without logging on to your course discussion group, you will get behind and find it very difficult to catch up.

(Source: Illinois Online Network)

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