Top Tools for Online Learners

Going to school online can be a great experience, especially if you have the right resources. Here is a list of some of the best tools available for online students to use in school.

Collaboration

• Notemesh
  A great tool for collaborating with classmates. You can share notes with other students around the country and world.

• TodaysMeet
  Here you can create private or public online meeting rooms for outside class discussions, collaborations, and study groups.

• Jing
  Another way to visually show what you’re talking about online. Similar to screen sharing software, this tool allows you to show images of what you’re working on, and lets others verbally comment on that work. A more interactive IM conversation.

Mind-Mapping

• Mindomo
  This is a robust mind mapping system. Although it’s not free, you can try the free trial period to see if it’s a good fit for you.

• Co-mapping
  Online mind mapping software to manage and share information. You can use it to take notes, plan and organize. It’s a way to have one set of notes, and one set of files.

Note-Taking

• Spreeder
  An innovative online speed reading tool. It teaches you to silence your inner voice while reading. You can gradually increase the WPM counter to speed up your reading abilities.

Staying Organized

• Toodledo
  An online to-do-list for organizing tasks and improving productivity.

• Notely
  For students looking to improve their grades with better organization, this is a great tool to utilize. Perfect for arranging your schedule, calendar, note-taking (if you need it), and homework planning.

• Treepad Lite
  Writers can keep track of their notes, e-mails, texts and reference materials with this all-in-one organizer. The program is easy to use and can be a great way to keep everything you need for writing in one place.

• Time Tracker
  A to-do-list with a clock. This tool lets you know when you’re spending all of your time on one item, and alerts you to re-allocate time wasted to other efforts.

• Password Hash
  Have problems remembering all your passwords? This is an excellent tool that stores your passwords for you, and can autopopulate them when you visit that site for login.

• Dropbox
  This is a virtual file storage unit. Just like google docs, it’s free to use, but this tool is great because you can access it from anywhere; your mobile phone, smartphone, laptop, desk top, any computer away from your home. It makes your documents mobile because they’re stored in a private area on the internet.

Research

• Instapaper
  Save the news for later. If you want to save a web page to read later, this is a great alternative to just bookmarking it. After signing up, you simply click on the “read later” button, and you can read the article/site/post later from your computer, paper, iPhone, iPad, or Kindle.

• CiteuLike
  A free service great for managing and discovering scholarly references. It offers automated article recommendations, stores references you find online, and stores PDFs.

• iCyte
  An amazing research tool. You can mark, make notes and organize your thoughts on a topic on a webpage, or a few keywords in an article online. This tool stores the information for you so when you visit the site again, it pulls up the information you keyed in.

• Diigo
  A powerful research tool and a knowledge sharing community. You can annotate, archive, and organize. With this tool you can highlight and add sticky notes to web pages.

Tools for Classwork

• Spellchecker
  For those times when you’re not sure how a word is spelled, this is the tool for you.

• Wordweb
  One of the better tools you can use for writing papers. It’s an online, or offline, thesaurus and dictionary. After downloading it you simple press and hold down Ctrl+Alt+W and it puts the word you’re looking to replace in context and gives you helpful suggestions. Available for download for Windows and Mac users.

• PDF Creator
  Need a way to create PDF’s but don’t have the software to do so? This tool is great for creating PDF files.

• Zotero
  An add-on that helps a student keep track of all sources while writing a research paper. It will help prepare a bibliography for Open Office or MS Word. It’s a Firefox extension.