Free Web Services for College Students
Free Web Services for College Students:
Free Web Services Combination for College Students to Increase Study Efficiency and
Reduce Cost
Zhenggang Hu
English 3006 College English Workshop
Professor Martin
June 25,2010
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Free Web Services for College Students
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Abstract
Today’s Internet is so much powerful than the 1990s’. Also today’s digital devices are
almost designed for web-based applications, they have the ability to connect to the web
and run the web-based applications in any place as long as there is network single.
Because of digital devices’ prices are becoming cheaper and cheaper, college students are
putting their daily study materials on those devices such as laptop, netbook, mobile
phones and tablet computers.
This paper is for giving college students an electronic study solution which is consisted of
many free web services that college students can access through their digital devices.
Also it produces a study model to define the scope of the solution to let this paper to be
more specific.
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Free Web Services for College Students:
Free Web Services Combination for College Students to Increase Study Efficiency and
Reduce Cost
Today, lots of people are still using the Internet for doing some e-mail, Web Page
Search Engine, IM Texting tasks. But the fact is, the Internet or the Web is much more
powerful than that, especially when the network becomes everywhere in the city. For
students, the Web can give them more abilities to improve their study experience not just
in the area I mentioned above but also in teamwork, learning, practicing and researching
without spending any money. There are numerous free resources that can be used to
improve students' study experience. But on the other hand, these resources are separated.
It would take a long time to find out which of them are useful. It is necessary to build a
completed solution to students to save their time.
Currently, there is a lack of a comprehensive free web services which are designed
especially for college student and even though there are some of them but they are just
very hard to be found out.
Also, there is a big gap between professional web tools and the college student’s
knowledge base. Some professional web tools are too difficult to use and not easy to find
by students who don’t like to put too much attentions and time on finding these services
and tools. If their friends or teachers don’t tell them, they would never know about those
free and great web services they can use for improving their study life.
For giving readers a more specific and completed solutions, the paper also include a
major section to describe a suitable study model before the solutions. The study model
will show a completely efficiency way to learn things. Then it introduces and analyzes
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those web services to match the study model so my readers can apply those web services
as a combination to the study model easily. Finally, there are some recommendations
about how to maintenance the combination in the future.
STUDY MODEL
In this report, a study model is a list of basic study activities and what student needs
to do while they are doing those activities to success in the college. This study model is
not the only way to learn things and be successful in the college but just one of various
kinds of way.
For creating a web services combination for student to study, the benefit of
introducing a study model before the combination is that people will know about what
kind of specific things the web services will be used in helping student. Also, this study
model covers many basic activities in college studying. Student can improve the web
services combination in the future by referring this study model.
In the following paragraphs, there are five sections which are related to five basic
college study activities: Time management, In the Lecture, Study after Class, Exam
Preparation and Doing Final Project. In each section, besides describing what student
needs to do in the activity to make sure he/she reaches the academia goal of the activity,
there will be some sentences to show what kinds of tools are needed for doing those
activities as well.
A Study Model
Time Management
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If a college student wants to enjoy his/her college life and also being successful in
college, the first thing should be putted on the desk is time management. As Dianna L.
Van Blerkom in her book Orientation to College Learning (1995) explains, good time
management skill is about how you can realize how much time you spend on doing some
fixed things and how much time you have to do things you are planning to do.
Then, in time management, students would do the following things to get their time
right: Marking down the fixed commitments, fixed commitments are like: class, school
activities, meal time and time of sleep. They are those no need to be changed frequently
or not changeable for personal reason things. Finding out the available time for study, it
shows how much time you have except the time for the fixed commitments. Scheduling
study time, find out different time blocks (long and short) for putting study time on them.
Making weekly task sheets, this sheet is for listing the major tasks need to be finished in
the week.
Figure 1 – Study Model (Time Management)
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When students are doing those things in time management, two useful time
management tools for them are: Calendar and Weekly/Daily to do list.
In The Lecture
In a college lecture, student receives knowledge and other type of information from
the lecturer. Sometimes they go to a lecture with questions; sometimes they leave a
lecture with questions. Here are the five basic things they would do in a lecture.
Previewing Course Material, maybe this is not in the lecture, but it is extremely important
for having a good lecture. Also, student will mark down the important things and also
write down something he/she doesn’t know to ask lecturer during the lecture. Lecture
note taking, this is the most important thing to do in a lecture in most types of lectures. A
lecture note can contain many different type of information, text, chart, graphic and
mapping. Cornell format of note-taking is a suggestion, students also need to create their
mind maps, put their notes in outline form. It is almost a whole record of the lecture’s
content. Receiving documents, sometimes lecturer gives students some papers for the
study. Doing Presentation, some classes require students doing some in-class activities.
Handing in assignments, sometime students are required to hand in their printed
assignments in the beginning of the class or after the class.
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Figure 2 – Study Model (In the Lecture)
For student to have a satisfied lecture/class, they need to bring notebook, document
folder and computer disk.
Study after Class
Student knows about how much time is available for studying after classes in the
first section – time management. In the off-class study, here are some basic study
activities for student: Editing Note after lecture, the experience of editing your notes after
lecture is very good for learning things, Van Blerkom (1995) said, “It helps you to correct
errors, clarify meaning, make additions, improve organization and this experience also
helps you to improve your note taking skills”. Reading Course Material and doing
research, sometimes students need to go to find out more information about the topic they
learn in the course material. This type of research activity would be in any different
sources: TV, Magazine, Library and the Internet. Discussing with other students,
discussing things learnt in the lecture between students is a very normal study activity
after the lecture. Doing Assignment, assignment is every student’s essential job.
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Figure 3 – Study Model (Study after Class)
These four things make sure student learn what they want to learn and got what they
need to know for the tests and exams. Tools for study are: course material, research
centers, notebook and assignment folder.
Exam Preparation
For preparing exam, students need to have a clear study plan. Most of the exams
require reviewing course material and notes. Three main things of the study plan need to
be considered for preparing the exam: review, exercise and evaluation. Here is the list of
what student should do during the exam preparation: Making a study plan, as mentioned
above, three main things for an exam preparation: review, exercise and evaluation. This
could be a short or long term plan, a week or the whole semester. Reviewing course
materials includes textbooks, assignment and notes. This step is for collecting knowledge
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about the exam. Also, put them into your brain. Making question cards and using it as
practice tools. As David B. Ellis (1985) mention, putting questions which you think they
would be on the exam is very good for student to re-organize the knowledge points. He
also shows a way of predicting test questions in his book “Becoming a Master Student”
(1985). Either, you can review these questions in anywhere with those small cards.
Figure 4 – Study Model (Exam Preparation)
Notebook, course material folder, calendar, to do list and cards are required in these
activities for preparing exam.
Final Project
College final project could be finished by one student or a group of students. And it
could be very complicated and it takes long time to finish. So, keeping all the things
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organized is very important for the project. Other thing should be considered is
communication between partners. When more than 1 people working together, there will
be many different types of things need to be shared. Keeping information accurate, safe
and recorded during the communication is also very important for the project’s quality.
The following list shows basic things student should do in the final project: Making
project plan. Finding out the goal of the project; organizing jobs for each partner;
scheduling each stage of the project. Doing research and producing project. Brain
storming is how the most projects’ start. Student also uses research center’s resource to
complete their project. Discussing with other partners in each stage of the project, there
will be an evaluation for each stage of the project to make sure the group and the project
are on the right track. Publishing the project, after finishing the project, students need to
choose an appropriate way to publish their final project.
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Figure 5 – A Completed Study Model
Doing team-based task like group project requires very efficient tools: A project resource
folder, communication tool, mind mapping tool and scheduler.
WEB SERVICES FOR THE STUDY MODEL
In this context, web service means some web functions on the Internet that public
users can use throw web browsers or desktop applications. Also, user’s data not only can
be stored on their devices, for example: laptop, desktop computer or mobile phone, but
also can be stored on the Internet, so users can access their data (document, music, photo,
personal information or other types of information) by any digital device as long as it is
connected to the Internet.
There are more and more different types of mobile digital devices appearing
nowadays (2010) and the most obvious future of these devices is that they are ALL
designed for the web. Also, the prices of these devices are becoming lower and lower, as
the result – there are more and more student having these devices. The rule of the whole
IT industry is changing as well. They are going mobile, web-based and cheaper. Student
can easily get their web-devices in almost anywhere in the city. After they had the webhardware, the next thing they need is web-software – web service. Two more things: they
are free and they really bring some cool benefit to college student.
In the following paragraphs, demonstrate which web services can be used in the 5
basic college study activities above. Same as the Study Model, there are the five sections
in it. In each section, it shows what basic study activities the web services are going to
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support. After this, it will introduce the related web services with the activities and
explain why they are being chosen.
Web Services Combination
Web Services for Time Management
Student need to use calendar and weekly/daily to do list to handle their time
planning activities: Marking down fixed commitments, scheduling study time and
making daily/weekly to do list.
Google’s Calendar is a good free web services to replace paper calendar for college
student. As the overview of Google Calendar in its official website says “Organizing your
schedule shouldn't be a burden. With Google Calendar, it's easy to keep track of life's
important events all in one place.” There are 4 reasons of choosing Google Calendar as
one of the time management tools for college students. Firstly, It has all essential
functions of scheduling things: schedule event (fixed and random), event notifications
through email and SMS to your mobile phone, scheduled Task to “To do list”, sync with
other calendar application such as Microsoft Outlook. Secondly, it has a very simple and
easy to use user interface and all the functions on Google Calendar are really fast and
smooth. I can just start using it without reading any kind of instructions. Thirdly, you can
import other digital calendar (iCal or CSV format) into your Google Calendar. It means
you can import your school’s calendar from your school’s website into your Google
Calendar. Also, it supports export your calendar as a “.cal” file so you can transfer your
schedules to other time management application such as Apple’s iCal and Microsoft’s
Outlook. With its event sharing service, you can invite other people to join your event
and share your event schedule to other people. Lastly, you can access your calendar
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through not only your laptop or desktop computer but also other mobile devices such as
mobile phone.
Google Calendar is a very useful time management web service for college student
and all you need is a Google Gmail Account. As we can see more and more students are
using it, it will become a standard of free web services of time management.
The official web address of Google Calendar:
http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/about.html
Web services for Lecture
The most important thing student need to do in a lecture is taking lecture note. As in
the study model that mentioned in the early of this report, students need at least 3 tools
for their lectures: notebook, document folder and computer disk.
A web service called Evernote could be a new note taking solution for college
student. Evernote is a free web note taking and management services combination. You
can use almost any type of computer or other digital devices to access this web service. It
allows you to make your notes with many types of information in a very quick and simple
input way. For example, you can type formatted text, snap photo, insert video, record
voice and put to-do-list into your note, no matter you are using a laptop or a mobile
phone. Also, you can clip a part of a web page into your note or attach document like
DOC and PDF into your note directly. In the lecture, you can just snap a photo from
lecturer’s presentation slide or text and graphics on the blackboard. You don’t need to
care about that you couldn’t search text information in a picture because Evernote
supports printed and handwritten character searching on images. In the side of note
management, Evernote uses “Notebook” to organize your note, you can create different
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notebook for your courses and set them to local only or sync to your Evernote web
storage. In note sharing functions, Evernote supports emailing, printing and exporting
your note so you don’t need to worry about sharing your note with other.
One more big reason to choose Evernote as college student note taking tool is that it
support ink note. This means you can just hand drawing your note as the most natural
way we want and without worrying couldn’t search it on the computer, because Evernote
supports handwriting characters on images.
The official web address of Evernote
http://www.evernote.com/
The next free web service for college student to organize their course material and
document, is Google Docs. You can upload any type of files into your Google Docs
folders so you can keep your course material organized. Google docs is a free online
office, you can create, edit, view, upload and download your document with Google docs.
4 types of documents file you can edit on Google docs: text document, spreadsheet,
presentation slides and drawings. The presentation service is suitable for student to do
presentation in the lecture because it provides rich content editing functions and an easyto-use user interface. Google docs also support viewing documents on mobile device.
Students can review their document in anywhere anytime as long as their mobile phone
can access the Internet.
The official web address of Google Docs
http://docs.google.com/
One more useful free web service for student and teacher to make their
papers/printed assignment easier to be accessed by digital device (laptop and mobile
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phone) is Microsoft Tag. Microsoft Tag is a free web service to create a picture tag which
linked to an URL so you can use your mobile phone to open the URL without typing the
whole URL but just scan the tag by the camera from the mobile phone. In other word,
“Microsoft Tag connects almost anything in the real world to information, entertainment
and interactive experiences on your mobile phone.” Here is a scenario about how it works:
you (a student) just finished your new research report which is an assignment of your
course. And it is on Google Docs, and you also have a presentation about your research.
You use Microsoft Tag to create a tag which linked to a URL of your research report on
Google Docs. You print it on your research report’s paper copies to let your lecturer
access your report’s electronic version on Google Docs and giving suggestion on it
directly, and you also put it on the last slide of your presentation and labeled “For more
information, please check out my report…” so your audients can access your research
paper without type a long URL but using their mobile phone to scan the tag.
The official web address of Microsoft Tag
http://tag.microsoft.com/overview.aspx
Web services for study after class
Study after class is student for reviewing what they have learnt in the class and
finishing their given assignments. For addition, student would like to know more and
deeper on the topic they had in the class.
As in the “Web Services for Lecture” part of this report, Evernote is mentioned to
be a note taking tool. Students can use its global search function to review the important
topics which are discussed in the class. They can use its to-do-list function to mark down
things they don’t understand so they can ask their lecturer in the next lecture.
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There are 3 web services for student to do research on specific topic: Apple’s
iTunes U, Academic Earth and Google Book and Scholar. Apple’s iTunes U has huge
amount of high quality resource, including video, oral presentation and documents. You
can access these academic resources not only by the computer (which installed Apple
iTunes), but also by Apple’s Mobile devices (iPhone, iPod-Touch. Academic Earth is a
website which provides lots of high quality university lecture videos from many famous
universities around the world. Students will find the lectures video are very easy to be
shared. Academic Earth offers citations for each lecture video, so student can use them to
work on their own research. Google Scholar is a web search engine which provides great
amount of academic research papers information. College student can use it to find out
more research documents for their study.
To access iTunes U, you need to install Apple iTunes on your computer.
The official web address of Academic Earth
http://academicearth.org/
The official web address of Google Books and Scholar
http://scholar.google.com/
http://books.google.com/
Web Service for Exam Preparation
There are 3 basic study activities student will do for preparing exam: Making a
study plan, reviewing course materials and making question cards. Students can use the
web service discussed in the early section – Google Calendar to create a study plan. Then,
use Evernote to review the lecture notes. After that, Google Presentation in Google Docs
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can be used to create question cards because it can be viewed on the mobile phone so
student don’t even need to print them out.
Web Services for Final Project
Final project usually require a group of student to finish so students need a powerful
communication tool to overcome issues of information sharing.
One good function for Google Calendar to handle collaboration task is that it can
share calendar and invite people to join the event. So student can use it to organize jobs
for each partner and giving out due dates.
For helping students doing research of a project, bubbl.us provides a web service
for people to create their mind maps, so students can use it while they are doing brain
storming. You can create, edit, share and export their mind-mappings by using the
website and without installing anything.
The official web address of Bubbl.us
http://bubbl.us/
Web communication tool like Google Wave provides a new way of communication.
During the conversation of a group of people, they can share many types of information
in the same conversation channel. Also, their conversation histories would be stored so
the group member can review their conversation content and won’t miss anything.
The official web address of Google Wave
https://wave.google.com
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The last web service for final project is Microsoft Live Mesh. Usually, a project can
contain many files. Google Docs only has 1 GB space for storing documents and other
type of files. Microsoft Live Mesh doesn’t have office functions like Google Docs,
because it is a file synchronizing web services. It provides 5 GB space for storing files.
Once you create a Mesh Folder in your computer, Live Mesh would sync the files in that
folder to the Internet. So, even though you lose your computer or your files being
damaged, you can just download your files from Live Mesh, or just open them by
accessing to Live Mesh’s website. It doesn’t only protect your files by backing them up
to the Internet, it also allow more than one user to access the Folder. So students will
know about when and what their group member has edited, created or deleted in their
project resource folder if they set their project resource folder as Live Mesh folder.
The official web address of Microsoft Live Mesh
http://www.mesh.com
Everything into a Chart
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Figure 6 – Free Web Services for College Student (Completed Chart)
Conclusion
This paper describes a free web services combination and a study model as a
solution for college students to reduce their cost and increase their study efficiency. In the
study model section, it shows those basic study activities including time management,
study after class, in the lecture, preparing for the exam and final project. Then, it uses a
free web services combination to support the study model by matching each study
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activity with one or two free web services. For example: it introduces a web service –
Evernote to support the study activity in lecture – Note taking.
Even though there is a study model to make the web service combination to be a
specific solution for college students, changing is very normal for all the web services on
the Internet. For maintaining this solution, students check their email weekly for
receiving update message from those providers of the web services. It is also important to
find out new useful web services by reading web blogs, magazines or other mediums
which are about students and on-line technology.
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References
About Academic Earth. (2010). Retrieved June 7, 2010, from Academic Earth:
http://academicearth.org/about
About Microsoft Tag - Connecting Real Life and the Digital World using Mobile Barcodes! (2010).
Retrieved June 7, 2010, from Microsoft Tag: http://tag.microsoft.com/overview.aspx
bubbl.us - free web application for brainstorming online. (2010). Retrieved June 7, 2010, from
Bubbl: http://bubbl.us/
Learn More about Evernote. (2010). Retrieved June 7, 2010, from Evernote:
http://www.evernote.com/about/learn_more/
Live Mesh Beta – Overview. (2010). Retrieved June 7, 2010, from Live Mesh:
https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/overview/overview.aspx
Overview of Google Calendar. (2010). Retrieved June 7, 2010, from Google:
http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/about.html
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