Most publications and blogs that cater to students will eventually run an article on how to stay awake during class. They offer (sometimes) valuable advice on getting enough sleep, avoiding all-nighters, using caffeine intelligently, cutting down on sugar, etc. I won’t go into details here, because we may decide to run an article of our own

In this article, I will focus less on preventing classroom catnaps, and instead talk about what to do after you wake up. Because let’s face it: some of us can’t do anything about our sleep schedule without cutting into study time, extra-curriculars, or aspects of our social life that are important to us. We know that we are sleep-deprived, but sometimes we can’t do anything about it. We even fall asleep in classes that we love most, sometimes during the lull between two exciting parts of the lecture. If you are like me, and you know that sleeping better and changing your diet isn’t enough, then it’s important that you master the ability to recover from an episode of classroom catnap.

First, a few words on my experience. I’m in my fourth year of college at a very large public university, with three majors and a minor, and since the beginning of sophomore year I have been notorious for sleeping in classes. Here’s the kicker: my professors still like me, and are willing to help. Well, most of them anyway. And it has nothing to do with the kind of grades that I get.

I have a lot of wonderful friends who are excellent students, and every now and then one of them will call me up to ask what they should do, because they either: A) fell asleep in lecture B) overslept and disrupted the class by showing up thirty minutes late C) slept through an exam. In all three cases, their first instinct as to what they should do is usually wrong.

After literally years of experience sleeping in virtually every class, I have developed my very own standard operating procedure (SOP) for coping with the fallout from a classroom catnap. But before I go on, I want to make it very clear what this strategy will and will not do for you.

This strategy will not help you sleep less in class. It won’t help you learn the material you missed, or get stellar grades on tests. It won’t turn you into some slick talker who can convince your professor to give you an A and the shirt on his or her back.

This strategy will help you limit the damage sustained to your reputation from your nap. Very often in college, especially as you get to the upper-level courses, maintaining a good image in the eyes of your professor is an important part of taking a class. In extreme cases, you may care more about whether the professor likes you and thinks you are bright than you do about whether he gives you an A or a B (I’m thinking here about recommendations for postgraduate study, jobs, and scholarships). But even if it’s “just some class with some old professor”, you will feel far less comfortable going to office hours and asking for advice if you feel that you have antagonized your professor (and he or she will be less likely to go the extra mile when providing help and giving much-needed breaks and extensions).

So, without further ado, I present my SOP (patent pending).

1. Open your eyes. Taking long naps is pushing it. The last thing you want to do is start snoring — there’s no forgiveness for snoring in class! Even if you don’t normally snore, when you are on two hours of sleep for the better part of a week, the odds are against you. I learned this the hard way last year.
2. Make eye contact with the teacher immediately, and offer some kind of facial expression. Whether it’s a smile or a wince, all you want to do is indicate that you are embarrassed.
3. Sit up in your seat, with your back straight. For bonus points, lean forward as if you are intensely interested in what’s on the blackboard.
4. Give yourself a few moments to get your bearings. Then, ask the first semi-intelligent question that comes to your mind. Don’t waste everyone’s time, but don’t worry about being wrong either. Your purpose here is to show your professor that you care. If you are stuck here, questions of the form “Professor, I just want to make sure I have everything right: you said x,y,z just a little while ago” are always an option, especially if you are in a lecture that requires taking a lot of notes.
5. Whatever you do, don’t try to act smart by making a pedantic observation or correcting the professor. This will earn you the disdain of both your professor and your classmates. Just don’t do it. On the other hand, if by some miracle you do have a bright idea that actually contributes to the discussion and/or lecture, do share it. It’s always impressive when someone can wake up and immediately join in on the discussion.
6. If you didn’t get to ask a question, then answer one. If your professor asks for hands, volunteer yourself. Unless you are exceptionally bright, or the class is remedial, you will probably be wrong. Perhaps you’ll be horribly wrong. But that’s okay — you’ve just shown the professor that you want to participate, despite your sleeping problem.
7. This should go without saying, but try to get the missing notes from a friend or neighbor.
8. Careful: this won’t work with every professor. If you don’t plan on keeping in touch with this professor after the class ends, you may want to skip this step. I always do it for all my professors. After class, go up to your professor and wait for the students who are busy sucking up to conclude their business. Then, apologize to your professor for sleeping in class. 90% of the time, your professor will respond by saying “I know, I saw.” When this happens, you will be very glad that you chose to speak with him or her. You have two options now. You can either explain how you enjoy the material but simply can’t help falling asleep, or you can offer fervent promises that it won’t happen again. Be honest, and try to choose the explanation that you think will be consistent with your behavior in the weeks to come

And there you have it. It sounds pretty straightforward — even naive. Perhaps many of you think it won’t work — but it does, as long as you are realistic about what it’s going to get you.

So what do you all think? Anyone have a great story to share about falling asleep in class (I’ve can think of a couple good ones myself..)? As always, feel free to post a comment or email me at (uh oh here comes to spam): info@studenthelpforum.com

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You know what I’m talking about — you started reading something great, bookmarked it, and then when you went looking for it two months later the only thing you can find is 404 Page Not Found? Or maybe you found it, but now the website wants you to fork over some cash in order to see it?

I hate emailing myself a link, or bookmarking it, only to learn later that the material is off-limits. The biggest culprit was the New York Times. Until recently, they would charge you for access to articles that were more than 10 days old. That meant that if I read a great editorial and the topic came up during a discussion with someone two weeks later, I couldn’t send him the link (how many students pay to read archived news?).

But there were other sites too - for instance, a couple of years ago, Poynter.org ran an amazing article series called Fifty Writing Tools. It was the best writing advice I’d ever received, and I bookmarked the index page so that I could come back to read it again and again. A few months ago, I went back to Poynter to find that half of the links were broken. I wish I could have saved those articles somewhere, and shared them with some of my friends who are aspiring journalists. (Incidentally, in writing this article I went back to Poynter and was absolutely delighted to find that the writing tips are back in the form of podcasts. Check them out at http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=78&aid=103943).

Digg and del.icio.us are fantastic social bookmarking sites, but they don’t allow you to save your own copies of a web page.

Yahoo! introduced a very handy resource for bookmarking pages a couple of years ago. It’s part of Yahoo! MyWeb, which is still in Beta - I guess they were taking a page from the book of Google, no pun intended. (Alright, maybe a little.)

Head over to http://myweb.yahoo.com, and once you’ve signed up, click on My Bookmarks. Since you’re just starting out, you don’t have any bookmarks. So let’s add one. On the MyWeb banner with the search box, find the link for Add Page. When you click it, a pop-up window will open up asking you for the url of the page and some other details. I took a screenshot of my own MyWeb Bookmarks page, with the window open.

As you can see, it is possible to set both public and private access levels. However, the option we are most interested in appears all the way at the bottom, in the form of a checkbox next to “Store a copy of this page.” Fill out the form, making sure that this option is checked.

When you submit the page, you’ll see something like the display in the background of my screenshot, in the main browser window. As you can see, I have saved four articles (more, actually), and for three of those articles I have added the note “For use in blog”. I got tired of linking to articles only to have them moved to paid archives (see earlier rant about New York Times). Those dates say 2008 but they are actually 2005 (I edited something small so it updated the date). If you click the titles, you will be taken to www.nytimes.com. However, if you click the little link that says “My saved copy” that I’ve circled in red, you’ll be taken to this page. Isn’t that cool?

Some convenient toolbars for your browser are available here. And if you want to use Yahoo! MyWeb for your social bookmarking, you can share saved pages with friends and colleagues under the My Contacts tab. You’ll have to add a contact first, but after that you can share easily. Try it out — my user is sadp182.

I use MyWeb occasionally to bookmark my favorite articles, to save a link when I’m putting it up on my blog, and for saving internet-based references when I’m doing research and need to be able to come back later. I hope you’ll find it useful as well!

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1. without re-writing notes, students may forget vital pieces of information as well as what abbreviations and other marks mean
2. re-writing your notes helps you memorize and understand the information you copied during the lecture, the best way to memorize a lot of information is in small pieces over a long period of time
3. if you have questions about things you’ve heard in lecture, re-writing your notes may either help you understand what they were, or point them out clearer, encouraging you to ask about them during the next lecture
4. while you are re-writing your notes, you are also able to re-organize them, put them in a format that works best for your learning style; visual learners can add color-coding and diagrams, auditory learners should read the notes aloud a few times, and kinesthetic learners (me!) learn by re-writing notes into outline formats
5. a note on outline formats: each main point should be on its own line, details for the point should be indented to the right. A fantastic way to either learn or set up an outline is to use a word-processing program’s “bullets & numbering” feature; hard returns and indentations create the next appropriate character for outlines
6. oftentimes, professors speak too quickly for a student to get all the notes written out; by re-writing your notes, you are able to fill in those blanks that you may have had to leave during lecture. The details are still fresh in your mind and you will be able to clarify them sooner. All of the abbreviations that you create during class should be spelled out and explained while re-writing your notes.
7. re-writing your notes prepares you for your next class, reminding you of what you were to learn in previous lectures and cementing the foundations
8. one thing I’ve found particularly helpful in many classes is writing out a short “summary” of the lecture at the end of each set of daily notes. Then, when I go back to study for the exam, I am able to paste all of these summaries together and read a page-long essay about what I was supposed to learn.

It helps best if a student can re-organize and re-copy their notes within 24 hours of the lecture, but if that cannot be done, then at least do it before the final few lectures, just in case you have any leftover questions or misunderstandings. Research shows that 80% of new material can be recalled if you review your notes within one day of presentation.

Want to bring those test grades up? Want to impress your classmates with your typed study guides? Re-write those notes daily and cement things sooner rather than later!

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Don’t surf the internet on study time.

Some buildings on my campus don’t have wireless. I remember being stuck inside the Political Science department once in a rainstorm. My class was still hours away, but I decided to hole up in an unused classroom with my laptop rather than brave the heavy rain.

At first, I didn’t have anything to do. My routine is to check my gmail, then read some news, then check my gmail again, then my RSS Reader, then more gmail. After that, I do some work, and check gmail again. (Does this sound familiar?)

With no internet, I couldn’t check my gmail, and the whole process was stopped before it started. Then, a miracle happened. Wanting desperately to avoid boredom, I started working on the first thing I could find — and finished, rather quickly. Then I found something else, finished it, and moved onto a third task. By the time class started, I had finished three rather unpleasant tasks that I had been putting off for weeks.

Since that incident, I’ve taken myself off the internet on a number of occasions, and it has resulted in productivity gains every single time. One of the secrets to being productive is to schedule uninterruptible periods. Even if you are working diligently most of the time, the thirty second break to check email or facebook can set you back as many as five or six minutes when you consider the time spent getting re-focused.

“Very well,” you may be saying to yourself, “but what if I need the internet for my work? Is there any way I can have the best of both worlds?”

It turns out that there is. Invisibility Cloak is a Greasemonkey script written by Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani. It allows you to create a blacklist of sites and specify a time period during which they will be blocked. For instance, you can block *.facebook.com and youtube.com between 12:00 AM and 8:00 PM, which means that your browser will prevent you from accessing that page except for four hours at night.

You can configure the script in Firefox by going to Tools => Greasemonkey => Manage User Scripts, and selecting Invisibility Cloak from the menu on the left.In order to change the period, you will need to edit the Javascript file with an editor (Notepad works just fine). Just click the Edit button in the lower left hand corner on the pop-up window and it will open the associated Javascript file. Find the following four lines:

// EDIT THE NEXT LINE TO SET THE HOUR AFTER WHICH SITES SHOULD APPEAR
// HOURS IN MILITARY TIME, SO 15 = 3PM
var surf_time_after = 15;
// END EDIT

Edit the value of surf_time_after as per the instructions, save, and go back to Firefox. If you want, you can also change the message that appears when you try to access a blocked site. I changed it to something rather derogatory. Here’s the line you need to alter. Just change the text inside the parenthesis (keep the quotation marks).

alert(”You can surf after “+ readable_time + “; right now, get back to work!”);

Do give this script a spin - it works remarkably well, even though there is a very simple way to disable it (if enough people want to know how to do this, I will post an answer in the comments). Also, if you have anything to add on the subject of going offline to increase productivity, please feel free to comment for the benefit of other readers. I’m also an avid comment reader, so I look forward to it as well.

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The 5 Things You Actually Need At College

1. A Calendar
Like I mentioned before, bringing and then using a calendar is one absolute needs at college. Whether you use it to write all your assignment due dates and your test times, or just the frat parties and sorority events that you’re attending, it will come in hand either way. I recommend getting a white board calendar so that you can change it every month, add to it and erase from it when you need to.

2. Flip Flops
Unless you want to end up with strange foot fungus, add flip flops to your list of must-haves! I had a pair I would wear specifically (and only) for showering. I also had a pair that I would wear down to the laundry room, a pair that lived in a plastic bag in my gym bag (for the gym showers) and a pair that I would wear around randomly for comfort and ease. Flip flops are $2 a pair and you can get them in color; these things are a necessity! $10 will save your feet!

The next three things were things I forgot, but bought within weeks because they were that important and useful!

3. Duct Tape
Window won’t stay open? Duct tape it! Window won’t stay closed? Duct tape it! Notebooks falling apart from being dragged around everywhere? Duct tape it! I am telling you, duct tape will fix anything! You can buy it in multiple colors (although I am partial to the original grey) and it’s not expensive. Invest in duct tape!

4. A Cushion
You’re going to be spending a lot of time on your rear-end in college, and unless you spend a huge chunk of change on a specific chair for your room, studying is going to make you hurt. Get a $4 chair cushion at Target or Bed Bath & Beyond and use it. If you’re really feeling adventurous, buy a waterproof cushion and take it with you to the football games. I even saw a woman once pull a cushion out of her messenger bag in class and use it in a lecture hall! There is no wrong time for a cushion.

5. Ear Plugs
Even if your roommate doesn’t snore, it’s helpful to have a pair of ear plugs. Maybe you need to study in silence and your neighbors are being loud, maybe you’re headed to a bar and you know the band is going to be incredibly loud, maybe you really don’t want to hear the professor’s lecture; a pair of ear plugs can help out in many situations. Other things my friends told me that they would have been better off having included: a minimal first aid kit, your own caffeine source, a strong book bag, multi-colored pens, work ethic (not something you can drop $3.49 on, by the way), a good dictionary and a laptop instead of a desktop computer. Your list may differ, but I assure you, that with the five things on my list (along with your own essentials) you can start off the year (or the term) in a great position!

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My university has a first year program that is designed to help freshmen become accustomed to the college experience. We have a triad of classes that are intertwined. There’s a large political science or psychology class, a smaller composition class and a small seminar class. The science/psych class is a normal large lecture, with about 150+ students, but the others have 25. The coursework is similar and the seminar class is designed to help students with any questions they have and to help prepare for a successful academic career.

My school believes their award-winning first year program helps students and it’s been in use for almost ten years. Texas State University, Ohio State University and the University of Georgia are among schools that have similar programs. While I haven’t researched in great detail the programs of other colleges, I can give you first hand knowledge of the one at my school (name protected for my privacy).

It is designed for students who will not otherwise succeed in college. All classes and instructors in the first year program do not grade or teach on a college level. The classes are on an upper (think Advanced Placement) high school level. For students that do not need to be babied, this program is a waste of time and money. Yes, it’s nice to get easy A’s (assuming you do the work), but it gets you used to easy coursework. Upper classes in college are not easy. Sometimes you will find easier, smaller classes, but for the most part, once you get into your major, you will have to work much harder.

It decreases freshmen dropout rates…

But it increases sophomore dropout rates. These programs get freshmen think college is easy and they can skate by without doing any real work like in high school. Students that otherwise would have dropped out to find a job will stay longer and spend more money only to find out they were misinformed and end up leaving the next semester, when classes get tougher.

These programs do not prepare students for the real world. When you get a job, unless you are the luckiest person alive, your boss is not going to give you a grace period to mess up. He’ll give you the real work on day one. You’re lucky if you get an hour to figure out your way around the office.

High school was the transition into college. Junior and senior year of high school are supposed to get students prepared to enter the workplace or attend a university. Students take advanced placement and honors courses to get used to the type of classes they will encounter in college. AP classes at most public schools are not hard enough, but they’re much better than regular curriculum. Why have another year of that? And why pay an incredible amount of money for it?

Currently, my university does not allow freshmen to opt-out of the first year program, but I wish they did. If you have to participate in the first year program at your university, enjoy the easy work while you can because you’re in for an awakening your sophomore year.

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Second, let’s get down to business!

If you’re anything like me, once finals week is over, your brain shuts down until about a week into the next term’s classes. However, over this winter break, I’d like to challenge you to keep thinking; start thinking about next term, and how you’re going to push yourself to do even better in it.

My first suggestion on how to improve yourself in the new year & the new term is:

USE A CALENDAR

Whether you choose to use a paper calendar, or Google’s wonderful calendar application, write things down, keep track of where you’re supposed to be and when you’re supposed to be there, and then celebrate as you cross things off your list!

I use my calendar to plan telephone calls, to make doctor’s appointments, to keep track of my work schedule, to remind myself I have a blog entry due (or blog inspirations), to write down lunch dates with friends, and even to write myself notes about how my day went.

When you have big events that you need preparation, pre-reminded yourself! I write down my finals during the first week of classes, and then one week before the final, I write “PHE 355 Final – 1 week!” and high-light it to remind myself that it’s coming up.

If it’s your thing, I’ve found that color coding my calendar is incredibly helpful. I have a colors for school, for work, for blogs, for WEGOHealth (where I am a community leader), for photography, for exercise and for personal stuff. It’s a bright looking calendar and even when there’s a lot of stuff going on, at least it’s shown in fun colors!

On paper calendars, sometimes it’s hard to write about your “to-do’s” in detail, but I recommend you write down all the details (address, contact name & information, things you may need to bring, etc) when you’re writing on your calendar. I often keep paperclips in my day planner so I can attach things to the days that they belong with as well.

Another tip that I have, which comes in handy for students is to write down all the family birthdays or anniversaries you need to remember when you first get a blank calendar. Most of us get calendars when we’re home for the holidays and since your mom is most likely to be right there, have her help you out. This will help you remember to send Grams a birthday card and remind her how great she is!

While it may seem daunting to use a daily calendar to keep track of your life, I promise you that in the long run, it will pay off and you will be incredibly pleased (not to mention organized) with the results!

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Students have a lot of needs when it comes to technology, and thankfully, there are free solutions to most of them. From security to socializing, I’m going to walk you through the essential software for students to keep their schoolwork and schedules on track.

Security

AVG by Grisoft makes an excellent suite of anti-malware software. There are three programs in the suite: AVG Anti-Virus Free, AVG Anti-Spyware Free, and AVG Anti-Rootkit Free. They work well, update automatically, and you don’t have to worry about your subscription - and your protection - running out.

As for a firewall, ZoneAlarm is a great choice, free for personal and charitable use. When a program tries to access the internet, ZoneAlarm pops up a message requesting access – if you don’t know whether to allow it or not, ZoneAlarm will offer advice about what to do.

Web Browsing and Email

For web browsing, you should get Mozilla Firefox. It’s free, it has thousands of extensions to do anything you could possibly want to do with a web browser, and it has security features built in. If you don’t do anything else, get rid of Internet Explorer. It’s a magnet for viruses, spyware, and just about every other kind of security problem that exists.

While you’re switching to Firefox, check out Mozilla Thunderbird for email. It does everything Outlook does, and like Firefox, has great extensions and built-in security.

Office Applications

Eventually, you’re going to need to write something, or create a spreadsheet. Instead of paying $300 for Microsoft Office, get OpenOffice. It does everything that Microsoft Office does, and it’s completely free.

Likewise, why settle for the restricted features of Adobe’s Acrobat Reader? Get Foxit Reader instead – it’s faster, it lets you do things Acrobat doesn’t, and it’s free.

At some point, you’re probably going to want to do some image editing. You can shell out hundreds for Adobe Photoshop, or you can get The GIMP, a free, open-source alternative. GIMP can be a bit less intuitive, but once you learn to master it, there’s not much you can’t do with it.

Calendar

If you’re going to keep your schedule together, you’ll need a calendar. Paper calendars are great, and it’s a good idea to have one for those times when you can’t get to your online one. However, there are a lot of positives to online calendars: email and text-message reminders, guest invitations and RSVPs, group sharing, and of course, being able to access it anywhere in the world. When it comes to online calendars, Google Calendar is my favorite.

If you like having a desktop calendar program, I recommend getting a Google Calendar account and downloading Mozilla Sunbird, a full-featured calendar program that integrates well with GCal. If you’re using Thunderbird for email, you can get Lightning, a great calendar extension for Thunderbird.

Chatting

There are a lot of great services out there for chatting. MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and Google all have their own services. If you’re using them all, you should consider a multi-service client like Pidgin.

You can log into all your IM accounts through Pidgin and save the system resources used by running several different clients.If you want the ultimate in chatting, though, you should go for Skype. Not only does Skype provide user-to-user and group chats like the other programs, but it offers free user-to-user VOIP phone calls. You can even have large conference calls with groups of Skype users, anywhere in the world. Skype also offers plans that allow you to call landline phones, and to receive calls from landlines; in some cases, you can have your whole year’s phone service for less than you’d spend for two months with regular phone service.

Online Applications

There are some great online applications out there for students as well. Google offers a whole library of services, including Google Scholar, Google Book Search, Google Earth, Google Translate, and the previously mentioned Google Calendar.

For note-taking, NoteSake is an excellent online application. NoteSake lets you take your notes online, share them with others, collaborate with groups, organize them, and even provide copies to others who weren’t in class.

If you’re learning a foreign language, Mango provides free online language courses. You can choose from eleven different languages, with more to come. Mango is a beta release, however, so don’t be surprised if you find the occasional cucaracha.

Justin Ryan is a freelance writer and technology consultant. He is the News Editor for LinuxJournal.com and a regular blogger for Wisebread.com, where he writes on technology, personal finance, and savvy living.

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Facebook has become a major distraction for university students around the world. There is just so much happening at any one time that all thoughts of assignments and study get thrown out the window. This has happened to me on many occasions. But there are some applications you can use to help increase your productivity, and get more things done in the long run. Instead of writing messages to friends, turning people into vampires, and throwing food at others, these Facebook apps are some of the best on the web. For educational purposes that is:

1. Class Notes - If you happen to miss a lecture, then the class notes application may save you a lot of time and effort. This is basically a directory of photos of class notes, lecture notes, and anything else that was displayed at your courses. So, you just have to hope that someone has uploaded the information you are missing, but with over 1700 users that may be very likely.
2. Cheap Textbooks - All students wish they could spend less money on textbooks, and with the ever increasing cost and size of textbooks, a way to reduce this cost will become very popular. In comes Cheap Textbooks. Simply type in the title of your book and you will be shown the compared costs between over 30 online bookstore. This could save several hundred dollars a semester. And who said Facebook was a distraction!
3. Hey Math - Throughout the world most people consider maths to be their most hated and hardest subject. It can be so complicated that you are completely lost, but it can also be logical and rational. With the Hey Math widget you can finally start to understand some of the most difficult mathematical concepts. Hey Math is a library of mini movies that “visually explain hundreds of difficult maths concepts.”
4. Zoho - Zoho Online Office allows you to collect all of your documents, spreadsheets and presentations in one place online. From here you can share them with friends without needing an offline copy. With this app you will never again be restricted by the difficulty of emailing your work around. I think I will keep an offline backup as well though… just in case.
5. Ask Questions, Get Answers - If you are having difficulty with any of your uni work, then using this application, simply type in your question and sit back and relax as you wait for any answer. Basically, Ask Questions, Get Answers allows you to post questions and answers to anyone in the Facebook community. A great time saver, but only if there is someone who knows the answer.
6. Easy Bibliography Generator - Have you ever been concerned with which format of bibliography and references to do? There are dozens of different styles that could be used, and are needed depending on the scenario. Thankfully, this Easy Bibliography Generator can format your references into MLA, APA, Chicago, and Turabian. This can be a time saver, but only if the format you need is there, otherwise you are on your own!
7. Notely - Notely is possibly one of the best student based online tools available, and it is now on Facebook. This system is a virtual homepage for any university student. It allows you to post to-do lists and shows which ones need to be done first. You can upload notes, write notes, set up a calendar, and pretty much anything else that you have ever wanted in one place. With this single application you can transform Facebook from a distraction into a study hub!
8. Docs - Simply put, Docs is a library of uploaded schoolwork. There are over 50,000 documents available from lecture notes, to problem questions and everything in between. Even though they claim to try and deal with plagerism, I have no doubt that there would be a significant quantity of that going on within this app, yet with nearly 10,000 users I’m certain that there is a lot of useful information available.
9. Scholarium - Scholarium is a combination of several other applications into the one system. You can view your friends timetables, rate your professors/lecturers, and find classmates with who you share courses. This could be very powerful, but it is still quite new and has yet to gain much momentum.
10. To Do List - A simple, and yet powerful tool for any student. You can add to your To Do list, see which ones are approaching, and cross them off when completely. While this is a great start for any student, I do not see why there needs to be a facebook application for it. Surely it can be done much easier just with a pen and a piece of paper.

As you can see there are dozens of great applications to turn your facebook profile into a machine of productivity and achievement. The only problem is that these to could become distractions. At least you now have an excuse for spending mass amounts of time there!

It is true that there are dozens, if not hundreds of distracting applications on facebook that can make you forget about assignments, ignore exams, and skip classes. I know this from experience… a lot of experience! Actually, it seems like I spend a lot more time on there than I should, and the problems are these three applications:

1. Roshambull - A massive online Paper, Scissors, Rock competition with over 100,000 players. You can bet on each game, and eventually build up your credits. The main part of the game is to increase your rankings by beating your friends, as well as dozens of random players. I am currently the number #1 in my university, and in the top 500 in the world.
2. Vampires - Build your vampire by attacking other vampires, and increasing your vampire army. This can get very addictive, especially if you start to get into the higher levels. This app also has over 150,000 vampires, so you are never short of an opponent.
3. Pirates vs Ninjas - Who would win, a pirate or a ninja? This is one of the lifelong questions that everyone will ask themselves from time to time. I am a ninja man myself, but pirates are not far behind.

So, in conclusion. If you want to increase your grades, add the first 10 applications, and stay away from the last 3 applications. This is one of the major battles that any student will face, but you must stay strong, and focus on your studies. Stay motivated and determined!

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This is another part of The Student Productivity Week. For the full list of articles see the overview, or at Scholastici.us.

Textbooks. No matter what way you look at them, they are a pain. They are heavy, expensive, and hard to understand. Everyday I see people struggling around their universities piled under a load of huge books.

This does not have to be anymore, thanks to the internet.

There are now a large collection of books available directly over the internet – no heavy lifting, no large debts. Simple!

The hardest part is to find these places, but look no further. Here is a list of the most important, easiest to access, and in general the best sites on the web. Here are Books on the Web:

Classics in the History of Psychology – Containing over 25 full books, and hundreds of articles, if you are a psych student you will never be lost again. For example, say you are looking for information about Sigmund Freud. Simply type in his name, and there you have it:
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams, and many more. All in full text for you to read instantly.

The Online Books Page – This is a directory of places you can download texts from. For example, type in Jane Austen, and there are dozens of places from which you can view the full works of Jane Austen. There is just so much information available at a click of the mouse.

eBrary.com – With more than 20,000 books, eBrary is virtually the perfect online book source. Unfortuantly, it does have a $5 sign up fee, but surely that is worth the price. Rather than purchasing textbooks, there can be a major saving for this online library. For my own sake I typed in the keyword ‘Thermodynamics’ and there were over 1500 results!

Google Books – Google had the bright idea of trying to insert every single book ever written onto the internet, unfortuantly they have not quite met my expectations. You are only allowed to view a view select pages of any one book, before being forced to buy it to see the rest. There are only a select few whose copyrights have expired, and you are allowed to download for free.

Project Gutenberg – Any book thats copyright has expired is available for free download from Project Guenberg. Some of the most popular books of all time are available here, as well as hundreds of others. With more than 20,000 free books, it is no surprise that some of them include Pride and Prejudice, Ulysses, Huckleberry Finnk, and The Iliad!

Hopefully this list will allow you to save several hundreds of dollars every year, especially if you are studying English Literature or something similar. Forget about lugging huge books to every class when there is such an easy and cost effective method available.

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