Tools For Online Learners

Going to school online can be a wonderful experience! Online learning provides great flexibility and increased opportunities by allowing you to manage your schedule in a flexible way. One of the keys to success in learning online is having the right tools in place to make your experience better and decrease the levels of stress often associated with school. Here is a list of some of the best tools available to aid you in your efforts.

Collaboration

Google Drive

Formerly Google Docs, Drive is a great tool for collaborating with classmates. It allows you to work as a group without having to concern yourself with whether you're working on the latest version of your project. Google Drive is accessible from all your devices and offline! Store the first 5 GB of your work for free. As your Google Drive grows, you can get another 25 GB of space (or more!) starting at $2.49 per month.

Join Me

This service requires no installation on your pc or mac, but still provides all the convenience of similar tools that do! It allows you to create public or private meeting rooms for group projects and class discussions. Known for its ease of use, Join Me also has screen sharing capabilities. A free trial is available, so try it out and see if it's for you!

Notemesh

A great tool for sharing class notes. Notemesh allows students to add to existing notes for a particular course or start a new section, making it the most comprehensive overview of course material available.

Voicethread - a conversation in the cloud

A collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam).

Organization

Remember the Milk

An online to-do-list for organizing tasks and improving productivity. Remember The Milk is everywhere you are: from mobile to the web to apps including Outlook, iCal, Gmail, Google Calendar, Twitter, and more.

Todoist

Another option for an online to-do-list, todoist gets great reviews. It's free and accessible offline on your mobile device and online from your computer. Todoist lets you create projects and add tasks to them. Each task can be nested into other tasks. You can also drag tasks around the screen to reorder them easily, as the app is built in HTML5.

Treepad Lite

TreePad Lite is a very intuitive and powerful personal database program. It allows you to store all your notes, e-mails, texts, and hyperlinks in one place. Editing, storing, browsing, searching and retrieving your data can not be easier.

Wridea

Great ideas can come at any time! Wridea is not only a place to store your ideas, but it allows you to organize your ideas by category, and then brainstorm with friends, colleagues, and total strangers online

Note Taking

Evernote

An online searchable note taking tool, Evernote is a free to use, and is a cross-platform universal capture application. It provides support for text, images, audio, tagging, and syncing between its web interface and all of your desktop installations, Evernote offers seamless capturing of information no matter where you are. Notes and images are searchable by text.

Reframe It

A free online application perfect for noting websites. Reframe it creates a space for comments in the right hand margin of any web page.

Springpad

A free online application designed for notetaking. Springpad is flexible, FREE and comes with an integrated to-do list and calendar. Springpad also supplies dozens of templates that help you structure your various notebooks to your specific task or purpose.

Research

Citation Help

Son of Citation Machine helps students properly credit the information they use. The primary goal of this tool is to make it easy for student researchers to cite their information sources. It's user friendly and free!

CiteuLike

A free service for managing and discovering scholarly references. It stores documents you select and allows you to search them later.

iCyte

A great research tool - icyte keeps your webpages, allows you to organize your thoughts and stores your information so when you visit the website again all your information is there.

WriteCheck

WriteCheck, from the makers of TurnItIn, is an anti-plagiarism service for students. WriteCheck checks your paper against sources to help you avoid plagiarism. WriteCheck also does an automatic grammar check on all submitted papers to help you avoid common mistakes in your writing. WriteCheck is not a free plagiarism detecting software. It costs approximately $6.95 USD per 5000 words.

Tools for Coursework

Office 365 University

This tool has the latest version of the applications you know and love, plus cloud services so you can have Office when and where you need it. Allows installations on up to 2 PCs and Windows 8 tablets and Macs under one account. Office 365 University includes the latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, and Access. Plus an extra 20 GB of online storage in SkyDrive (27 GB total) for anywhere access to your documents. All you have to do is sign in! A four year subscription is available to WKU students through the WKU Software Center for $79.99.

WKU Online Writing Center

The Online Writing Center, housed in the English Department, was designed with distance learners in mind, and is open to both graduate and undergraduate students. The Online Writing Center can provide you with the feedback you need. Tutors will talk with you about your writing and help you brainstorm ideas, clarify main points, strengthen logic and support, integrate sources and credit them properly and organize your paper! Feedback includes an audio explanation of the tutor's suggestions as well as written comments.

WKU Online Tutoring

Online Tutoring Sessions are available through The Learning Center at WKU! Whether you are a distance learner, online student, or just feel like working on your courses from the comfort of your own space, Online Tutoring Sessions will provide quality academic assistance for a variety of classes.

gDoc Fusion

This service allows you to combine documents in different formats into a single PDF. Simpply drag and drop the documents you wish to combine. gDoc Fusion allows you to make notes as you go.

Writing.com

Writing.Com is free to join and has more than one-million members! It provides access to a free online writing portfolio, and numerous writing tools.

Wordweb

A great tool for writing papers, Wordweb provides access to a thesaurus/dictionary that can be used to look up words from almost any program. In addition to displaying sense definitions and synonyms, WordWeb can find sets of related words. The database has more than 150,000 root words and 120,000 synonym sets, many proper nouns, pronunciations, and usage tags. WordWeb works off line, but when online you can also quickly view Web references such as the Wikipedia encyclopedia. Available for download for Windows and Mac users. (description from Wordweb Software)

PDF Creator

If you're looking for a way to create PDF’s this tool is perfect. It allows you to create pdfs from almost any document type.

Zotero

Zotero collects all your research in a single, searchable interface. You can add PDFs, images, audio and video files, snapshots of web pages, and really anything else. Zotero automatically indexes the full-text content of your library, enabling you to find exactly what you're looking for with just a few keystrokes. (from Zotero.org) With free and premium subscriptions available, you can't go wrong.

Didn't find what you were looking for? Try Bamboo DiRT - a collection registry of digital research tools for scholarly work.

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