College Life: Resources and Tips for College Students

Online Education Database has a College Basics section full of articles with Web sites and tips to help you succeed in college. Find alternatives to some generic Web tools along with advice about study habits, finance and college life.

MyNoteit is more than just a free online note-taking application. Sure, you can create an account, add your classes and use the note-taking feature to take and save notes on the site. But you can also upload notes you've taken in offline documents (such as Word or Notepad), keep track of upcoming assignments, access your notes via mobile phone, search the text of your notes and ask questions of the MyNoteit community through message boards.

Clipmarks lets you save and share the best sections of Web pages. Unlike other social bookmarking tools, Clipmarks stores only the section of the site that you want (a paragraph, a word, whatever). It's a good way to store or share important bits of Web research.

i-Lighter is a free highlighter for the Web. Not only can you highlight sections of Web pages, you can also make notes on pages, e-mail pages complete with highlights and notes to friends, and tag your page to a Delicious account or to your i-Lighter folder.

EasyBib is a free online tool that lets you choose the type of resource you want to cite. It then prompts you to fill in the necessary citation information and automatically creates a list that you can save or print.

OttoBib only needs you to enter the ISBN of a book and it creates a full citation.

Zotero is a free Firefox extension that gathers citation information, full text, Web pages and images from sites as you browse.

TutorLinker.com is a quick way to find out if there is a tutor in your area. Just enter your complete address and you'll see a Google map with a little icon for your home and then icons of tutors nearby. Hover your mouse over a tutor to get more information; click on the tutor to get a detailed profile, with hourly rate and area of expertise, along with contact information.

SparkNotes offers free, short and very specific study guides on a wide variety of topics in subjects including history, film, literature, math, language and more. SparkNotes also has a variety of printable charts and reference materials as well as test prep materials and college application tools. Access content online for free, or pay a small fee per document to download and print for offline reference.

The New York Times' Knowledge Network is full of news articles of interest to college students. Browse the Student Resources" box on the right for more relevant features.

RateMyProfessors.com allows you to rate or read ratings of professors at your school. These ratings can be helpful because they provide anonymous and at times very blunt evaluations of a professor (not what you're going to get on the professor evaluation slips that most schools use for official purposes). Keep in mind, however, that because students can rate professors anonymously, some ratings might be heavily influenced by personal feelings (positive or negative) rather than typical student experiences.