5 Free Computer Applications for College Students

Do you remember a time when you didn't have to write anything down? Tasks just lingered somewhere in your pre-frontal lobe until the they got done? But then life got more complicated with classes, meetings, plans with friends, shows, appointments, work, due dates. Luckily this led to the discovery of writing lists on scraps of paper. Then you got a planner. Then there were multiple planners and lists and calendars. Then writing things down and remembering where to look became just as confusing.

Rather than giving you 5 specific tools that can potentially simplify your life, I am outlining 5 specific types of tools and giving you a few examples. Read about a couple and pick the one that sounds best. I'll admit, the examples are some of my favorites and if they existed when I was in college...well, I would have finished a lot more papers on time, I swear.

The great thing about many of these applications is that they are increasingly interconnected. For instance, Remember The Milk is an online application that allows you to create lists of tasks, but it also lets you set up the program to send reminders about tasks via various other modes such as through your mobile phone, email, instant messenger or iCal.

Two main challenges for college students today are staying organized and sharing content. The applications below address these challenges. They are easy to learn and free. If what you are doing now isn't working, some of these might help.

Organizing
1. References, bibliographies, citations (Word, Zotero)
(okay, Word is not a free application but is there a university in the U.S. that does not provide students with Word?) If you are pretty new to college, Microsoft Word 2007 should be sufficient. When your teacher asks you to create a bibliography citing at least 5 outside sources, the References tab in Word is where you can go to create citations and bibliographies. Click here to see instructions. On the other hand, for more advanced research such as thesis writing where you need to save articles, links to websites, take notes, etc., I recommend Zotero.

2. Bookmarks (Delicious, Google Reader)
In my opinion, Delicious is pretty much the best way to bookmark everything that you find online. Google Reader is also great if you want to keep up with specific journals, newspapers, blogs, etc. It feeds most currently published information to you and then lets you bookmark articles that you want to keep for later.

3. Calendars (Google, Outlook/iCal, Remember the Milk)
Google calendar is nice because you can create multiple calendars and share them with friends. I have Outlook (iCal on a Mac) at work and it syncs with my iTouch (iCal and Outlook are not free but universities typically provide one or the other for free to students). I mentioned Remember the Milk earlier and this is more of a task list than a calendar. It's great for keeping track of deadlines and tasks in a list kind of way and for getting reminders on your mobile device. The ability and necessity to synchronize calendars with mobile devices is going to be huge (if it isn't already) and all of these applications do that in one way or another.

Another key part of college life is sharing. Presentations are a common requirement in classes. Collaboration with classmates is also a big one. A number of applications make it easy to exchange, edit and publish documents online.

Sharing
4. Files (Google Docs, Dropbox, Box.net)
In the post below, I wrote about Dropbox and Box.net. A few days later, I noticed that Google Docs came out with its own version of a file sharing application. One of my favorite features is that you can email links of your uploaded documents and allow people to either just look or even edit without requiring them to have an account in Google. This really lowers the participation barrier.

5. Creating (Flickr, Creative Commons)
Flickr is a way to organize, store and share images. I wrote more about image sharing a few posts down. The Creative Commons allows users to share their content with others by offering an alternative to a restrictive copyright. For instance, I use the Creative Commons License to share my Flickr images. Anyone can use my photographs as long as they don't use them to make money, they attribute my work to me and also share. Creative Commons is the dreamy, idealistic side of the internet where creative content is shared and collaboration thrives. If you want to learn more about CC, take a look at some of these videos.