Instructify

Beyond Wikipedia: 20 References You Can’t Do Without – Wikipedia is always a great place to get started on researching a subject, but you can never fully rely on just the information found there. Daily Revolver presents this list of general and subject specific sites and resources to aid you and your students in research.

6 Great Money Saving Tips for Students on a Budget – We all love money, despite its evil nature. Unfortunately for many young adults, the stereotype of being a “starving student” might be all too real. TextLister.com brings us this quick list of tips to cut down on spending superfluously – something we all could probably benefit from.

25 Articles Every Student Should Read – If you are into “hacking” (and I don’t mean enjoying your winter cough) you will probably know most of these ideas already, but check out this list anyway. The article, via StudyHacks, helps those of us who might be looking to tap into that unused part of our brain that helps us, um, think better or something.

Top 10 Web Tools for College Students – OK, so maybe these are directed at college students, but most of the tools here can be used by students of any age. My favorite is Cramster – surprisingly, a homework help forum, not a crocodile/hamster hybrid. Oh well. Thanks Campus Squeeze.

50 Ways To Boost Your Brain Power – So, many of the tips on this list are great, but others are just common sense. Out of the 50, there are quite a few that will help you and your gray matter – choose wisely and avoid the contradictions though. “Drink Red Wine” or “Cut Alcohol Consumption” – you decide. From 4Mind4Life.com. – JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Photo credit: JCKham on flickr

As your students start to get college acceptance letters, they’re probably trying to figure out how they’re going to pay for the next four years of school. If your students are stressing about an expensive education, have them check out Campus Grotto‘s advice on how to avoid a lifetime of crushing education debt.

The article focuses on the various types of student loans, and what to watch out for. Campus Grotto advises using federal loans before turning to privatized lenders. Federal loans have more borrower protection, and are easier to get for families who don’t have perfect credit.

No matter how they pay for it, your kids’ college education will cost them a big chunk of money. Make sure they read up on the subject so they can make informed decisions. -BILL FERRIS

Student Debt in America via Campus Grotto

Are your students freaking out about their SAT scores? Before they spend a bundle on SAT preparation materials, have them frequent the College Board’s SAT Question of the Day. Every day they’ll get hit with questions just like they’ll see on the tests. If they create a free user account on the College Board site, they can keep track of their results. To make things even easier, RSS feeds and email can deliver the questions directly to their computers, so they won’t have to muck about with filters and firewalls.

For more review, check out their SAT Practice Questions in Critical Reading, Mathematics and Writing. Note: on the main page, they’ll see a lot of products with price tags. Though more review never hurts, they can still get some practice with the freebies listed above. And when in doubt, their local library will probably have SAT review books available. So while the SAT test is expensive, studying for it doesn’t have to be. -BILL FERRIS

SAT Question of the Day

SAT Practice Questions

Words… I love them! I’ll take crosswords or curse words, word play or word-of-the-day; in lines, on lists, or out of lips, I just get a kick out of them. For this reason, a good friend of mine, who has recently started student teaching, thought I might be a good person to ask about fun ways to teach word roots to her high school classes. She was wrong. At first my answer was, “aren’t word roots like inherently fun?” Thinking I owed her something more useful, I figured I’d turn to one of my other great loves (the Internet).

The coolest thing I found was an SAT prep game at Quia.com. This game has Jeopardy-style, one- or two-player games for an impressive array of subjects – one of them being word roots. The game is actually quite difficult if you attempt it unprepared, but if your students are studying the roots that the game uses, then it would be about right. -MARIELLE PRINCE

SAT Word Game via Quia

The Online Education Database has hundreds of free online courses for your perusal– 200 to be exact. The database has compiled a list and description of these courses to help hopefuls such as yourself to be able to learn the things you didn’t know already. Who has the time to visit the learning annex every Wednesday night just to listen to some old stiff coat ramble on about modern poetry? If your work and home life don’t allow you to go out and do such stuff, then sit in front of the computer and use the power of the internet to guide you toward knowledge.

The database is broken up into several categories that might sound vaguely familiar such as Math, Science, Language Arts, and Health. The real gems lie in the categories such as Theology, Business and Finance, and Social Sciences. The courses themselves are from real universities and colleges such as The University of Notre Dame, Utah State University, and Tufts University to name a few. If you’ve got some spare time at home, and you can’t swing going back to school, this might be a great option. Send your students to this site, too, if they don’t have too much homework already, that is. – JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Online Education Database

Top 5 Open Source Wiki Engines – Wikis are Web 2.0 incarnate, but they can also seem a bit overwhelming at times. TechCorner gives us these five open source resources for manageable wikis. Be careful of the atrocious grammar in this article though. Too bad the article isn’t a wiki you can edit yourself.

Top 10 Underhyped Webapps – Lifehacker presents these webapps (some of which we’ve touched on here before, including Jott) so you can make your online life as simple as it should be. Some of my favorites include Meebo and Remember the Milk.

11 Tips to Carve Out More Time to Think – Lifehack is the source for life management, and they don’t relent when it comes to bringing great articles like this one to help you deal. These tips include such gems as Walk, Talk, and Type.

50 Inspirational Quotes to Make You Think – via Goal Setting College – While we’re already thinking about thinking, delve into these quotes to give you something to think about. These quotes from such legendary thinkers from history such as Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, and Confucius will have your brain exploding with deep thoughts. Unfortunately, Jack Handy is nowhere to be found.

10 Ways to Green Your Bathroom – Luckily for mother Earth, being green is still in. There are ways we can all do our part to get in on the action, and there are chances to conserve and reduce in almost every area of our lives. Tiny Choices presents these ways you can do your part even when it comes to the nitty-gritty of the grittiest of places – the bathroom. Give one or more of these a try – maybe even recycled toilet paper (not as gross as it might sound). –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

photo via pualv or flickr

Graduation comes in only a few months, and your precious youngsters are about to make the harsh transition from parent-subsidized affluence to scrounging up change for laundry they should’ve washed weeks ago. They’re ready for college classes, but can they juggle homework and a 20-40 hour a week job?

Do your soon-to-be cash strapped students a favor and tell them about Software for Starving Students. It’s a bundle of great programs you probably already know about like Open Office, Audacity, Firefox, plus stuff you might not have heard of like PDFCreator (you get three guesses what this does), and Blender, a 3D graphics program. Everything is free, and students can get it all in one easy download, rather than jumping from site to site to download the apps.

The software is available for both PC and Mac users. FYI, the download is in .img format for CD burning, so you’ll need a CD burning program to install it (there’s one included in the download, for all the good that will do you).

The only problem with most of this free software is that the people who need it don’t know it exists. With Software for Starving Students, your kids can get a bundle of useful programs in one shot and still have money to wash their whites. –BILL FERRIS

Software for Starving Students

Related Stuff:

Ditch Microsoft Office: OpenOffice Provides a Free Office Suite

Lifehack comes to the rescue once again by providing this useful and succinct article that suggests that studying less and learning something right the first time around is more beneficial than repeating and reviewing information over and over again. In ‘How to Study Less by Learning Things Once’ writer Scott Young helps readers to imagine the brain as a structure full of holes, and that by reviewing study material over and over, we are really just putting a band-aid over a sieve.

A student himself, Young seems as good a candidate as any to write about effective study habits. He breaks the process into steps, offering guidance along the way and giving tips on how to maintain the techniques that work best for you. Some are merely mnemonic devices that we should all know by now, but there are other bits of wisdom such as ‘your brain is not a computer,’ that will help learners rethink their study habits. Students can surely benefit from the steps here, and they might even stop blaming you when they claim to be ‘tired from studying ALL night’. –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

How To Study Less by Learning Things Once

The Hundred Greatest Theorems– There’s a top 100 of just about everything nowadays. Now, it’s time you geometers and algebrainiacs had your turn. According to the site, the ranking is based on “the place the theorem holds in the literature, the quality of the proof, and the unexpectedness of the result.”

The Hundred Greatest Theorems

The Seven Blunders of the World – Mahatma Gandhi was known as one of the wisest spiritual leaders of all time, and he didn’t get to be revered without saying and doing some pretty great things. Here is a list of his Seven Blunders of the World presented by Dr. Hugo. My favorite: “Politics without principle.” Heh.

Dr. Hugo

64 Interview Answers You Need to Know – CrackInterview.info offers this extensive list to assure you’ll be prepared for the next time you have to be on the answering end of an interview. Some of the questions here are no-brainers, others you might have never even considered, like “Why aren’t you earning more money in this stage of your career?”

Crack Interview

10 Do’s and Don’ts for Your Statement of Purpose - Getting into grad school is hard enough as it is– luckily, Accepted.com presents this list of things to include and exclude from your statement of purpose when applying to the schools of your choice. When you’ve got a lot to say, you should know what not to say, too.

Accepted.com

100 Kick-butt Lifehacking Blogs – Whitepapers.org has done a wonderful thing for those of us obsessed with productivity. Here is a list, presented by topic, of the 100 best life-improving, time-saving, and get-it-done-right blogs on the web today. Some of our favorites like Dumb Little Man and 43 Folders are up there, and some new ones we’re looking forward to exploring. Maybe next time you’ll see Instructify up there, too.

White Papers

–JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Deborah Fox is every teenager’s parents’ hero. On her Pay For College Blog, Fox gives oodles of great tips and advice on going to college without having to join the Armed Forces or becoming a plasma prostitute. In a recent article, she describes the ways to easily spot a scholarship scam. Everything she mentions follows the old adage “if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is.” The bottom line: if someone is offering you a great deal for no effort on your behalf, or if they want something in return, then it’s likely a scam.

For that matter, what tips do YOU have for spotting a scam? Have you fallen victim to a Nigerian diplomat looking for a place to keep his funds? Won a “Toy Yoda”? Accidentally purchased a Nintrendo Wiii on E-Bay.net? Tell us your stories, and enjoy Ms. Fox’s helpful tips on avoiding sleight of hand when it comes to getting what you’ve earned. –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Six Ways To Spot Scholarship Scams

Prevent your students from adding years to their student loan repayment schedule. Bankrate.com offers up some more good advice for your college-bound students. Cheryl Allebrand’s “13 Financial Aid Traps” is as much for parents as for their kids, and dispels several (thirteen, in fact) myths about getting more funding for college.

Allebrand lists mistakes ranging from withdrawing money from retirement accounts to using credit cards as a means of establishing credit to impress financial-aid types (and not running up credit card debt is darn good advice for anybody. Not that I’d know from experience or anything).

It’s all good advice, but I worry about the next generation if there are myths floating around like, “Get married to achieve independent status” for the FAFSA. -BILL FERRIS

13 Financial Aid Traps

College can teach your students many important lessons – the satisfaction of broadening one’s mind, the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and the crushing burden of lifelong student loan debt. If you’re still paying for the bestest four years of your life, you owe it to your students to stress the importance of planning how they’ll finance their education. And since there’s nothing teenagers enjoy more than listening to adults’ advice, Instructify recommends you tell them to visit Bankrate.com’s Countdown to College.

Countdown to College is a month-by-month guide to students’ senior year, with the goal of maximizing grant and scholarship money. Advice includes registering for the SAT or ACT in September, harassing parents in January to file their taxes so kids can submit their darn FAFSA already, and spending February sucking up to civic and church groups who award scholarships.

Yeah, it’s a lot of work to cram into one year. Students are free to start following Countdown to College’s strategies early, of course. But if they’re that on the ball, they probably don’t need the advice.

As for everyone else, Countdown to College breaks up the nebulous concept of securing financial aid into doable monthly tasks. For kids bagging groceries for minimum wage at the local Try-N’-Save, asking total strangers for several thousand dollars probably never sounded so easy. –BILL FERRIS

Countdown to College