Update: Microsoft Office for $60 Deal Resumes

A while back we talked about The Ultimate Steal, a promotion by Microsoft which lets college students purchase Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for a hugely discounted price of $60. It ended this April, but the folks at Microsoft have kindly decided to rekindle to promotion for this year’s freshmen. If you are in university, this is a deal you cannot afford to miss. At $60, that’s a 91% discount off shelf price. The...

Click Your Way to Bibliographical Glory

Writing bibliographies is one of the most irritating, not to mention time-consuming, parts of writing papers. MLA? APA? Chicago? Turabian? Does the publisher come first, or the year? Is it a comma here, or a period? There’s just too much to do wrong. Well, that’s exactly why you shouldn’t leave it to yourself. Leave it to the Web! There are two great resources out there that make writing your bibliography...

5 Ways to Rock Your Research

Particularly once you get to college and beyond in academia, it seems like your life is spent nose-in-book, coffee-in-hand, trying to find out what the heck your next paper’s going to be about. You highlight passages, and then forget why; you spill coffee on your book; you fall asleep. Not the most fun activity.Thankfully, between Firefox and Google, doing research has been made a whole lot easier. Here are five...

Take Brain-Friendly Notes With Mind Maps

When I’m in class, I tend to take a lot of notes. Then, I proceed to forget everything I learned, hoping I can remember the important stuff later on when I start studying for tests or preparing for papers. The trouble is, I often get lost in the sea of my notes, and have trouble weeding out the important parts of my notes that I really need to know. With the hierarchical (I, II, III/a, b, c) notes I take, it’s...

Student Tools: Cornell Note Templates

This semester I have been facilitating breakout groups for the learning strategies course in my faculty. Last week, the session focused on reading and note-taking. One of the activities had the students make a Cornell note on a section of the course’s textbook. When I asked if any of them had heard of Cornell notes before, 0 of 19 hands went up. The Cornell note-taking system is a widely-used notetaking system devised...

Mac Addict: Papers Review

Welcome to the first post of Mac Addict. Your first stop for Mac only software, hardware, and gadgets reviews with students in mind. With school comes textbooks, workbooks, and of course, journal articles. The hard drives of college students and professors alike are littered with dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of articles. How do you tame the chaos? Enter Papers Papers is like iTunes for your budding journal article...