Tech Tales for Freshmen or any Student

Love Technology but hate Top Ramen?

Welcome back to year two of Tales From The Grad Student! To kick off the start of the academic term I wanted to highlight some technologies not for the educator or for the classroom (grounded or distance), rather highlight some useful services on the web incoming or matriculating students could find fun or helpful.



SOCIAL NETWORKING
Facebook
The most obvious and popular social network for college students is Facebook. Just recently Facebook launched New.Facebook.com. As a result the site face lift provides a tabbed layout profile page as well as (in the opinion of this grad student) a better over all layout and communications to all your friends and classmates. However, as with any redesign some users love it and some hate it.

Shelfari
If your a book worm, or just want to get some ideas for books to read- welcome to Shelfari. This is a social network for those who love to read and share what they read (see widget on the left of the blog).

Twitter + TwitPic
Hi, I'm @ajbarse and I am a Twitter-a-holic. Twitter is a social time line where you and your friends can send messages about what your are doing, thinking, reading, etc. Combined with TwitPic and your camera phone, you can take and upload pictures to Twitter for added fun.





COMMUNICATION
Calling Home
Most students use calling cards or night and weekend minutes to call home, however, there is another option. Some students may find GrandCentral a useful service that can help cut those calling card costs for long distance calls as well as low cellphone minutes. GrandCentral (acquired by Google) provides users with the opportunity to have a local number that can ring all your phones (cell, home, work etc.) or allow users to call anyone in the Continental United States from that local number. To call out, you do need access to an internet connection separate from the phone you wish to use to call out with. But the service is easy to use and you can check your voicemail right from your internet browser.
This grad student has to say, this is awesome! Especially if you are are on a budget yet need to call a multitude of people in different areas and can't afford a large talk time cell phone plan.

Text Messaging and no cell phone? iPod Touch but No iPhone?
Texting (SMS) is pretty much this grad student's main mode of mobile communication largely because on my cell phone service it saves me a lot of money. If you are armed with a wifi connection and an iPod Touch (perhaps from the promotion Mac just ran for back-to-schoolers), this link provides you a web site that will allow you to send an SMS to your friends via the internet (standard text messaging charges to the recipient apply). Granted, the person you are sending the text message to can't reply back to you- but at least this site (iPhone, iPod Touch web formatted) provides a way to shoot a text out.
http://sms.dynadel.com/

Instant messaging everywhere
Meebo is an online service that allows you to monitor your plethora of instant messaging accounts without installing anything on a computer. It is great if you are working in your school's lab as well as on your own computer. See previous post on Meebo

Video Calling: Skype and MeBeam
If you have a camera and microphone on your computer:

• Skype (requires installtion): http://skype.com/
• MeBeam (browser based): http://mebeam.com/ good for keeping connected with friends without needing to worry about the kind of program needed to do it (Skype, iChat, AIM, MSN...). All you need to do is create a room and send the link to who you want to have in the video chat. See previous post on MeBeam

TOOLS FOR CLASS
Free ways to write your papers: OpenOffice, NeoOffice and Zoho
Whether you can't afford Microsoft Office, use a Linux operating system, or just want to use something other than the Office suite: these alternatives provide students with free solutions to getting their papers and presentations done for class

• OpenOffice (PC, Mac, Linux)- http://www.openoffice.org/
  
• NeoOffice (Mac)- http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php
  
• Zoho (internet connection required)- http://www.zoho.com/
  
• see previous post on Zoho. But first a quick plug! This service provides a great way to work on a paper from multiple places as well as collaborate with classmates for class projects and papers without worrying about 'who has the most recent version of the paper.' and the hassle of e-mailing your paper to your group members every time you work on it. Users can create a free zoho account for login or login with using a Google or Yahoo ID . Combined with Google Gears, users can use this suite online and offline.
  

ENTERTAINMENT

Tunes: The Music Genome Project
Pandora is an internet radio site that allows you to create radio stations based off of song or artist seeds (a song name or artist). The quality is great and Pandora has an app for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Unlike Yahoo radio or other web radio services, Pandora creates a music station based on the selected artist or song. You can help that station fine tune your selections by giving songs that play a thumbs up, thumbs down or ban it for a month. What is a great feature is that you can create several stations so when you pass your skip track count for the hour, you can change stations to continue your music fix.

Television Shows: HULU
HULU in the eyes of this grad student is perhaps the next best thing since sliced bread. This service allows any student a way to catch up on most of their favorite tv shows after a long night of studying or like in my case, evening classes. Hulu has a large catalog of TV shows as well as movies that are free to stream. There are some short (15-25 second) commercial breaks in the show, but they are few and far between with perhaps 4 breaks in an hour show.


I wish all students across the globe the best of luck in their studies this year. Thank you to all who continue to read Tales From The Grad Student! As always, please feel free to leave your comments, ideas, questions or experiences.

Cheers!