Top Free Apps for Your College Student

As many parents send their high school graduate off to college, they may be asking, “are they prepared?” or “do they have the tools necessary to succeed?” However, aside from being “the best years of their life,” college is also the time in which expenditures outstrip income by more than they ever will, so why not let parents know they have a variety of free web apps that can help their child be prepared this school year? Here’s just a few free web apps every college student should know about:

• HipCal.com (www.hipcal.com)
HipCal is an easy, free personal scheduling program that enables your student to plan their classes, study time, and social calendar with ease.

• Skype (www.skype.com)
A free video phone service that allows you to video chat your grad live. It is also a great way for your child t stay in touch with their friends who attend different schools.

• CompareMyDocs.com (www.comparemydocs.com)
An advanced Track Changes tool that helps students collaborate on documents by giving them the freedom to send out the same document to everyone in the group at one time, upload each version they send back, and then compare everyone’s contribution simultaneously in one view.

• EasyBib.com (www.easybib.com)
This automatic bibliography and citation maker is a life-saver when it comes to papers and essays. It enables students to plug in their term paper sources and out comes the Works Cited page in a Microsoft Word document.

• NoteMesh.com (www.notemesh.com)
While I’m not encouraging students to not attend classes, there are times when one is sick or cannot make it. This site is like a “Wikipedia for your notes”. It allows students to login and compare notes with other students in the same class, or post their notes to help others.

Editor’s note: The article was submitted by Tomer Shalit, founder and CEO, Nordic River, innovator in tools for document review and collaborative writing. Founded in 2006, Nordic River developed TextFlow from the ground up for joint work on documents. Based on TextFlow’s patented WeaveSync technology, which indexes, matches and synchronizes text documents, TextFlow simplifies management of document review, as well as visualizing and merging suggestions from many sources at once.