Stay Organized

The first thing you need to do in order to have a successful school year, is develop a plan to stay organized. If you’re constantly missing due dates or losing track of your notes, you’ll find yourself in a deep hole rather quickly. The following web applications can help you get organized and stay organized.

1. Evernote

– Evernote is one of the best note taking applications available, allowing you to sync notes between the web, your phone, and any computer. With Evernote you can save text, audio, and images (like screenshots, entire webpages, or photos taken with your camera phone), and everything — even the images — is searchable, so you’ll never lose track of your notes. One of the ways Evernote really excels is in the number of different methods you can use to add notes to the application, which include via the web, mobile apps, email, or even Twitter

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2. Notely – Notely is a complete, end-to-end solution for taking notes and staying organized. With a course and assignment calendar, note-taking tools, and to-do list, Notely can keep you on top of your schoolwork and assure that you never miss a due date.

3. GradeMate – GradeMate is a free online organizer made with students in mind. With it you can create to-do lists, manage due dates, keep track of grades, and even collaborate with fellow students.

4. Backpack – Initially designed for business users, Backpack is also a great way for students to keep research organized. Backpack is sort of like a single page wiki that lets you keep files, images, notes, and to-do lists in a single place and share them with fellow students (which is great for collaborative projects).

Study Better

When you sit down to study, you want to arm yourself with the best web tools available to make sure you get the most of your study time. By utilizing the tools listed in this section, you can get more done, and do it more quickly, so that you can have more time for fun and still be prepared for that upcoming test or paper.

5. StudyRails – StudyRails is perfect for those who have trouble blocking out distractions when it comes time to study. The site lets users schedule study time and alerts them (by text message) when it is time to drop everything and hit the books. But where StudyRails really becomes important for chronic procrastinators is that it can be set to block out your favorite web sites and computer applications during scheduled study time. That way you won’t be tempted by Twitter or World of Warcraft when you’ve set aside some time specifically to write a paper.

6. Diigo

– When you’re reading books for class, you probably use a highlighter and sticky notes to mark off the passages that are of particular note to what you’re studying. But what do you do on the web? Diigo is a web-based highlighter and sticky note system that lets you annotate your web research. You can also share your work with classmates.

7. Delicious

– Delicious is the quintessential bookmarking application on the Internet. If all you want to do is collect all the web resources you’re using for a class, project, or paper under a single tag, Delicious is one of the best and easiest to use tools you can utilize.

8. Mindmeister – There is a slight learning curve involved, but once you get use to them, one of the best ways to organize your thoughts and research is through mind maps. And one of the best online mind mapping tools is Mindmeister, which lets you both easily create mind maps, and also collaborate on them with your classmates. They offer special discounted academic pricing for students.

Work and Collaborate

Web-based and social tools can also help you to actually get your work done and collaborate with others in your class on group projects. From word processing to presentations, the apps in this category will help you turn in complete and polished work.

9. Google Docs

– Google Docs is one of the best online word processing and spreadsheets applications available, and it offers great collaboration features that allow you to work together on group assignments. In fact, we use it often here at Mashable

to keep track of who is working on what and collaborate on posts and projects. The two main advantages of using Google Docs over more feature-rich applications like Microsoft Word (which is also a great application that I use on a daily basis) is that Google

offering is free and, more importantly, you can access your files from anywhere. Also check out Adobe’s Buzzword.

10. EtherPad

– EtherPad takes collaborating on written documents to a completely new level by allowing a group of people to edit a document at the same time and actually see what everyone else is writing as they write it. When used by multiple people meeting in person or combined with a VoIP app like Skype, EtherPad can be an amazing collaboration tool for group studying or hashing out who is doing what on a group project.

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Image courtesy of Flickr

user wheany via mashable.com

Nothing about the usual clothes and beauty stuff, but you’ll like to be organized in school and university too! Enjoy this article by Mashable.com.