4 top tips for keeping your website safe

We can all agree that no one wants their website hacked. Obviously, when you create your website, you won’t be thinking to yourself, “What can I do to make my website even easier to hack?” However, these days, with our lack of precautionary steps when creating and maintaining our websites, we might as well be thinking that outrageous question to ourselves.

According to Symantec, in 2014, roughly three out of five websites that were hacked belong to small and medium sized businesses, and the average cost of data breaches to small businesses totaled US$36 000. Now, that’s not an amount that people should just overlook. Small businesses can’t afford to have employees dedicated to preventing cyberattacks, so they are often targeted by hackers. And to make things worse, a newer phenomenon called “ransomware”, malware that encrypts files on your computer, then demands a ransom to unlock them is growing in popularity in the hacking community. With this increasingly aggressive cyber environment, what can you do to protect your website?

 

What do the tech experts think?

 

Tech experts for years have been telling business owners to take precautions to prevent cyberattacks, but unfortunately, the response from business owners has not been strong. However, now is the time to take control of your website and protect yourself from losing your valuable personal and financial assets. Here are some top tips from industry leaders on how to prevent future hacks on your website.

 

1.      Train your employees to against cyberattacks

 

Sometimes, your employees just do not know that it is not good cyber hygiene to send sensitive customer data via e-mail. Clearly distinguish and teach your employees on what information should be sent via email and what should not. If they need to send that information via e-mail, then make sure that you have a strong data encryption service in your e-mail system.

According to Jayne Friedland Holland, Chief Security Officer and associate general counsel at technology firm NIC Inc., it is also a good idea to educate your employees about any laws that pertain to protecting customer data, as they have a legal obligation to protect sensitive customer personal information.

 

2. Never store customer data

 

News regarding customer data breaches to major corporations, such as Home Depot, Target, T-Mobile, and most recently, the Dow Jones, are common place. Unfortunately, all of these situations could have been prevented if these companies followed industry compliance and did not store customer related private information. According to Forbes, all e-retailers are held to PCI-DSS standards, but honestly, there is no reason why companies themselves should store customers’ account numbers, credit card numbers, or expiration dates for long periods of time.

 

In simpler terms, if you have nothing to steal, you won’t be robbed.

3. Create more complicated passwords for yourself and customers

 

This sounds like web security basics, but it needs to be said. Both employees and customers struggle to create complex passwords and consistently commit to changing them at least every 90 days. According to SecurityScorecard CEO, Aleksander Yampolskiy, “A big portion of the breaches out there is because of weak passwords.” Companies need to be cognizant and place an emphasis on the importance of avoid simple data breaches due to easy to guess passwords.

 

One best practice is installing a program on employees’ computers that force them to change their passwords every 90 days with character requirements. Another great method could be to send recurring reminder e-mails and/or website notifications to customers to request that they change their passwords based on character type and minimum requirements.

4. Make sure you have a website application firewall (WAF) to prevent web attacks

 

If you own an eCommerce site, you may be hosting your storefront with a major retailer (i.e: Etsy, Amazon, etc.) that already provides sufficient protection. However, if you are hosting your own website, you may be defenseless against a cyberattack. If you are relying on your content management system (CMS) or web hosting service for basic protection, it may not be enough. Even the biggest CMS services, such as WordPress, are susceptible to thousands of hackings every day. Depending on your site’s needs, you need to take action on protecting yourself against cyberattacks before it’s too late. This is where WAFs can help!

 

WAFs work to act as a filter between a user and a web server. Essentially, these services are your shield from the outside world. Just as you wouldn’t let any random stranger into the privacy of your home, you wouldn’t want suspicious intruders to gain access to your online information.

These days, most WAF services are cloud-based services. Brad Causey, CEO of the tech consulting firm, Zero Day Consulting, shares that any organisation with technology exposed to the Internet canbenefit from having a WAF. These services work by analyzing and filtering harmful web traffic that could potentially lead to malicious attacks or intrusions. This way, your website is kept safe from attacks such as malware and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), which can flood your website with bad traffic to, ultimately, shut it down. If your website isn’t functioning properly for long stretches of time, it can be bad for business and could potentially lose long term customers.

 

By using a WAF, you can stop hackers before they can access your website. There are even WAF systems that you can use for free up to a certain level of monthly data traffic. Search for a WAF that best fits your website’s needs and commit to moving all of your domains under WAF protection.

 

Source | http://memeburn.com/

An online platform that makes education more personalized

Vedantu enables students in remote areas to receive tuition from highly qualified teachers

The platform has now completed providing 21,000 hours of live learning to more than 17,000 students through 180 listed teachers.

Bengaluru: Its almost 4 pm on a Tuesday afternoon and Vasavi gets ready to take her daily physics lessons for 9th and 10th graders. An Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Madras graduate, Vasavi, on maternity leave from her corporate job, dedicates three hours daily to tutoring students from Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai and remote towns such as Rudrapur in Uttarakhand.

In Wani taluk, Yavatmal district in Maharashtra, 9th grader Tanusha M. gets ready for her physics and mathematics class. She takes two classes from highly qualified teachers whose location Tanusha does not know. She only knows them through their qualifications and names.

Vasavi and many others like her are teachers by choice and Tanusha is one of the thousands of students they teach daily via Vedantu, an online tutorial service run by Vedantu Innovations Pvt. Ltd. The journey of Vedantu began almost a decade ago when Vamsi Krishna from IIT Mumbai), Pulkit Jain, Saurabh Saxena and Anand Prakash (from IIT Roorkee) got together in 2005 to start something that their parents did not encourage.

Giving into their parents’ demands, they joined corporate jobs, but lasted for only about six months. On 16 December 2005, Anand resigned. The others followed. With a bit of teaching experience gained during their summer breaks at the IITs, they decided to teach. They wanted to challenge conventional teaching methods.

They started by teaching the children of the workers at Trident Group Ltd’s yarn plant at Barnala, Punjab. “That was the pivotal step,” Vamsi says.

This led to more students and their first venture, Lakshya, a test prep establishment where they helped students crack engineering entrance exams. Among the four, they claim to have taught over 10,000 students from 2006-12 in places such as Patiala and Chandigarh.

At Barnala they swept floors, set up classes and even slept at the same place where tuitions were held. “The energy we used to get from these sessions... we could really see the spark that really motivated us to take up the profession of teaching,” Vamsi says.

In 2012, Mumbai-based education coaching service provider MT Educare Ltd acquired Lakshya Forum for Competition Pvt. Ltd. The model had its limitations. “Being there as teachers ourselves, we felt the challenges with the offline set-up... no matter what, there were challenges of scalability.”

Determined, and now equipped with Lakshya’s experience, they challenged institutionalism and generalisation in education to make it more personalised and democratic. But the disparity in learning would remain, which called for a technological intervention.

In April 2014 they started developing a product and six months later Vedantu was live. Vedantu was the so-called anti-model of its predecessor. It developed WAVE (whiteboard, audio and video environment) technology and the teachers marketplace model. In order to get access to more good teachers, Vedantu started developing technologies like whiteboard and audio and is currently developing facial expression reading algorithms for better engagement and greater efficiency from each session.

“We are coming out with engagement metrics. For every session the algorithm analyses the session and goes back to the teacher,” Vamsi says.

Vedantu says, “Innovation has come to facilitate the why.”

Initiatives like Digital India and fast growing Internet infrastructure provide platforms like Vedantu with tools to connect more students and teachers facilitating effective learning.

Though the motivation was not money, the company did not want to be an NGO. The priority was to make a difference; money would follow. The platform has now completed providing 21,000 hours of live learning to more than 17,000 students through 180 listed teachers.

The platform, which charges around 30% of the teachers’ fees, says average tutor earns around Rs.40,000 (depending on the number of hours) and the top earner raked in Rs.98,000 (August 2015). Vendantu has a mix of professional teachers, corporate entities and college students. Vamsi says the presence of teachers working only on Vedantu (10-15%) is where the real disruption is happening.

Vedantu is aware of its limitations. This venture cannot be run as a mainstream institution due to regulatory requirements. “So we can at least be a parallel education system,” Vamsi says.

Vamsi says that there are around 250 million students in India and around 33% of them go to private schools. This hasn’t deterred its global ambitions. “Global expansion can be tempting,” he says about moving to other markets like in South Korea, Singapore and other East Asia markets.

Accel and Tiger Global led a $5 million funding in Vedantu in May this year. Anand Daniel, an early stage investor with Accel Partners, says Vedantu has huge potential. The tutoring market size in India is around $11 billion (2014). “Very few teams in India have a great sense for the education sector as well as how technology can be used for effective scaling Vedantu is one such team,” he says

Source | Mint – The Wall Street Journal | 14 October 2015

Microsoft launches cloud services in India





Tech giant Microsoft on Tuesday launched commercial cloud services from its three data centres in India, giving companies an option to store their data locally. The data centres are located in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai.The company , however, did not share the investment details about the centres. A couple of days ago, during PM Modi's visit to Silicon Valley , Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had announced availability of its cloud services operating out of India's data centres. Microsoft said it has invested over $15 billion so far in building infrastructure globally .The company has more than 100 data centres located in over 40 countries.

Source::: Sep 30 2015 : The Times of India (Mumbai), p.18, 

Satellite route to education

President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed schoolchildren and interacted with them on the eve of Teachers’ Day. Both events, held in the national capital and televised nationally, were largely ceremonious and appeared well-rehearsed, and they demonstrated the power of communication technology tools to reach out to students across the country. The use of video-conferencing and live satellite broadcasts for education may sound archaic to many at a time when instant two-way communication, including video chat, is just a swipe away on handheld smart phones, and high-end city schools are going paperless and wireless. But the harsh reality of the Indian education sector is that technology is still a far cry in most schools, which solely depend on ‘chalk and talk’ pedagogy. The situation need not have been so had India learnt its lessons from a unique experiment in distant education it pioneered four decades ago. The 40th anniversary of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) should provide educationists and space scientists opportunity to review the role technology can play in improving the quality of education in India. 

 

The experiment was a result of the vision of Vikram Sarabhai, father of India’s space programme, who wanted space technology to be used for the socio-economic development of the country, particularly to reach out to people in far-flung regions. To a great extent, the Indian Space Research Organisation has been able to translate this vision into reality with satellites that provide an array of services — communication, broadcasting, weather forecasting, disaster management, locational services and so on. However, success on the education front has not been so unequivocal despite education having been the focus of its first outreach in 1975. SITE, conducted during 1975-76 using an American satellite, was the first such experiment anywhere in the world to provide proof-of-concept that satellite technology could be used for development communication. It was also a demonstration of a technology that could take satellite signals directly to homes (it was community television sets in the experiment) — a technology that would get miniaturised and commercialised as Direct-to-Home (DTH) decades later. This means that both technology and its application — hardware and software — resulting from SITE were unique.

If SITE was taken to its logical progression, India should have been a leader in both satellite television and its mass application in fields like education and health. This did not happen for various reasons. India did expand its national television network aggressively in 1980s but without any technological lessons learnt from SITE. The government chose to expand the terrestrial way — through its one-transmitter-a-day programme — and not by using satellite technology that had already been shown to be viable. Satellite-based national channel was eventually added to the network. SITE was a collaborative, inter-disciplinary programme involving engineers, scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and content developers. A host of national and international agencies like Unesco were involved in its execution. On the other hand, the expansion of Doordarshan was a largely government exercise in hardware rollout led by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. This was the first mistake. That’s why when satellite television came to India in early 1990s via STAR and Zee television, the public broadcaster was left behind in the very game in which it was a forerunner in mid-1970s.

While the government failed to see the benefits of taking the satellite route rather than terrestrial transmission, the space agency got busy with its own technology growth trajectory of designing and launching satellites and launch vehicles in the 1980s. ISRO did try to spread educational television in collaboration with agencies like the University Grants Commission and the Indira Gandhi National Open University, but the magic of SITE could not be repeated. In 2004, the space agency once again made a foray into education with its Edusat satellite. It was India’s first thematic satellite meant exclusively to provide educational services in remote areas. The objective was to overcome shortage of qualified teachers both at school and higher education levels, supplement curriculum-based education and also provide effective teacher training. In addition, the programme was meant to boost non-formal and continuing education for different groups of people. Technology-wise, it was much superior to the 1975 experiment as it provided for two-way audio and video communication and included interactive channels. The Edusat Utilisation Programme consisted of a hub and studio facility in state capitals, satellite interactive terminals in universities and colleges and receive-only terminals in schools.

Technological developments since 1975 and improved technical capability of ISRO ensured good hardware infrastructure, but serious problems arose in software or educational content. As later audits and evaluation studies found out, there was no definite plan of action for content generation and utilisation, and there was no single source identified for co-ordination and monitoring of the programme. In addition, the Edusat project suffered because of massive delays in setting up ground facilities in several states. As a result, while the satellite was up in the sky there were only few educational institutions ready to benefit from the signals it was beaming down.

The underutilisation ranged from 99 per cent in 2004-05 to 89 per cent in 2010-11 with an average of 91 per cent over, as reported by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India a couple of years back. Overall, the distant education programme of ISRO failed to be effective due to deficiencies in planning for network connectivity and content generation and the lack of a robust management structure.

The present situation with regard to education television based on satellite technology or satellite-based tele-medicine is like this: we have necessary experience, technological know-how and capability, but have inadequate software or content development strategies as well as management capacity to run such multi-agency programmes effectively. India may have lost the chance to become a leader in DTH despite having pioneered the concept four decades ago, but it still has an opportunity to use satellite technology to make headway in key areas of development like education and health. We will have to develop creative and innovative solutions using satellite, digital and mobile technologies over the next few years. ISRO alone can’t do it, as amply proven in the case of Edusat. All we need to do is revive the spirit of SITE; otherwise we will again be playing catch up when the next round of communication revolution happens, or be forced to import readymade solutions to our problems.

Source | Daily News Analysis | 8 September 2015

"Yoga" training for teachers to beat stress

COMPULSORY SUBJECT

Yoga institutes to organise orientation programmes for teachers across the country

MUMBAI: With the aim of helping teachers battle the stress of teaching crowded classrooms, the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) has recently made yoga compulsory in teacher training institutes across the country. 

The NCTE — under which 18,000 teacher training institutes function — has designed yoga modules that will be a part of all the 15 programmes offered by them, including diploma, bachelors and masters in education. 

These programmes are aimed at helping aspiring teachers remain calm in stressful situations. 

“From academic year 201516, every teacher enrolling in a teacher training institute will have to practise yoga; it will be a compulsory subject. It will help them develop a calm mind, which will in turn boost their efficiency levels,” said Santosh Panda, chairperson, NCTE. 

“We don’t want t hem to become yoga instructors, but to pursue yoga for their own good,” added Panda. 

Modules of 50 to 100 marks have been introduced in all the programmes covering topics such as introduction to yoga, yogic text, yoga and personality development, stress management and self-development, among others. 

“These modules have 64 hours of practicals and 32 hours of theory. Every module has guidelines for practical and compulsory internship,” said Panda. 

Yoga institutes have also been identified across the country to conduct orientation programmes for school teachers. For instance, orientation programmes for school teachers of the western region will be held at the Kaivalyadhama Yoga Institute in Lonavala, said Subodh Tiwari, joint director, NCTE. 

“Teachers need to learn traditional or classical yoga, which focuses on physical and mental well-being,” said Tiwari, adding that the institute has recently launched a diploma in yoga education. “In our programme, we will also train teachers on how yoga can be taught to the students.” 

Admitting that pressure on teachers is mounting with the recent reforms in education, teachers agreed that including yoga in the syllabus will help them. 

“There is a lot of stress at work for a modern-day teacher. Besides keeping the management and parents in good humour, teachers have to keep up with students who are exposed to various sources of information,” said Giselle D’Souza, associate professor, St Teresa’s Institute of Education, Santacruz. 

D’Souza said the new reforms such as continuous comprehensive evaluation (CCE) have added to the teachers’ burden. “The CCE has increased the load on teachers, they have to conduct various assessments throughout the year. In the case of SSC schools, it is worse as there at least 80 students per class,” she said. 

Source | Hindustan Times | 19 August 2015

"Mobile-app Flinnt, a learning platform for school kids"

It allows teachers to communicate with students, parents and share resources

A WhatsApp-like mobile platform called Flinnt, which allows teachers to create groups with students and share academic resources like chapters, videos, data, charts among others, is making learning resource rich, easy and interesting for school children. 

Academic institutions

Developed by a group of entrepreneurs from Ahmedabad in June 2012, Flinnt is currently being used by about 105 academic institutions across Gujarat and a few in Mumbai, Noida, Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Tirupati. 

“This will act as a communication platform between students and teacher. This is a platform that allows one/few to many broadcast. So, content broadcast can be monitored and managed. It is a good platform to share user-generated content like documents, videos of class-room teaching, best answer written by a student or graph or charts,” said Tarak Yagnik, one of the four founders and a marketing expert. 

The Android-based mobile app is being used for students in the K-12 segment, graduate and post-graduate. 

How it functions

“Up to grade four, the teachers send one-way communications like reminders, announcements, homework, activity photos directly to the parent’s phone,” said Yagnik. 

Once enrolled, the institute is given sign up codes, with which teachers and students can use the app. 

Teachers post a document or a video on the platform; students can comment on it and discuss it further. 

But unlike WhatsApp, the teachers can prevent mischief by restricting students from commenting on a particular topic. The platform can also operate on a desktop PC. 

Currently, the company has total 40,000 users for the app. 

“Our charges range from ₹5000 per annum to ₹15,000 per annum for different size of institutions. We are targeting the private institutions first as they can take faster decisions,” said Harish Iyer, Co-founder and CEO. 

Breakeven this year

The company, which has raised around $400,000 including an Angel round from US-based investors, expects to break even this year. Going forward, it is also planning to raise about ₹10-12 crore from venture funds. 

Expansion plans

In the next two-three years, the company plans to cover about 8,000-10,000 institutions across the country. By this year-end, the start-up plans to have a presence in 15 cities. 

Because of its high dependence on customer acquisition to add new users, 70 per cent of the total cost goes towards it, while the remaining 30 per cent cost is for development and infrastructure. 

Source | Business Line | 25 June 2015

5 Productivity Skills Every Educator must have

In a national survey, we asked teachers, administrators and tech leaders to tell us what it takes to make a 21st century classroom run smoothly. Here’s what they said.

Educators literally have a “world of knowledge and resources” at their fingertips, as one director of curriculum and instructional technology declared in response to THE Journal’s national survey. “What better way to learn about the situation in Syria than tweeting #Syria and receiving a tweet from someone there?” But guiding your students in learning new concepts, gaining insights and building their skills requires you to be comfortable with the technologies that can make all of that happen.

Where do you start? We asked your colleagues that same question, and they responded in multitudes. Their recommendations covered the alphabetic gamut, from adaptivity and apps to wikis and a willingness to learn. Although the responses are ranked in order of popularity, you can begin your self-improvement plan anywhere on the list. No matter which one you decide to start with, these skills, sensibilities and products can help you run your classrooms more smoothly.

1) Acing Productivity Applications

Whether your school uses Google Apps for Education, Microsoft Office, Office 365 Education or something else, learn the fundamentals of word processing, spreadsheets and presentation applications and then go beyond the basics. Expertise in these staples will help you with communication and collaboration among students, colleagues and parents. Plus, they'll make you more effective.

As Joy Lopez, director of technology for Sacred Heart Schools in Atherton, CA, put it, "By modeling the use of these and incorporating them into their lessons, students will utilize them in their projects and daily lives." 

“Communication is crucial for keeping parents on board and informed,” added Amy Downs, instructional technology coach at Scottsdale Unified School District (AZ). “Students don't always share school information with their families, so let parents retrieve it at their convenience.”

MaryAnn Powell, instructional technology facilitator at Edgecombe County Public Schools in Tarboro, NC, concluded, “Whether [we're] working with a co-worker next door or around the world, whether [we're] getting together across a table or via a shared Google doc, it is essential that students learn to work together. We have placed way too much emphasis on ‘Eyes on your own paper — go!’ ”

2) Mastering Search, Research and Internet Literacy

You spend a lot of time on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other sites hunting down "good stuff" for your students, said Penny Pearson, coordinator at the Sacramento County Office of Education (CA). By learning “effective, fast and targeted searching strategies,” you'll save time and frustration. You can start, added Laura Lynch, technology director for Norfolk County Agricultural High School (VA), by studying the use of Boolean operators and symbols in your searches — such as using “-” before a keyword to tell the search engine to ignore that term.

If you can instill those search skills in students, all the better. “Being fluent in the world of digital resources allows teachers to open students’ eyes to more than Wikipedia," explained Scottsdale's Downs. “Teaching skills for the evaluation of sources is something that will have long-term effects on the child's learning.”

Wendy Johnson, director of library services and e-learning coordinator at River Parishes Community College (LA), agreed. “If there is one very common problem among students entering college from high school, it is the lack of information literacy skills, including proficiency in browser use, critical evaluation skills regarding resources and search skills to find resources as efficiently as possible.”

3) Connecting Through Social Media

Today’s students live on social media, whether it’s Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Snapchat, Google+, YouTube or various blogs. As Bill Pratt, technology integration specialist for Clover School District (SC), put it, social media “permeates our students' lives. Therefore, teachers need to understand how it works and what is being done online. Social media is running the world right now.”

Fortunately, teachers are figuring out how to use social media to best advantage. Maria Elena Yepes, director for the learning assistance center at East Los Angeles College, suggested, "We should consider using social media as a vehicle for capturing the attention of those students who live glued to their mobile devices."

Marjorie Wagner, technology integrationist at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, AR, declared that social media has become the "communication tool of our time!" not only for reaching students but also their families.

Social media also helps instructors to "connect with other educators and share knowledge and resources," said Donna Teuber, the team leader for technology integration in Richland School District Two (SC).

When it comes to reaching beyond the school, said Chris Anderson, K-12 tech integrationist at Spencer Community School District (IA), blogging and microblogging can be effective ways to “allow teachers to contribute to their local communities as well as the greater educational community.” 

Besides, said Robin McCants, digital resource coach for Richland School District Two, “Teachers need to promote themselves, their schools, their students, and their students' work,” and social sites provide an “easy, ubiquitous and free” platform for doing that.

4) Finding and Sharing Files

“As teachers, we are natural-born creators,” declared Andrea Earl, math teacher and technology coordinator for Santa Ana Unified School District (CA). “Teachers need to know how to share resources with each other, including documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Teachers also need to understand about permissions when sharing documents. Many a teacher has lost an important document that has been dragged out of a Dropbox by another user.”

Moreover, added Sacramento County's Pearson, “If you can't find your stuff, you waste a lot of time. Using the 'search' option doesn't always solve the problem, especially with new cloud-based services.”

Jim Rose, director for career and college pathways at Oxnard Union High School District (CA), went one step further, suggesting that “an awareness and understanding of file formats and extensions” will help you assist students “in their manipulation of technology.”

On a similar note, Mark Lushenko, a teacher at Elk Grove Unified School District(CA), suggested that his colleagues should learn how to “find a file without knowing its name.” 

5) Managing Learning and Students

The learning management system has been around for a very long time in higher ed, but it's finally gaining a foothold in K-12. For example, Johnson said that River Parishes, which runs an early college program on campus, uses its LMS as a central spot for posting course materials, announcements, reminders, supplemental materials, links to library and Web resources, events and expectations. The advantage of going that route is that the LMS is a “secure and comparable choice,” which avoids “student privacy issues and/or school policies preventing use of social media.”

Whether the software is Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas, Edmodo or something else, the advantages of the LMS don't stop there. Cameron Mount, an instructor of English for Brookdale Community College (NJ), noted, “Students can reference important documents even if hard copies are lost in the shuffle.” 

Richland's Teuber found that using an LMS “allows students the opportunity to have anytime-anywhere access to digital resources.”

Frank Kohler, student technology assistant for the division of student affairs atBowling Green State University (OH), agreed. The LMS, he said, is a great place to “create and deliver asynchronous or synchronous presentations and training sessions.”

4 Tech Skills Educators Don’t Need Anymore

Wondering how to make room in an already crammed schedule for skill-building and new practices? It's time to take inventory and decide what you can stop doing. Here are some suggestions.

1) Printing documents or worrying about disk space. As Donna Kline, IT director and instructor for Ocean View Christian Academy in San Diego, pointed out, “the ability to use those technologies needs to grow into an understanding of external drives and cloud space.”

2) Carrying flash drives or a day planner. “With Gmail you have storage for everything you need,” suggested Jennifer Rushing, a digital resource coach at Richland School District Two. Likewise, she added, you can stop “carrying around a day planner and writing every appointment in it.” Better to put those meetings and to-do's into a digital calendar and have reminders sent right to your phone.

3) Editing documents by e-mail. “Editing and sharing is a skill of the past and takes a lot of time,” declared Johnathan Clark, a director for DeKalb County Schools(GA). Adopt cloud computing, he said, so that students “can post work to a cloud solution, [then] teachers and peers can log in, review, edit on the fly [and] share.”

4) Signing in with multiple logins. Stop wasting time logging into online programs one by one, advised Laurie Wolfe, director of curriculum and assessment at Idaho Distance Education Academy. Use the single-sign-on tool provided by your district, and if IT doesn't provide one, ask for one. Even better, she said, choose an environment “that allows programs from different vendors to share data both ways, while protecting student data privacy.”

Source | http://thejournal.com/

9 Best Free Online Resources for College Students 

You don’t have to be Einstein to see that technology is flooding the world. Interconnectivity of peoples is at an all-time high and continues to soar.

Since the birth of the internet, people have been sharing ideas and concepts across continents and oceans. Amongst this exchange, some have sought to profit. Others instead seek a free sharing of information to all people simply for the betterment of the human mind.

For the most part, sharing information is not a free endeavor as any college student will attest, but there are some who want all learning free. What better place to start than with the internet? There’s an app for that and a website too.

Here are some of the best free online resources for college students.

1) Khan Academy. This massive teaching tool is the brainchild of Salman Khan who began making YouTube tutorials in math for his relatives and friends. Their popularity prompted him to make a career out of the institute. The website is entirely free and funded by donation.

A variety of teachers show how to do everything from algebra to post-modern literature to biology and the lessons have been translated into 23 different languages. Download the app today and get this awesome tool to help you stay on track with all of your school or to further your education.

2) Glass Door. College helps train students for professional life. One way to do that is through internships. Paid or otherwise, an internship is a way of getting experience in your chosen field. There are many out there. Some have massive competition while others go completely unfilled, but how do you know the job or internship is good for you?

Enter Glass Door. This website allows people to post anonymous ratings of positions and companies completely free. The site allows you to see what people have said about the internship before you ever even apply. It can also help you narrow your search for internships that help you get where you want to be.

3) Rate My Professor. Getting to know a professor is tough by any account, but sometimes it can help to know them before they know you. Ratemyprofessor.com is a useful tool to do just that.

The site allows students to post reviews of classes, professors, and even school as a whole. You can see exactly how hard the class will be, what to expect in terms of help, and which professors are more concerned about research than teaching.

4) The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL). Communication is key to everything. From relationships to work to schoolwork, communication is paramount to success. However, communicating ideas in writing is not easy as evident by the thousands of papers, books, apps, and websites dedicated to helping people write.

Many claim to be able to teach anyone to write, but few can compare in sheer detail and thoroughness as Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab. The website is free to the public and contains a complete style guide to the Modern Language Association including a perfect complete example paper.

5) Sparknotes. Reading is easy. Understanding is hard. When the professor drones on and on about the Biblical basis of the characters’ dilemma, the Faustian bargain he must make, or how the murder of a side character was actually a rape, some minds might wander.

Others will wonder what drugs the professor’s on to be pulling this stuff from thin air. That’s where Sparknotes comes in. This handy website allows you to get more than just a summary of a book’s chapters. It gives you an invaluable tool for understanding the intricacies of literature.

6) LiveMocha. Parlez-vous français? Sprechen sie Deutsch? Hablas español? It’s all Greek to me.

Learning new languages is certainly a difficult task and making a good grade while doing so is even harder. Here’s where LiveMocha can help. This site is a points-based learning site where experts and the community help each other learn 38 different languages.

This site also offers the experience of having peers review your work to help you learn better and faster.

7) Google Scholar. Google is synonymous with search engines, but for all its amazing power, it has its failings. The engine has been accused of being biased according to who’s paying the most or who’s most popular at the time. So when searching for sources or research, Google’s main engine doesn’t cut it.

Here’s where the scholar function comes in handy. It will search universities, libraries, archives, and repositories for “scholarly articles” or more reliable, more knowledgeable information on a given topic. That will give you some better material than a Google search on the Industrial Revolution.

8) BibMe. Need a bibliography for a paper now? Want to get some feedback on your styling? Don’t want to pay for it? Try BibMe.org. This amazing site has instant bibliography makers for MLA, APA, Chicago, and Turabian styles, feedback generators for essays, a title page generator, and a citation guide to help you make sure authors and artists get their due credit.

9) Project Gutenberg. How much did you spend on books last semester? Answer: too much, especially when you can get your books for free on Project Gutenberg.

This site offers an enormous library of books for free download. Available throughout the country, this site seeks to allow for the free flow of knowledge worldwide. Textbooks are sparse on the site, but for a novel or other book, why waste the money? Kindle, iPad, and plain text versions are available for download.

Have any ideas for other sites? Post them below or share them with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Source | http://www.uloop.com/