Category: Back to School

When it comes to managing your e-book collection, there aren't a whole lot of options out there. If you want to organize a large library of e-books, especially ones that you're not buying or downloading directly from your e-reader's manufacturer, then there's really only one viable choice: Calibre. Not only does it organize your collection and load it onto your e-reader, but it will do so ...

If, like the great Sylvia Plath, you punctiliously plot your prose with a thesaurus, may we entreat you to visit Save the Words? The prim nebbishes over at the Oxford University Press went crazy with Flash to develop the site, which features words that have all but disappeared from standard English usage and also asks users to "adopt" the archaisms in their daily communications. In a tragicomic ...

File this under things impossible to prove, but a new study shows that, if you've got a lot of Facebook friends, you might actually be more likely to finish college. Abilene Christian University followed 375 college freshman for nine months, and tracked their social networking activity. What the university and its research partners found was that the students who returned for their sophomore year ...

Share Here's a great way to get yourself fired: logging onto Facebook, and letting the world know how much you hate your job -- and the people you work for -- especially if you work with kids. That's exactly what Dr. June Talvitie-Siple did, and it totally worked. Dr. Talvitie-Siple, supervisor of the math and science program at Massachusetts's Cohasset High School, recently used the social ...

You know those ubiquitous yearbook photo banner ads from Classmates.com? The ones that bait you into clicking by vowing to put you back in touch with your long lost high school buddies? Well, if you've never been tempted to hunt down old homecoming dates, consider yourself lucky, because the site has now been officially declared a scam. Yesterday, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo listed ...

School officials in Lee County, Florida have issued a new set of guidelines for the upcoming academic year. This go-round, they're cracking down on Facebook. As the AFP reports, the newly published protocol explicitly warns district teachers against interacting with their students via social networking sites, in order to avoid the kinds of legal or professional pitfalls that have plagued so ...

Share Since March, at least, we've known that Facebook Places has been coming. We also knew that, despite its built-in audience, Facebook would have to offer more functionality than established location-based services like Foursquare if it hoped to succeed. Finally, after months of testing, Zuckerberg and crew have taken the cover off Places, and entered a brand new realm of usage. You'll be ...

The University of Florida is not the first college to offer a course in 'StarCraft,' but it is the first to offer one that at least pretends to have some intellectual value beyond boosting your APM (actions per minute) rate. EME2040, or 21st Century Skills in 'StarCraft' is being taught by Nate Poling, and uses the blockbuster real-time strategy game as a tool for teaching lessons about time ...

All Ages/Elementary Pivot Power With a horde of electronic devices vying for your precious outlet space, a power strip is essential. Most strips are far from dynamic, and unable to accommodate oddly sized power adapters and plugs. The Pivot Power solves this problem with aplomb, as its six-outlet strip can be bent into a variety of shapes, adapting to most any configuration of power needs. ...

High School Sharpie Ink Pencil This space age writing device combines the smooth flow of a pen with a pencil's ability to erase. The liquid pencil eliminates worries about broken lead, pencil sharpening and ink boo-boos forever. Price: $4.99 Elvis Hot Pink 15.4 Inch Laptop Sleeve Hey, incoming college freshman, take advice from a pro: Own one conversation-starting piece of equipment, ...

College Folding Keyboard As individuals who haven't gotten past our college-era dependency on our laptops, we spend our day typing with our hands smooshed together. However, if we had this full-size, roll-and-go plastic keyboard to plug into our computers while we were cramming for finals, our carpal tunnel would certainly have been deterred (by at least two or three years, we'd bet). ...

None of us here (aside from our lovely intern, Matt Evans) are going back to school this year. But that doesn't mean we can't drool over the delightful gadgets and finely designed objects (like this foldable keyboard) that are offered to returning academics of all ages. We've put together some gear to make even those that cheer "no more pencils, no more books" in May excited to crack open some ...

Share With the fall semester around the corner, eBay has launched a mobile app for its discount site Half.com, which scans barcodes to locate the best deals on textbooks and other back-to-school products. According to CNET News, users snap a picture of a barcode (say, that expensive Biology 101 textbook), and the free iPhone app scans it using RedLaser technology, then trolling Half.com's ...

Earlier this summer, Barnes & Noble slashed the price of its e-reader, and last month announced a Nook desktop app geared toward students. Now the big-box bookseller is re-branding and revamping the iPhone, iPad and PC versions of its Nook apps as part of the continuing e-reader war. According to Engadget, the formerly titled Barnes & Noble e-reader products now sport the 'Nook' brand ...

Share We understand, better than most maybe, that it can be maddening to conjure and remember a bunch of passwords for a bunch of online services. Still, we manage. Granted, we do recycle some passwords, but we make sure never to register for a site with an e-mail address and that particular address's password. Unfortunately, according to a new study from BitDefender, 75-percent of Web users do ...