For several years now, colleges and universities have posted for free academic courses via iTunes podcasts. But now in iTunes U, Apple is expanding the service by providing access to complete courses from leading universities and other schools.

For now the courses are completely free–requiring only your time to work through the lectures and assignments.

iTunes App

The iTunes U app can be used on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. When you subscribe to a coure all the core material for the course will be automatically downloaded to the app on your device.

Links to supplemental material will also be provided for download from the App Store, the iBookstore, and the iTunes Music Store. While the supplemental material may come at a cost, most of the video lectures and PDF document handouts seem to be available for free.

The beauty of iTunes U is how it packages core material into one application. A downloaded course typically includes a brief overview, a detailed course outline of lectures and assignments, a built-in Notepad, and links to course materials. The interface and setup is similar to how you might organize an analog three-ring binder.

Though courses are best viewed on the iPad, you can sync your notes and course information between your iOS devices. Unfortunately, however, Apple has not created a Mac client for iTunes U. Nor has it done so for its iBooks 2 textbook reader.

You can access and view all the courses in iTunes U either through the iTunes U application itself, or in iTunes on your Mac or PC. iTunes U already includes several dozen courses on a wide range of topics—from Basics of Culinary, Beginners Chinese, Masters of Photography, to Stanford University’s highly rated iPad and iPhone App Development course.

Standford CS193p

The Stanford apps development course, for example, includes 19 actual live lectures, slide show presentations, in course assignments.

Even better, the course doesn’t require you to purchase any additional supplemental material. And if you’re running OS X Lion you can download Apple’s app developers application Xcode for free from the App Store. All that is required on your part for this course is your time.

Copyright Course

Another interesting though lightweight course, titled Rights, Remixes, and Respect, is a five part series about the differences between creative inspiration, appropriation, copyright and fair use.

Kirby Ferguson, the developer for this course, provides short definitions of copyright related terms, and then presents excellent song and movie examples about sampling and remixing and creative productions. His video presentations are are linked to a website which means you don’t have to download those files to your device.

You can work through the course in less than a week, and it even ends with a couple of short quiz reviews. The course also requires a few paid download of songs from the iTunes Music Store.

Notepad

Another useful and practical tool in the iTunes U app is a built-in notepad. If you want to do pretty much all your work within your mobile device, this notepad will come in quite handy. It works similarly to to the default Notepad app in Apple’s mobile devices.

While iTunes U will never be as popular as the iTunes Music Store or the App Store, it’s a great opportunity and resource for self-motivated learning. And because courses are free, you learn as much as you like without taking out a student loan.

Let us know what you think of iTunes U.

Online dictionaries aren’t only about words and their meanings. They also bring in other cool features which make for a fun learning experience for both children and adults alike.

Dictionary.com and its resources make it almost a portal that takes you on a journey of word discoveries. Word has it that it is probably the most frequented of online dictionary and reference sources on the web. Why not – after all you can do much more than merely look up a word here. Try these 8 for starters.

The Hot Word

Words are never one-dimensional. There’s always an interesting story behind them or you can create an interesting one around a word. The Hot Word shows just how interesting the English language is. The blog not only dives into the origins of words, but also discusses their present context. Even a casual read through the blog gives you interesting tidbits like the language that’s only spoken in one tiny part of Portugal.

Words!

This is a weekly compilation that picks up interesting definitions from areas of medicine, gardening, cooking, and more. Browsing through them takes you to entire word lists and in turn to their meanings. The compilation perks up interest because you might thing that you know all about a specific area, but the word list tells you that you still have some learning to do. Dictionary.com comes with comprehensive listings on medical terms, abbreviations, cultural words, idioms etc.

Solve a Daily Crossword

I can’t get to the Times crossword or solve it, but I do try my word associations and recall with the Daily Crossword here. You can time yourself, pause and save your progress, and even print the puzzles though it’s much better to solve them online. The game also gives you letter and word hints if you are stuck at a square.

By the way, if you are attempting to solve the Times crossword, you can take the help of the Crossword Solver here at Dictionary.com. Just a helpful tool to bookmark if you are into crosswords.

Fun ‘n Free Games!

The fun doesn’t end at crosswords but continues with the cool word based puzzles and games in the Games section. Making words starting with a provided letter sounds lame, but some interesting rules make the game a bit more challenging. There are more ‘complicated’ games like Word Kingdom which is like playing Age of Empires with words. Word Games has a lineup of nice games that should set up someone who is trying to get better with English.

Become a Word Millionaire with Word Dynamo

Word Dynamo is a beta feature but it already looks useful as an educational tool. Word Dynamo is about learning words in an engaging way. Word challenges are arranged according to grade levels and topics. You have to progress up by unlocking the levels as in any game. Quizzes, word lists, and word games make up Word Dynamo. You can also learn a bit about French, Spanish and Latin.

Which Word Is The World Searching For Today?

A small section that is tucked away near the foot of the homepage shows what the world is searching for on Dictionary.com. Capturing trending words from the whole web would be too much to ask for, so let’s do with what the nearly 50 million visitors landing here are making popular each day. You can look at Popular Searches, Words in the News, and Where Is It.

Rave on Quotes

There are many places you can go in your search for quotable quotes. Dictionary.com happens to be one more. There’s the Quote of The Day right on the homepage and more quotes beyond that. You can cite the quotes or choose to embed them in your blog.

Simply Translate

Last but not the least; Dictionary.com includes a very handy translation engine that can handle 50 languages. The translation is limited to 100 characters, but that should suffice for short bursts. One limitation is that the translator does not detect the language when you insert it into the field.

Dictionary.com goes beyond being a simple online dictionary. What sets it apart are these add-on learning features which make this a complete ‘word portal’. Which is your favorite online dictionary? If it’s this one, tell us what appeals to you here when you come looking for some meaning.

We’ve shown you Ubuntu chemistry applications for students, but we somehow missed this extremely simple and information-crammed version of the periodic table. That’s too bad. There is a lot of information to be found in gElemental, and it’s very logically arranged. There’s a reason it’s so highly rated in the Ubuntu Software Center, and I think it’s more than a competent replacement for a mere poster.

Whether you’re a student or just a science enthusiast, this is an application worth having around for offline reference. If you’re a real nerd, you can just explore it for fun in your spare time. Science is fun.

Using gElemental

If you’ve seen the periodic table of the elements before, the main screen of gElemental will be familiar to you. You’ll see the elements, all in their proper places.

Hover over an element and you’ll see its name, the series it belongs in and its atomic number at the top. By default elements are color-coded according to series; you can find a legend by clicking the drop-down menu at the bottom of the window. You can change this color code in the menu to any of dozens of factors, which is certainly something a poster can’t do.

It’s a simple interface but what else do you want? If what you want are details about the various elements I highly recommend clicking one of them.

You’ll find a variety of information right away, from basic chemical stats to the year and place it was discovered. Click the “Physical or Atomic” tab in this window and you’ll see even more information:

Under physical, you’ll find the melting and boiling points, the heat of fusion and vaporization and more. The atomic tab contains even more information. Rest assured, there’s more data here than most posters you’ve seen.

Are you wondering where this information is all coming from? There’s a complete list of sources which you can find in the menu.

You’re free to look through this and decide how trustworthy the information is, which is particularly nice if you need to cite something you find in this program.

Installing gElemental

Are you ready to install this program? Search your Linux distro’s repository for “gelemental” and you’ll have it in no time. Are you a Ubuntu user? Then simply click here to install gElemental, thanks to the magic of the Ubuntu Software Center.

If you can’t find gElemental in your repositories, head over to the gElemental homepage, where you’ll finds the source code to compile it yourself.

Conclusion

I love simple applications that do one thing very well. So far as I can tell, this program is a great way to quickly pull up information about the periodic table of the elements. Do you agree? As always, leave your thoughts in the comments below along with any alternative applications for the job.

I personally hate installing extra toolbars in my browser, and not only because they take up screen real estate. But the potential usefulness of Citelighter piqued my interest enough to overcome my reluctance. Citelighter is not merely for students, because with its information gathering features, it could be handy across the board for bloggers, writers, office workers, even stay-at-home moms.

How does a citation tool help us?

Citation is defined as a short note recognizing a source of information or of a quoted text. You can call it a reference. If you are still confused, just open up a Wikipedia entry and head below to the section called References. A citation also similarly acknowledges previously published works and in case of the web, links to it. There are various styles for publishing citations in research papers and on the web. But we will not go into that. For us, it’s more useful to learn what we can do with a citation and research tool like Citelighter.

• Citation is the best way to avoid charges of plagiarism or copying.
• Information is reusable. Crediting the source of the original information helps everyone because a reader can go back to the source and dive deeper into the material.
• Citations help to respect intellectual property rights of the person who created the source text in the first place

Organizing information with Citelighter

Citelighter is described as a fully automated bibliography, citation, research, and internet highlighting tool. It works as a Firefox plug-in. Citation is in public beta now, but is gradually progressing towards maturity as a full-fledged academic research tool.

Let’s see how it automates the whole process of collating information and preparing a research paper (or any paper).

1. To get started, register with an email account or Facebook Connect. Next, you have to download the Firefox plug-in which shows up as a toolbar after you restart the browser. The screenshot in the next point gives you an idea of how it looks after an install on Firefox.

2. Start a project. You can also set a due date for project completion and set reminders. The next steps are pretty simple.

3. Surf the web and start collecting information from webpages. Citelighter does not yet work on PDF files, but with webpages it’s a smooth flow.

4. Highlight all relevant information with the mouse by selecting the text as you would with a highlighter pen and clicking the Capture button.

A small sub-toolbar drops down and gives you an option to edit the capture or add extra comments. Citelighter automatically captures the information, but as you can see in the edit box below, you can fine-tune your capture by adding a lot of citation worthy info.

5. As you keep collecting the info, you can press the View button anytime to see all that you’ve saved. It’s arranged in points. The View window is where most of the information organization takes place. You can drag & drop to reorder all the data you have collected. You can click on Comments and type in more information required for your paper or notes.

6. Scroll down and you see all the bibliographic information neatly recorded as per the order you collected the information. You can customize it according to the three styles presently on offer right now – APA, MLA, and Chicago.

7. Once you’ve completed your research, press the Export button to send all the organized data (or selected ones) to a MS Word document, Google Docs, email, or printer.

8. The My Projects page (accessed from home icon on the toolbar) lists all your projects. You can use the search bar to search for specific text stings within all your projects listed here.

Footnotes…

Citelighter is a quick research tool to collect and organize your research notes. It works well on webpages, but it’s still not tuned for PDFs. That may go against it, but these are still early stages and the project is evolving. It just might be the premium feature when the developers start offering it in paid and free flavors. Browser extensions for Chrome and Safari are also in the offing. Citelighter is also putting a points system in place for more community participation.

When it comes to citation and bibliography tools, I like Citelighter for its speed and ease of use. What about you? Which research tool would you recommend?

Brainstorming your ideas visually helps with clarity and allows you to connect ideas and interlink them together. That’s where mindmapping took off. You might know zilch about it, but even age old habits of doodling your ideas is better than a blank page. But you don’t have to draw aimlessly because MS Word offers you a few free templates to structure your ideas and sharpen your thought process.

Let’s fire up MS Word and take a look at 8 free Office.com templates that help you generate ideas with Microsoft Word. You can use the search field to get to the template if you have a specific term; you can drill down the categories; or you can follow the links below.

Story Map Templates

The Story Map template looks suitable for writers who are trying to outline a plot. Alternatively, it can be used by students, as intended to plan out a narrative. But it can also be used to plan out a team role-play for a given situation when you are trying to connect a solution to the underlying problem by assigning specific roles to team members.

Process Chart

This is a very simple step-by-step chart that can be used to describe the flow of a process. You can use the process chart to break down a complex event into a sequence of smaller action steps.

Event Map

I have tried using this Word template while plotting the idea for a short story – and it worked. Along with the Story Map template, the Event Map can be a useful tool for beginner writers.

Spider Map

The Spider Map is a little like a conventional mind map. The large central circle represents your main idea, and the branching linear lines can be used to jot down the subsidiary ones. The description says that you can use the spider map to investigate various aspects of a single topic or just to organize their thoughts about a subject.

Umbrella Chart

To be frank, I haven’t figured out a way to use this MS Word template effectively yet, so I have yet to find out how versatile this graphic organizer is. The description says that you can arrange the details of any subject or topic using this visual aid. What I have learnt is that the umbrella chart can be used to represent a core idea and the subordinate ideas around the spokes.

KWL Chart

Using this simple columnar template, you can easily track what someone (or you) knows (K), wants to know (W), and has learned (L) about a subject. It’s a very handy aid for studying and also if you are trying to research something. Wikipedia has a more detailed explanation on its use, and as it says the KWL template can be used to reduce repetition by leaving out prior knowledge and focusing on the W (wants to know). Based on this, students can concentrate on what exactly they want to learn or how and where they want to learn it from.

T-Chart

Every issue has two sides and this template helps you to examine both sides of the same coin. The T-chart is a graphic organizer that can be used to look at different viewpoints and broaden your view on an issue. Anything that can be broken down into two opposing views can be stated using the T-chart.

Fishbone Diagram

The Fishbone diagram came out of Japan (not surprisingly). Also called Ishikawa diagrams, they are somewhat advanced idea organizers in comparison to the others we have on this list. This diagram analyzes the relationship between a cause and its effect. You can use it to drill down into the root cause of a problem by organizing a complex cause-effect event into categories. The Fishbone diagram is widely used in quality control.

The templates are mere tools. Ideas and brainstorming effectiveness will depend on how well you put them on paper or on the screen. But MS Word and its gallery of templates give you easily downloadable files that can be turned into idea organizers in a flash. Customize the templates by changing the text labels and/or adding to the sections.

Are you a brainstorming kind of guy? Tell us how you go about it and tell us especially if MS Word is on your list of tools. What do you think of these brainstorming capable templates?

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Searching for scholarships is a way of life in countries like the United States. It is considered to be one of the more stressful stages of one’s educational career. With the right scholarship in hand, it obviously becomes the most rewarding one later on.

There are a gazillion scholarship search engines and websites on the web. Each of them could potentially lead you to a fitting scholarship that could help you save a few dollars. So, here’s looking at a few useful ones that could save you a lot of legwork in search of financial aid.

FastWeb

Fifteen years in the search for the right financial aid for students and counting makes this web service one to bookmark. You don’t have to pay a penny as it tries to match you with roughly 1.5 million scholarships worth over $3.4 billion across a diverse range of educational needs. The site also caters to adult education.

There are other tools on hand like advice on student life and tools such as financial aid calculators, discussion boards, and checklists. Some of the advice comes from past beneficiaries who applied and won scholarships. FastWeb merely connects students with scholarship sponsors and then gets out of the way. On its part, FastWeb does screen sponsors to ensure their legitimacy and the privacy policy protects applicant details.

Scholarships.com

Here you search more than 2.7 million college scholarships and grants worth more than $19 billion. The site has a detailed directory listing over 7,000 colleges, their admission statistics, tuition and fees, financial aid and scholarships, academic majors etc. The free scholarship search website allows you to manage your scholarship search with your own profile. The College Matchmaker helps you find and connect to the right school.

As usual, you start by creating your profile and then use it to match scholarships to your educational needs. You can match scholarships by – dollar amount, deadline, rank, and scholarship name. You can use the site as a tracking tool for your desired sponsor. The site helps you in composing and personalizing a scholarship application letter.

Zinch

The Facebook Connect option suggests that this scholarship site has a social networking angle built into it. Zinch has a score system (Swagger) that measures your activity on the site and positions your profile accordingly. The site so far has featured $1.9 Billion in educational aid. 800+ college recruiters can connect you to 5000 schools in its database.

As the screen above shows, the advanced filters can help you sort through the results and select the right scholarship. The site is planning scholarship help for non-U.S. schools soon.

College Board

The site has a database size of 2300 colleges and $3 Billion in educational finance aid. The site has a slew of tools that help students calculate cost of loans, compare loans, compare aid awards, calculate college savings etc. that helps to give the right picture for informed decisions.

The scholarship search relies on the information you feed into your profile and then the brief questionnaire helps you match your education level, talents, and background to the proper loan.

FSA (Federal Student Aid)

The U.S. Government site helps students access more than $150 billion in new aid annually. The main tool and the focus area for the site is the development, distribution, and processing of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), the form used to apply for all federal, as well as for many state, regional and private student aid programs. This covers the three modes – grants, loans, and work study – the program uses to fund aid for students.

Though these five sites are U.S. specific, they are useful for foreign students too as a large number of them hunt around for the right college to enroll in. Legitimate scholarship sites help you avoid scams and fraudsters and secure your education without giving away an arm or a leg. Are you on a scholarship hunt? Have you ever landed financial aid with the help of a scholarship search site? Give us a shout.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Sure, we’ve talked a little bit about instructor ratings here on MakeUseOf before, but surely there’s something a little better out there. Fortunately, I’ve found found a little site called Koofers, and with over 4000 universities using it nationwide, you know that it’s your all-access pass to professor reviews, study tips, and more.

A Review On Reviews

As just a personal preference, if I’m going to any third-party website concerning my university, I’m only really going to go there to check out the professor reviews. With Koofer’s you can definitely do this using their 5-star rating program complete with personal student reviews. Granted, you should keep in mind that any online university review is biased, so use your judgement when taking into consideration the opinions of others. Sometimes a person who is a poor student will simply blame the teacher, but other times the professor is just that pitiful.

Fortunately, there is another system in place in which you and others can actually rate the reviews. If a review doesn’t seem legitimate (or the reviewer only gave the professor his stars and wrote nothing else), you can click whether or not his input was useful. Koofers will place the most helpful reviews at the top of the list, and from there, you can get a pretty solid understanding of what the professor is actually like.

As always, I like to take a look at the search system of a website simply because if you have a bad search function, then it’s likely the website is poor as well. Koofers allows you to search by class, instructor, and even class by instructor. Yes, you may hear a horrible review about a professor’s 2020 class. However, if you click over to his 2030 class, there may be glowing reviews. That’s a pretty good thing, in my opinion.

The Campus Online

Another element of Koofers is its desire to bring the campus online. Part of me doesn’t necessarily like this feature, for it seems to pass itself off as a weak social networking system that is supposed to bring the classroom to the tubes. The idea in theory is wonderful, but since Koofers’ users probably already communicate via Facebook (or in at least my case, do not communicate at all), there isn’t really much of a place for it. However, with elements such as the “class wall” which allows you to post messages to your fellow students, I am positive others could make use of it.

Despite the in-house social networking attempt, Koofers does an excellent job of integrating with Facebook. Simply sign in with your account, and when you start adding classes to your schedule, you will be able to connect with your classmates and be able to communicate with them via Facebook as well. The only downside to this is the practically forced option of Facebook. You can sign up with your email address only, but you will miss out on some features such as building your class schedule and communicating with fellow students.

In addition to the class community building, Koofers also allows you to share notes, videos, and flashcards with all your classmates so that you can work on studying together. Besides this – and I’m not sure how ethical it is – the website also allows past students to post old tests, quizzes, and exams on the site itself. Is it likely that the professor will change the test each semester? Yes. Is it also likely that he won’t? Yes.

Some Spiffy Tools

Besides all the basic stuff focused on your educational enrichment, Koofers also has set up a portion of its site in which you can buy or sell textbooks. So if you really want to go see that Deathcab concert, you have a place to sell your books even if it’s the middle of the semester. (No guarantee that anyone will buy, though.) Besides this, there is even a GPA Calculator for people like myself who often think, “Well. If I make a C in here, and if I make a B in there, I can still come out with a 3.25!”

Also, if you’re feeling a little studied out, Koofers supposedly has a variety of web games to play. However, while working on this review, I noticed that the games actually didn’t load… Chances are that they may not actually work, but that doesn’t take away from the functionality of the rest of the site.

Conclusion

Being a university student, I can definitely see where Koofers could help me out. As an endnote, you should know there is even a karma system based on information sharing, so you can use this to know who is reliable on Koofers. Also, whether you are a student yourself or if you know one, this is a nice website that should definitely be shared with the rest of the world, so pass the word on.

What other sites do you use to aid you in class selection and studying? What do you think of Koofers online university reviews?

Sadly, most people can’t speed read and the organisations which promise to be able to teach you are for-profit and out of the reach of most students. But there are free solutions available, and Readfa.st has proven itself to be a very good free solution at that. Readfa.st lets you easily line up your own reading material from the Internet and at the same time use the service as a game to teach you effective speed reading. You can even compete against your friends and check out what they’re reading.

How To Get Started With Readfa.st

Readfa.st is a free, online service which lets you set up an account quickly and easily either with an email address or a Facebook Connect login.

Test How Fast You Can Read

The first thing to do using Readfa.st is to test how fast you currently read. This means Readfa.st can set your minimum reading speed and ensure all the documents you read are optimised just for you.

After you have read the passage, Readfa.st can quiz you on the content to ensure you have understood correctly.

You can then continue to test yourself by reading passages from within Readfa.st or move on to reading your own chosen content. Readfa.st can offer you a list of its most popular content to read if you want to try something new and interesting.

Read Online Documents Faster

Using the Readfa.st bookmarklet, you can quickly take the text of any webpage and read it using Readfa.st.

As Readfa.st makes a list of your documents, it can easily be used as a short-term read it later style list. Although, you wouldn’t want it to get too long or it would become unwieldy.

While reading, you can control Readfa.st by using “s” for slower, “f” for faster and space bar to pause/start the text.

Learn Speed Reading Online

Readfa.st doesn’t just offer you a speed reading experience, it helps to teach you how to improve your reading speed. With every passage you read you can record your speed, meaning you can see how you’ve improved over time.

If you have used Facebook Connect, your Readfa.st account can easily be used to compare your reading speeds with friends and have a little bit of friendly competition. If not, you’ll need to add friends manually at this stage. Hopefully soon they’ll make it possible for users who signed up with an email address to connect their accounts to Facebook later in order to find their friends and sync profile pictures.

If you have no friends on Readfa.st you can always compare your results with the top readers on the Readfa.st leaderboard.

Here’s some more great articles on learning how to speed read that you might like:

• 3 Ways You Can Learn To Speed Read Online
• 5 Text Reader Apps That Really Help You Speed Read
• 6 Bookmarklets That Will Boost Your Web Surfing Speed & Productivity
• Make Skim Your Ultimate Reading & Study Tool For PDF Files [Mac]

How do online speed reading applications like Readfa.st help you? Are there some texts which work better than others?

As you can probably tell by the name, AnkiDroid is compatible with the free learning application and website Anki. It also synchronizes with Anki, so you can split your learning between the PC and your Android device, and it has a cool homescreen widget and a reminder system.

The Basic Concept

If you’ve never used a flash card application for learning something, the concept might bear a short introduction. Flash card learning is good for memorizing factoids and small pieces of information, such as the letters of a language or key terms. It works using question and answer pairs. You’re asked a question, try to think of the answer, and then press a button to see the answer. You then need to tell the app how hard or easy coming up with the right answer was.

According to this, the application knows when to next ask you this question. If you know something well, it won’t ask you about it often. This produces a very focused and personalized learning process, where you’re constantly drilled only on your weak points.

The App

Just like Anki, AnkiDroid’s system is based on “decks” of flash cards. The screen you see above is where you can see the status of your local decks, and sync them with the Anki server (requiring a free account). As you can see by the thin white progress bar, my NATO Phonetic Alphabet is going better than my Russian (I’ve been using AnkiDroid for about two months now).

In case you’re not so much into phonetic alphabets or reading Russian, there are many other decks you can choose from.

These are just card decks regular folks like you and me created for Anki and decided to share with the world. Some of them are better than others, and there’s no ranking system, so picking a high-quality pack is a matter of trial and error. There’s often more than one deck about any given subject. Let’s take history, for example:

I could keep scrolling – this is a wide field, and as you can expect, there are lots of decks. Some of the decks are very focused, aimed at one specific test (SOLS Unit 2 above, for example), while others are more general. Also, some packs are just enormous – check out that Hebrew Vocabulary pack (two screenshots up) with 11,670 facts.

If none of the decks available offer the facts you need, you can always create your own deck. You can do this using Anki’s PC application, or right on your device. Once you have a deck you want to learn, it’s time to start!

The Study Process

The deck review screen looks like this:

Before you start studying (or “Reviewing”, in Anki parlance), you can see your progress on the pack so far (ever since you started learning it), as well as how many cards you need to review today. Let’s Start Reviewing:

This is a very simple deck, so the question consists of just a single letter (meaning, “what’s the word for U in the NATO phonetic alphabet?”). Once you’re done thinking, tap Show Answer:

You can rank your answer in four different grades. “Again” usually means you just didn’t know the answer, and the others are self-explanatory. As you can see, if I say this was a hard question for me, I will be shown the question again much sooner than if I say it was Easy. In both cases the interval is really long, because I’ve been working on this deck for a while and I actually know this stuff already (and AnkiDroid correctly picked up on this).

Let’s take a look at the Russian pack I’ve been studying, where I haven’t been doing as well:

In this card, “Hard” would make AnkiDroid show me the card again within 21 days, not 1.1 months. AnkiDroid has all sorts of other nerdy goodies, such as a statistics browser showing your total review time and other data about your progress. These are all secondary to the core of the app, which we’ve just seen. It does have one other key feature:

The Widget & Reminder System

AnkiDroid comes with a large (4×1) widget which shows lots of information about your progress. Apart from the cryptic “0 15 0″, the whole thing is quite clear. Tapping it, as you would expect, launches AnkiDroid.

The reminder system is configurable – for me, it kicks in once there are 25 cards pending review. So you don’t have to constantly check on the widget. If you leave AnkiDroid for a while, notifications will just start appearing in the Notification Bar whenever you need to review your cards. They’re slightly annoying (most notifications are, to me) but are very effective. If you really don’t like them, you can always just switch them off.

Final Thoughts

As I said, I’ve been using this application for a while now, and it just works. It is one of the best applications on my device, and is a fantastic way to learn a new language or any set of data. Just for a sense of proportion, the Anki client for iPad (by another developer) retails for a whopping $25, while AnkiDroid is completely free.

If there’s anything you want to learn, grab AnkiDroid now. And if you make any decks, don’t forget to share!

Journal articles are just as relevant in the academic world today as they’ve ever been, but fewer and fewer people actually handle a physical journal on a day-to-day basis. Instead students and professors are amassing ever-growing folders of PDF files containing the papers they need to do their job. These files are convenient in many ways but the more papers you collect the harder it is to find anything.

Featuring quality OCR and a searchable document library complete with metadata (author, subjects, tags and more), Qiqqa makes organizing your PDF files a snap. Add an indexed way to add comments and markup pages and you’ll quickly realize that this is the tool you’ve been looking for.

Your Library

Start up Qiqqa and you’ll see a summary of your library, along with a collection of links to learn how to better use Qiqqa:

You’ll also notice that there is a tabbed interface. This means you can open various documents at once, which is useful while writing.

Open the library and you’ll see your PDF collection:

All of your papers are presented here, assuming you’ve added them. Adding files to this library is easy. You can set Qiqqa to watch a folder on your computer for new files; do this and any files added to that folder will be in your library. Alternatively, you can add files individually or add entire folders of files.

Once you build your collection you can scroll through to find a specific paper if you’d like. Alternatively, you can use the search function:

This is probably the quickest way to find what you’re looking for, but it is by no means the only way. You can also break your library down using metadata:

Above you can see the papers organized according to whether or not they’ve been read. As you can see there are a variety of other options, including authors, publications, year and tags. Some PDFs include this information but most don’t; you’ll have to add metadata to the files to use these tools.

Getting Metadata

Luckily Qiqqa also includes a brilliant way of collecting metadata. It requires some input from you, but will ultimately save you a lot of time when you’re searching for documents and when you’re building a bibliography later. This video tutorial outlines everything nicely:

Reading PDF Files

Qiqqa comes with a built-in PDF reader, of course:

From here you can read the way you usually would, with a few bonuses. You can highlight text and add notes; these notes are then indexed for easy reference. In fact, all text in all the PDFs you add to Qiqqa are indexed; even PDFs made from scanned documents. This is possible because Qiqqa comes with very good OCR technology.

This is put to good use. For example, Qiqqa can automatically determine the title of a paper by looking for the biggest words on the front page of the paper. This same concept is used to automatically generate a table of contents for any file that doesn’t have one, a feature that can save you a lot of time.

Other Features

If you’re working on a paper you might want to visualize your ideas alongside the sources that inspired them. Qiqqa includes a tool for this:

This isn’t that different from other mind mapping software, except that you can directly reference the papers from which you’re drawing ideas.

Another feature worth mentioning is online syncing. You need to purchase a user account to really make use of this, but for academics with multiple computers it could be a godsend. It’s even possible to browse your papers online.

Download Qiqqa

Ready to download Qiqqa? Visit the Qiqqa homepage to find out how.

Want to see Qiqqa in action before you download anything? Watch the following video; it goes over all the features mentioned above and more:

You can find more Qiqqa tutorial videos here.

Conclusion

I’m not an academic; at least, not anymore. My wife Kathy is though, and it was her quest to organize papers that made me aware of Qiqqa. She is a physics graduate student and uses the software all the time; she tells me it’s extremely useful and I can certainly see why.

I want to know what you think, though. Is Qiqqa a good way to manage documents, or is there a better one? Let me know in the comments below, as always. I love learning from you guys.