7 Key Web 2.0 Sites Catered to University and College Work

Web 2.0 is a concept where users utilise web tagging taxonomies in order to categorise webpages and collaborate their categorisations with other online users. In the past decade, there has been a large shift from one way mass-market communication from corporate websites, to those that provide social networking and peer-to-peer sharing of information, links, photos, videos, and other sorts of data. It is no different when it comes to improving student productivity and motivation.

The following 7 websites listed here will aid you in becoming more productive, efficient, and motivated to work hard during semester. You should seriously consider subscribing to these and it only takes a few minutes of time per day to check them out.

Google Notebook

Google Notebook allows you to create notes on webpages you visit, by simply selecting text, and choosing “Note This” in your right-click menu. It allows you to clip useful information, text, images and links from web pages to your Google Notebook without ever leaving your browser window. You can also organise notes, divide them into sections, and drag-and-drop your notes to stay organised. All notes are accessible anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection.

BackPack

This magical tool allows you to organise, and share information across your assignment or working group, effectively making a web intranet portal in a matter of minutes. Keep everyone’s schedules online with the calendar, and centralise discussions, removing the need to send out mass emails to discussion groups, through backpack messages. You can even integrate the website to send text message reminders to your cell phone! Check out a demo page which shows you how to create a portal page within a matter of minutes. The example shows the user how to create a page with links, to-do items, images, notes and page dividers. Another demonstration shows you how to make a collaborative calendar, which can be used to generate and organise your key milestones with your project and assignment deliverables.

Ottobib

A straight forward tool, Ottobib is allows you to create a bibliography giving the web tool basic information, spitting out one of five referencing types: APA, Chicago, MLA, BibTeX and for some reason, a Wikipedia reference. I guess this is for those keen people who not only read articles on wikipedia, but those who also write them!

Zoho Projects

Zoho Projects is essentially an easy to use project management system that lets you define and manage tasks and milestones, track your progress, and create project schedule Gantt charts. The tool also allows you to share your files and items so that it is easily and simultaneously shared across your work group.

All of your tasks that you define can easily be viewed along with their sub tasks, their project/task owner responsible and when the tasks should be done according to a Google-Calendar like system which also allows the user to create and schedule meetings. If you are a project manager, you can also send email messages to remind about task deadlines!

However if you are a fan of BackPack and you are also familiar with the tools offered by them, then perhaps you should check out BaseCamp and their other suite of organisational programs such as CampFire, an online chat system for project groups online, accesible over the internet and on mobile devices such as the iPhone.

Team Cowboy

Team Cowboy is a sports team management tool, which allows you to organise, create, plan, and manage payments for your local sports team, whether it be a club within University or College, or outside of it. Team Cowboy allows you to control rostering of a team, who will be playing and when, event scheduling for upcoming games, planning for a game ladder, as well as the creation of your own team homepage. It also allows you to track your teams progress against other teams as well as your team scores throughout the season. Check it out!

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