In a change from the time when colleges vied to be the most wired campus and recently the most wireless campus in the nation, professors and colleges are kicking laptops out of their classrooms. Slate’s The Big Money reports on the trend of banning laptops; calling attention to the University of Chicago Law School’s decision to cut Internet access in classrooms and the more dramatic laptop dipped in nitrogen at the University of Oklahoma, shown below.

Why are campuses asking, or sometimes telling, students to ditch the laptop for a legal pad? Most often the professors and universities cite the lack of class discussion or attentiveness of students who have access to all of the Web’s distractions. Others cite lower grades from laptop users and a lack of actual thought by students who type exactly what their professor says. Whatever the reason given, the trend is growing and this isn’t good news for students who will be relying on these digital devices for the rest of their working life.

Slate argues that the iPad will make the problem even worse because students can claim that they are using the device to read digital textbooks; making it harder for professors and universities to institute a ban.

As a professor I have to admit that staring out into a sea of screens is a much different experience than making eye contact with 35 students, but I welcome this new technology into my class. Yes, students have access to a wealth of distractions — but they also have access to a wealth of relevant information that, in my experience, aids class discussions.

I wish the university I teach at would give every student an iPad, like Seton Hill is doing this fall; because in my experience, students who use the tablet or slate are easier to engage because there is no screen between us. Even with the screen between us having a small affect, I couldn’t imagine getting through advanced undergrad courses without the help of OneNote and a laptop. I only wish I had Evernote and my HP tx2000 tablet with me then as the combo proved essential while finishing my MBA.

I see the entrance of new technology like iPads, notebooks and smartphones into my classroom not as a problem to be banned, but as a challenge to think about how I can engage a group of students using the devices that are a part of their daily life. After all, I am preparing them for their future in a workforce where these constantly connected devices will be their constant companions.

Bad News: More Colleges Banning Laptops is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

Nobody is perfect; and when a college instructor tries to write an entire semester worth of class schedule, there are bound to be some mistakes. Unfortunately, mistakes are hard to amend when you’ve printed the syllabus and given it to perhaps hundreds of students.

There has been changes and updates to class schedules in nearly every class that I’ve had this semester, and keeping track of it all is quite complicated. Most instructors aren’t about to hand out revised syllabi to a myriad of students — so at best the student gets a shout-out in class that something has been changed, and perhaps the schedule uploaded as a word file somewhere on the web. But regardless of how they try to notify students, schedules get confusing when there are multiple iterations, and if a student is absent that day how are they to know that they schedule has been modified? What’s more, the schedule can only be viewed by downloading a word file and searching through it to find the change.

So here’s a suggestion for instructors. Use a shared Google Calendar to keep your class schedule. What is a shared Google Calendar? In simple terms, it is a free, online calendar that can be viewed by multiple people (ie: all of your students). This has many benefits over the traditional way of doing things (explained above). What are they?

• Push schedule changes to students instantly: The real beauty of a shared Google Calendar is that you can update it whenever you need to, and the change will be seen instantly as students access the calendar. No more arduous altering and uploading of word documents. The calendar, of course, would be set to read-only so that only the instructor can make changes.
• Multi-platform: A word document is… a word document, and can only be read on a device that supports whatever format you choose. A Google calendar can be access in a vast number of ways. Students could access the calendar from a simple website URL. They could subscribe to the calendar with their own favorite calendar application. Students can even see changes to the calendar through RSS. If your students are really savvy, they’ll easily be able to get the calendar onto their phone or a device like the iPod Touch, and it will function as a handy pocket schedule for their class. The great thing about this is that if done properly, they’ll get instant schedule updates directly to their device if the professor makes a change to the master calendar (ah… the beauty of technology).
• Save the environment: Instead of printing hundreds of papers at the beginning of a semester (and maybe even again in order to update the schedule) just write the URL of the calendar on the board at the beginning of the semester. From this one URL, students can view the calendar, and advanced students can access the calendar from wherever they want (RSS, through a mobile device, etc.) A tip about the URL: Writing a long shared calendar URL can be annoying for you and for your students who need to copy it down. Try using a service like www.tinyurl.com which will shorten the URL to just a few characters and make it easier for everyone to copy down the address.

So consider using a more efficient, practical, and environmentally friendly approach to class schedules next semester. Not only will this make things easier on the instructor’s end, but students stand to benefit as well. Have a quick look at how easy it is to work with a Google calendar, and how students see the updates immediately:

Students: feel free to point your instructors in the direction of this article if you think that it’d be useful to you or them, maybe they’ll be willing to give it a try for their next semester of classes!

Professors and Teachers — Use Free Tools to Help the Environment and Keep Your Class on Schedule with Ease is a post by Ben from Notebooks.com.

The advent of mobile computers becoming commonplace in the classroom is one that has brought much increased productivity and many other great advantages. However, having a notebook is also a portal to the vast internet which can be filled with a seemingly limitless number of distractions.

Be honest now — how many times have you browsed Facebook, or instant messaged friends in class (who they themselves are probably also in class)? You know the deal: the second your professor starts talking about something that is boring, you somehow subconsciously open a web-browser and before you know it, you are updating your Facebook status or checking out the lastest Lolcats.

A simple but effective way to prevent keep yourself from the ever tempting web is to toggle off your WiFi. Many computers have hardware switches (located somewhere on the notebook) which can be flipped to temporarily disable the wireless functions of your notebook. If not a physical switch, some notebooks have a key combination that can be pressed to toggle WiFi. Take a look up in the F-keys to see if you see anything that might look like it represents WiFi and try giving that a press (you’ll probably need to press a modifier key along with it, like Fn). If your computer doesn’t have either of these, you should be able to disable the WiFi through your notebook’s wireless connection manager.

This is an effective method because it makes 5 or 10 minute web browsing sessions less temping as you’d have to go through the task of turning the WiFi back on and waiting for your computer to reconnect to the web.

One great side effect of turning off your WiFi to stay focused is that it is also a great way to save battery life. Transmitting data over a wireless network with your computer is one of the larger power consumimg tasks that a notebook does. By turning off the WiFi you can save a noticeable amount of battery life.

But don’t limit yourself just when power saving is convenient. Use this tip even when you are plugged in. You can’t tell me that you’ve managed to avoid ‘web breaks’ where you have a 15 minute browsing session (every 15 minutes) while you are trying to get a big paper done. Turning off the WiFi will help you stay focused and get that paper finished and turned in on time.

College Quick Tip: Turn Your WiFi Off to Stay Focused and Saved Battery Life is a post by Ben from Notebooks.com.

Its pretty much inevitable that you’ll be needing word processing tools in college. While there are several great free alternative out there, Microsoft Office is pretty much staple in the word processing world and most people are familiar with it. With that said, read on to find out how to nab your copy of Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for just $60. If you are willing to try some awesome free word processing tools before dropping $60 on MS Office, stick around, we’ll be bringing you MS Office alternatives in the next week or so.

Microsoft offers US students a big discount on their office suite of tools through a program that they are calling ‘The Ultimate Steal’ (pun intended I hope). If you have a college email address ending in .edu you should be qualified for this steep discount (as long as your school is approved). For $60 you’ll get Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 which includes the following tools (I’ve linked to Wikipedia so you can get info on the lesser known tools in the suite):

• Word (word processing)
• Excel (spreadsheets)
• PowerPoint (presentations)
• Outlook (email management)
• OneNote (digital note-taking)
• Groove (document collaboration)
• Publisher (document layouts)
• Access (database management)
• InfoPath (form creation)

How To Buy

Note: You are paying for a digital version of this software meaning that you will download it after purchase. For an additional $13 you can have the software shipped to you on DVD.

Taking advantage of this offer is simple. Just head over to The Ultimate Steal webpage and click the big green button that says Buy Now. You’ll be asked to enter your university email address twice. After filling out the fields, hit the submit button and wait for an email to pop in to your inbox. The email that you receive will have a link that takes you to purchase Microsoft Office for the discounted price. Just add it to your cart and then use the Checkout button. By default, your cart has the physical DVD version of the software. If you don’t need the DVDs and are simply going to download the software, be sure to remove the item listed as ‘Office Ultimate 2007 back-up DVD‘ by clicking on the trashcan icon in the cart if you want to save yourself $13.

And that’s about all there is to it. Enjoy your cheap copy of Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, and remember to stick around if you are looking for powerful and free alternatives to Microsoft’s office suite.

College Student? Get Microsoft Office 2007 for $60! is a post by Ben from Notebooks.com.

Gmail is wildly popular and for good reason. It is one of the most advanced email tools out there: it offers a huge amount of storage, has tons of time saving features, and maybe best of all, it’s free. If you don’t have a Gmail address, making one is simple. I’d highly recommend making one and using it as an email address for life.

But anyway… you are probably here because you already have a Gmail address and you’d like to rip your mail out of your university’s horrible mail manager and get it into your oh-so-awesome Gmail inbox. As long as your university’s email system supports the proper protocols, it will be possible to make this happen. You can even send mail from your school’s email address through Gmail! Ok enough telling you what it can do, and more showing you how to do it.

There are two steps to get everything working.

The first thing we want to do is to set up something called POP3 which will pull messages from your school inbox into your Gmail inbox. Note: This is not a fool proof process, these steps may not work for you depending on the configuration of your school’s email system. If you run into a problem, check the Troubleshooting section toward the bottom of this post.

Configure Gmail to receive mail from your university email address:

1. Go to www.gmail.com and login
2. Click on the Settings button at the top right of the screen
3. Click on the Accounts and Import tab
4. Look down the page and find the Check mail using POP3 section and click Add a POP3 email account
5. Enter your school email address and click Next Step
6. Enter the password that you use to login to your school email, make sure that Label incoming messages: is checked, this will visually identify which emails are from your school address and which are from your regular Gmail account. Leave all other settings as they are, click Add Account
7. If everything has gone smoothly up to this point, you should be all done for the first half of the process. Close any windows remaining from the Gmail setup, and check your inbox which should start to be populated with emails from your school inbox. If you aren’t seeing any mail come into your Gmail inbox, make sure that you actually have emails in your school’s inbox, or try refreshing and waiting a few minutes

What you just did was configure Gmail to download emails from your school email inbox and put them into your Gmail inbox. Gmail will automatically check your school email inbox every 15 minutes or so for new emails, and download them into your Gmail inbox without you needing to do anything. If you urgently need something from your school’s email inbox to get into Gmail, you can always click Check mail now by going to Settings > Accounts and Import > Check mail using POP3 > then click Check mail now next to your school email address.

Note: Depending upon how you configure it, Gmail deletes emails in your college’s email inbox after downloading it into your Gmail inbox. So just in case you don’t like how this whole Gmail and college email thing works and want to get everything back to the way it was, don’t permanently delete your school emails out of Gmail expecting them to still reside in your school inbox. (tip: remember to archive with Gmail! Archiving moves the message out of your inbox so that you can stay organized, but stores it so that you can find it later.)

Ok you are half way done. The next step won’t hurt a bit, I promise.

Configure Gmail to be able to send emails from your university email address:

1. You should still be logged into Gmail, click on Settings at the top right of the page
2. Click on the Accounts and Import tab
3. Find the Send Mail As: section and click the Send mail from another address button
4. A new window will pop-up. In the Name: field, specify the name that you would like to associate with the email address (ie: when you send an email, it will display your email address in addition to this name). In the Email address: field enter your school email address. Then click the Next Step button
5. Leave the Send through Gmail radio button marked and click the Next Step button
6. Click the Send Verification button. Gmail will send an email to your school email address to verify that you own the account. Log in to your school email inbox, open the verification email and click the verification link. If you can’t see the verification email in your school’s inbox after a few minutes, check your spam folder or try refreshing the page

What you just did was configure your email account to work with Gmail so that you can compose a message inside Gmail and send it ‘from’ your university email address. When you compose a new message, there will be a drop down list in the From: field; you can choose if your email is send from your regular Gmail account, or the newly configured school email address. You can also reply to emails that have been sent to your university address (that we’ve now configured to come into the Gmail inbox) from your university address.

And that’s about it, congratulations! The best part about this whole thing? You’ll probably never need to use your crappy school email inbox ever again!

Troubleshooting

So it is possible that the steps above didn’t work out for you. This is usually caused because some schools don’t like to support great standards like POP and IMAP, while others simply don’t have these features enabled by default, or use different configuration settings. If you had any issues with the above steps, you’ll want to verify some things. Try the following:

• Ensure that POP and IMAP are supported by your school: The easiest way to do this is often to log in to your school email and find a Help link. Browse around looking for keywords such as POP and IMAP. Hitting ctrl+f will bring up a search box in your browser so that you can search the current page. If you can’t find anything, contact the department that manages email and computer systems for your university (often ‘IT’ something or other), and email someone asking if POP and IMAP are supported.
• If your school does support POP/IMAP, it may be disabled by default: Some email clients require that you manually enable POP/IMAP. See if there is a settings page on your school email inbox. Search around for POP/IMAP or words like forwarding. Try to enable POP/IMAP.
• Some schools use different settings than Gmail sets up by default: Remember step 7 in the first section of this guide? We left all of the settings as they were. Sometimes, school’s need Gmail to connect in a different way than Gmail expects to. You may need to adjust the POP Server: and Port: fields in step 7 to values defined by your school. Again, the best way to find these would be searching through Help documentation, or emailing the people that manage your email and asking (first if POP and IMAP are support) what POP server and port email clients should connect to.

How to Use Gmail to Manage Your School Email is a post by Ben from Notebooks.com.