Thursday, April 22, 2010

What’s New in Sites for College Students

This title is misleading, in that just about all the sites that we explored have value far beyond the scope of college students. I would say that at least one site in particular has value for grade school students, higher education students and adults of all ages.

yelp.com
This is a pretty interesting site. yelp.com provides reviews on just about any subject for many cities and regions in the US. The reviews are written and submitted by average people, not necessarily professional reviewers. In addition, the reviews are both positive or negative.

That being said, I think that reviews of any kind can provide helpful guidance, but should be taken with a certain grain of salt. I never know for sure when a review is from a biased individual, who may be submitting a glowing report or a damning review for personal reasons.

www.newseum.org
www.newseum.org is the official website for the Newseum in Washington D.C. This is a real museum dedicated to the subject of news events. Whether it is a historical or current (soon to be historic) event, the Newseum covers it. This is another great tool for school children to learn about our past history, with a high tech 21st century approach. It seems to me that way too many people of all ages have a dislike for history. This is very sad, because the old saying that history can repeat itself is quite true. Not knowing world history guarantees that our society will eventually make the same blunders of our past over and over again.

The Newseum covers serious subjects, announcements for upcoming lecture programs, educational programs, exhibits and even a fun page. Make sure you check out "THE NEWS COMES TO LIFE", featuring the Monty Python like routine of Winston Churchill, F.D.R. and Joe Stalin conversing on a park bench.

This is a great site that I highly recommend to everyone, and I will be visiting it many times in the future.

ispeech.org
Do you want a way to convert text files into the audio spoken word? ispeach.org can help you. This is not a free service, but it does provide a niche service for those who have a need of aids for individuals with vision impairment or for podcasting.

officelive.com and yousendit.com
officelive.com provides a free service for off site storage and file sharing of up to 5GB of information. This is a convenient way to send files to clients who do not have an FTP sits, or have e-mail file size restrictions. Just be careful what you upload, because Microsoft will also have access to the information.

yousendit.com provides a similar service as officelive.com and while it is free in a limited "Lite" version (100MB file limit) for individuals, there are business level accounts offered for professionals and corporations.

It all depends on what an individual needs. Ironically, I became aware of yousendit.com not long ago, while working on a freelance assignment. We had problems sending large photo files due to email limits. I had even tried setting up a wiki as a file transfer aid to the client, but they had firewall difficulties with their IT. In any event my contact mentioned it, which is how I became aware. Perhaps officelive.co or yousendit.com could have solved our problems.

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