Today we are introducing the first year students to tricks that make their digital life easier.

The Term Life Hack was popularised by a blog Life Hacker

Wikipedia covers the history of the term life hack but the term has developed to mean productivity tricks, personal organization, and efficient work processes

The advantages of working within a browser.

Carrying work back and forth between the computer labs and home computers leads to multiple copies of files on thumb drives and other storage devices.This is not the case if handled within a browser.

You can also share documents

Google Docs in Plain English produced by Commoncraft.

With Google Docs & Spreadsheets you can store, and edit your work from any web connected computer. The service is free and you don’t require to install any software on your computer

Zoho offers spreadsheets, word processing, presentation tools, planning tools and note taking tools. All are useful for students, free and browser based.

Images

You can store images online using sites like Flickr. Not only can you store your images online but on Flickr you can annotate and discuss your images as well as tag them so that they can be found by other users.

Picasa is a goggle Web app for hosting photos.

RSS Readers

Using an RSS reader is a efficient way to consume web content if you have problems with ‘keeping up’ with new material that is being published RSS can solve the problem.

RSS in Plain English produced by Commoncraft.

Personalised online start pages

A personalised online start page stores links to all the sites you use regularly on one page.

These services usually offer a way to check your web based email, your RSS feed, a search function, a variety of web services like your Del.icio.us account or Flickr account.

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