Wikipanion: Who needs a textbook?

1Who needs a textbook when you have Wikipedia’s brain child, Wikipanion? This app has really high ratings – because it’s simply a great app. You can access open source content on any topic imaginable, an essential tool for any class.

Evernote: A revolution in note-taking

2This app is revolutionizing notes as we know it. Evernote is a mobile and web sync friendly, media-rich note-taking machine. The basic function of the app is note-taking with the ability to add voice, photos, location and tags as well as the option to share with friends. The most exciting feature of this app is the Evernote trunk, which is filled with all sorts of valuable tools that are sure to help you excel in the classroom.

iTranslator: Translations at your fingertips

3You can use iTranslator to connect to Google Translator, Babel Fish or Free Translation to help with your language courses. Or, maybe it’ll help you figure out what language your prof is speaking.

Study Tracker: Chart your performance

4Study Tracker, the iPad app by GradeGuru, helps students track their class performance. Students can record their study times and grades per class to monitor their effort and outcomes — and adjust accordingly.

Google Docs: A complete collaboration solution

5Google applications such as Google Documents, Calendar and GMail have become a standard suite of tools enabling college students to collaborate – it really hits the spot for group work. Other apps in the suite include Google Talk for chat, SMS for mobile, Desktop to index your computer, Scholar to find scholarly works and Picasa to edit and manage photos.

Skype: Video chat in the classroom

6Traditionally a software app that allows users to make free voice calls to one another, Skype has a group video chat service that’s being used by professors and students to engage in classroom discussions and host virtual office hours. And, of course, use Skype video to keep in touch with a long-distance significant other — and maybe even the family back home.

Twitter: New levels of engagement

7Twitter is longer just a social network. Students and academics alike are starting to leverage this network to crowd-source questions, gather research and increase classroom engagement levels.

StudyRails: Focus, focus, focus

8StudyRails is an online study tool that helps with time management by allowing students to schedule their study time and block out access to sites that might distract them.

Mindmeister: Brainstorming made easier

9Mindmeister is a cool online mind mapping and collaboration tool that will help with your group projects and presentations. (You’ve done mind mapping before, right?) The basic version, for three mind maps, is free.

GoDocs: Essential for your Google docs

10View, download and send your Google docs from your iPhone or iPad with this $3.99 app. Google docs are the go-to collaboration tool for students, and GoDocs will make collaboration even easier. The only thing it doesn’t do is let you edit docs.

MyHomework: Digital planner in your palm

11Make sure you hand in all of the assignments on time – download this app. MyHomework makes it easy to keep track of, and color code all of your homework, classes, projects and tests. The app will also notify you when you have late and upcoming assignments by numbering them on your application icon. Buh-bye, paper planner.

Kindle: Save money on textbooks

12Digital textbooks are for sure the way to save. With thousands of textbooks available for the Web, mobile and tablets, Amazon’s Kindle will save you about $60 on your average textbook purchase. Multiply that by the amount of textbooks you buy in one semester — that’s a lot of extra spending money.

FlashCards++: No more 3x5s

13There are a lot of flashcard apps to choose from. FlashCard++ is the best bang for your buck, going for $3.99, less than a deck of 3x5s. This stand-out study app makes it easy to study anything anywhere with your mobile phone. It can sync with Quizlet and also back-up your cards to Dropbox. If you’re not pleased with this one, check out CoboCards, Cram or Flashcards Deluxe.

Citation Manager: Making assignments easier

14GradeGuru Citation Manager is a bookmarklet & FireFox add-on that helps students collect and manage citations for papers, essays and assignments. Just highlight the info you want in any online source and Citation Manager will automatically capture the associated citation data from your browser. It’s a real time saver for course work.

Update: GradeGuru doesn’t seem to work with the latest version of Firefox.

Cliqset: Consolidate your stream

15Sharing, discovering and discussing on mobile and the Web just got easier: Follow your streams on Facebook, Twitter, Buzz — 70 social networks all told — in one place with Cliqset. This app is sure to help students simplify their lives and help professors keep students engaged. Cliqset is closed.

Plaxo: A ‘universal’ address book

1Until recently, Plaxo was somewhat lacking as a social network, no matter how much it tried to Face-Twit-book-terify itself. Its strength, to me, lies in its original offering, which they’ve now refocused on: the “universal” address book that allows you to keep your contacts current even if you switch jobs, email services and so on. Now they’re offering a direct sync with Google Contacts if you’re a premium user (read, give them money, currently just under US $60 a year).

I am a premium user, which means I can keep my contacts current in both places, which will be useful should I ever stop using Google Contacts. Google Contacts also syncs with my BlackBerry, which means I really do have my contacts at my fingertips. These are great time savers – remember when you had to export your contacts as a .CSV file, import them, snore … ?

The other thing I really like about Plaxo’s offerings are its ecards. I use them all the time to schedule and send mostly birthday greetings to my friends, family and business contacts, which is another way of networking with a twist. This was one of the reasons I signed up for Plaxo’s premium service some years ago. I figured the resulting selection of additional ecards (you’re limited in your selection if you use the free service) would more than offset what I would otherwise pay to actually buy a card, mail it to someone, etc.

I also now use Plaxo to make and send our own greeting cards, which has cut down significantly on holiday postage. Yes, I send a lot of cards. It’s disappointing that Plaxo doesn’t know when I’ve already scheduled ecards and keeps emailing me reminders about various birthdays, etc., coming up. But that aside, the ecards are cool.

Boomerang for Gmail: Schedule your emails!

2This is something I’ve just started using and I really like it. Essentially, Boomerang for Gmail lets you draft and schedule emails to be sent at a particular time. This is an excellent way of ripping through your work when you’re on a roll, yet not scaring people into thinking you’re a sleepless work demon when they receive emails from you at 2:43 am. You can also decide when you want to respond to email by telling Boomerang when you want to “receive” it, i.e. read something that’s already come into your in-box. I’m not quite sure how useful this is because if I’ve already read it, chances are I’ve already decided whether or not I’m going to reply to it, whether it’s spam or whether I label/star it, etc. But I’ll go with the flow.

Boomerang for Gmail recently became available for download without an invitation code. Once you download and install Boomerang, you’ll see it in the top-right corner of your Gmail screen. I tested it almost immediately and after a couple of missteps – I had a pop-up blocker that I needed to disable – it worked perfectly. Note: if you look at your draft after you have saved and scheduled it, it won’t work. At least for me.

Their customer service is also pretty good. When it wasn’t working for me, I emailed them and got a reply almost immediately from their CEO. Nice!

Tungle.me: Collaborative scheduling

3I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I love Tungle. When people use it instead of email to schedule meetings, it really saves time. I’ve been including it in my e-signature for a while now, and have incorporated it into my website as well as my Waxing Unlyrical blog. Check it out and I’m pretty sure you’ll become a fan.

Toggl: Track multiple projects & clients

4If you need to track your time for your clients or projects or want to move up from a basic spreadsheet but don’t want to lay out a lot of cashola, try Toggl. It’s easy, free (up to a point) and lets you track multiple projects, clients, etc., including those that are billable and those that are not. Even if you don’t have to track your time, it’s still a good exercise to undertake. Doing so lets us see how we spend our time — assuming we are disciplined and truthful about it. And this can help when negotiating or renegotiating client agreements or when you need to push back on a client who’s demanding too much, though we all know we never do that.

Bonus: it helps identify holes in your time management skills, including the amount of time you spend in/on social media. Plus, you’ll have an answer for when someone asks you, “Just how much time do you spend on Twitter?”

Google Docs: Updating docs with your team

5Google Docs let me share and update documents in real time with as many people who need to be involved, without the pain that inevitably comes with people emailing each other different versions of a document that you have to keep saving and re-saving.

Evernote: A revolution in note-taking

6I still like and use Delicious to bookmark stuff that I come across online, but I find myself increasingly using Evernote because of the little notes I can write to myself.

This could be something I plan to send to a client, a cool blog post I want to use in a Weekly Roundup or just something neat I have no idea what to do with at the moment, but I know I’ll want to come back to. The basic service is free.