25 Worthwhile Student Productivity Websites

The internet is a great source of information for the productive student. We can read books, and I love to, but every day new great tricks are invented and shared with us via the internet!

That’s why I would like to share  this list of interesting student productivity resources with you. Not all of the websites and blogs mentioned are specifically targeting students, but on all of them you will find helpful information on various student productivity related subjects. I hope they will be beneficial to you!
In no particular order: Read more

Huge Online Resource for Education Tools

Today I read on academHacK about this, they call it a “Ridiculously Useful Resource”. It’s the Centre for Learning and Performance Technology’s Directory of Learning Tools. And it’s quite a list! From blogging tools to presentation tools and mind mapping and brainstorming tools. With a note if the described tool is free, a download or a hosted service and if it’s open source.

As a Mac user I have to say I don’t see all my favorite Mac applications in the list, although it contains over 2300 tools. But especially if you’re looking for a hosted service and have a good overview of it’s competitors, this is a great directory to check out. They also have a list with their Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008 selected by 159 ‘learning professionals’. It’s worth taking a look at.

A New Logo, a New Theme

From now on Streamlined Mind will have a new theme. It’s the one you’re looking at right now and it’s made by Brian Gardner. Returning visitors might have noticed I was playing around with the design of this website. I tried a few different themes but I wasn’t totally happy with them. There were a lot of small things that I had to adjust or that didn’t work the way wanted. So the last one I used was nice and simple, but the lines were too long which made the articles unpleasant to read.

When I saw Brian Gardners work and especially this theme, I immediately fell in love with the clean look of it. So here it is. With a new logo too. I’m still making a few adjustments so if things aren’t working the way you expect them to, let me know, and I will have a look at it!

I might still change some things here and there, maybe the some colors or fonts, but this is the design I want to stick with for Streamlined Mind.

If you have any questions or remarks on the new theme, please leave a comment and let me know!

Taking Notes: Choosing the Right Tools

It’s a known fact: the longer the lecture or presentation, the smaller the amount of information that will be remembered. If a lecture is 30 minutes long, students don’t remember the first 15 minutes as well as in a lecture with a duration of only those first 15 minutes. So how can we keep track of the information given to us in a two-hour lecture?

Not Just Reading a Book

When we read a fiction book we probably read a line only once. That’s no problem. We don’t really have to remember that specific line, but we want to understand the story. When we have to learn something, say for our final exams, we really have to study the material and make sure we will not forget what we read. So we have to read it over and over again, or use a smart highlighting system to keep track of the most important fact and information.

However, when we listen to a lecturer or a presenter, we can’t highlight words or read things over several times until we really understand what’s being said Read more

How to Use an Outliner to Plan Your Project

While working on a project it’s important to have a good overview of the process. Planning the project before you start might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people just start, without taking the time to write down what exactly has to be done and who is going to do it (in case of a group project).

For a writer it’s good to think about the story line before starting to write as well as during the process. Writing a paper or a book he might want to outline the chapters first.
While working on our own project, and this can be anything from doing research to writing a thesis or building a piece of software, it’s a good idea to think about the ’story line’ of your project before you start producing anything. Read more

Would a Paperless Life Make You Happy?

As a follow-up on my previous post A Smart System To Process Your Paperwork I would like to take a closer look at what can be done to get rid of as much paper as possible. A few practical tips.

Eliminate

First of all it’s a good idea to eliminate as much of the incoming paper as possible. Let’s take some time to make a list of all sources of paper sent to us. Bills, obligations and notices, promotional material, things like that. Do we really need them? Do we read all that stuff?

A lot of the information banks and telecom providers send can also be viewed online. A lot of companies offer the possibility to unsubscribe from these mailings and just send an email with a link to the information. If companies send us promotional offers we can Read more

Book Review: The War Of Art

Sometimes a book can give you just what you need at that specific moment. It’s great to read a book and discover how you seem to recognize a lot of the information. It’s like you already know it but you never really thought about it. For me, Steven Pressfield accomplishes this with his book The War of Art - Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.

Clear And Concise
It’s a small book containing a lot of short and easy-to-read chapters. This is good. The book is about winning your inner creative battles, and it’s good to see the writer doesn’t need 500 pages to explain this. It’s about starting, so the sooner we are done reading the book, the sooner we can start. Start what? Start creating!

There are negative forces inside each one of us that holds us back from doing what we know we should be doing. Pressfield calls those forces Resistance. Read more

A Smart System To Process Your Paperwork

As much as we want to have everything organized inside our computers, there is still a lot of real paperwork sent and given to us. What are we going to do with it?

I’ve been searching for the best way to organize my digital documents for a while now, tried different systems and found great new ways of doing so. Very interesting indeed, but what if too much attention is going to organizing our virtual documents and while inventing and tinkering our best digital file system to date, the papers, letters, presentation or lesson handouts and other printed documents pile up around the computer cluttering our desk.

During a conversation I had with a colleague he described how he organizes his paperwork using a smart and simple system. It goes like this: Read more