If you’re a student, you probably have a computer, but you might not have a lot of expendable money for fancy software. Don’t worry, because there’s a whole bunch of open source and otherwise free software out there!
Personally I use a Mac, but I also use Windows quite a lot, as a kind of 60%-40% split on usage. If I don’t indicate what operating system the below software uses, please assume it works on most platforms, and do make sure to check it out yourself before you download it.
- OpenOffice.org is my favourite office suite. I’ve paid for Apple iWork, and I’ve paid for MS Office. I still go back to OpenOffice over the two of them every time. The Open University used to recommend StarOffice, but it’s been discontinued and is now pay software.
- Don’t forget, The Open University now offers Google Apps to its students, so you can use Google Docs as part of your online experience now. This means your documents are stored on Google’s servers, and you can access them from anywhere. I’ll mention a few more central online storage facilities later.
- You can also use Google Drive with your personal Google account! I use Google Drive to do a lot, like NaNoWriMo, and tutorial notes when there’s an internet connection. The mobile apps also work pretty well – I’ve had great success with Drive/Docs on iPad along with a bluetooth keyboard.
- Elluminate of course is used by The Open University for audio conferencing, slideshows, chat and even video. This will generally be used by your tutor for tutorials, but you can generally also access your tutor group’s instance of Elluminate any time you like. Elluminate runs on any computer with Java Runtime. (That’s pretty much every operating system!)
- I really like to use Evernote right now. It’s available for Mac OS, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry, to name a few. Your Evernote account synchronises across all your devices. You can make notes in the form of text, images, locations, audio recordings, videos and all kinds of combinations of those things. I keep my study notes in there, after I’ve written them by hand first. I can also access them on my phone if I want to recap while on the move.
- Microsoft Office Online has really improved recently and I like it because my Office for Mac and OpenOffice doesn’t always save Office formats that look quite right, while Office Online does. It’s all nice and simple, and I can access it from anywhere with an internet connection, just like Google Drive/Docs.
- I keep my bigger bits of OU work, like TMAs, in my Dropbox. I use a lot of different devices, including switching between Windows and Mac OS on my iMac, so this is a great way to keep up to date. That also means that when Dropbox synchronises, I have a remote and local copy of each document on every device I use. If that’s not a good backup solution, I don’t know what is!
- If you’re not signed up to any cloud services, maybe you’d like to help me help you? :)
- Sign up to Dropbox and get us both extra space.
- I already have a huge Box account thanks to their 50GB offer on iOS, but here’s the site!
- Sign up to Copy and get us both extra space.
- They don’t do referrals for size increases, but here’s a link to Microsoft OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive).
- Tresorit is based in Switzerland, has end-to-end encryption and is overall very cool for the security-conscious! You get 3GB on a free personal account.
- Mega is one of the newer ones; I seem to have acquired a 50GB free account at some point but I’m not sure if the offer is still on.
If you have any suggestions for free tools for students, please let me know!
I also made a post about free online learning resources here.
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