If you want to develop a new habit, what do you do? You make it convenient to perform. So what if you want to expand your vocabulary? Easy, you install Dictionary Search for Firefox.

Dictionary Search makes it easy to look up any unknown words you may stumble across using The Free Dictionary. Never again will you skim over a word that you don’t quite understand, because all you have to do from now on is high-light the word, right click on it, and select “Lookup in Dictionary”. This is absolutely perfect for anyone who spends a significant amount of time online and wants to keep their English skills shiny.

If there is an easier way to improve your understanding of people’s writings and help grow your vocabulary at the same time, then my name isn’t Geoff.

DictionarySearch for Firefox [addons.mozilla.org]

Cal over at Study Hacks beat me to an article on how to take notes from PowerPoint slides. Some of my professors use PowerPoint to create their lecture slides, but distribute them to students as a PDF file. Fortunately, we can still take notes without printing out the PDF using the free Foxit Reader.

The trick is to enable Foxit’s full set of annotating tools. You can do this by right-clicking anywhere on the toolbar and checking “full toolbars” as seen below.

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So Firefox 3 Beta came out the other day (if you don’t know that already, you have been living under a rock). It adds a bunch of cool new features, but the problem is most extensions are not yet compatible with it. It’s not that they don’t work, it’s just that they haven’t officially added support for the new Firefox. If you just can’t wait for all your extensions to migrate to 3.0, all hope is not lost.

Nightly Tester Tools is here to save the day, allowing you to disable extension compatibility testing in Firefox, rendering all your old extensions usable! It also lets you customize the Title bar, so you can change it to something cool like “Ninja Browser”. Anyways, just remember that some of your extensions may not function properly in Firefox 3 until they are properly updated. For example Gmail Manager won’t allow me to save my passwords.

Nightly Tester Tools

Citastic is a simple “MLA citation and bibliography creator.”

You start by picking the appropriate source in the left sidebar.

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If you haven’t visited your library’s website lately, you probably should. The resources might surprise you. They certainly surprised me. Read the rest of this entry »

Check out freerice.com. The site will give you a word and 4 choices. If you choose the correct definition, they will donate 10 grains of rice through the UN.

Why should a student care? If you will be taking the SATs, GREs, GMATs, LSATs, MCATs, or any OTHER standardized test you will get a better grade if you know more vocabulary. Here is a way to learn some more and help people at the same time.

Rebecca is a PhD student who is blogging about her academic experiences at protoscholar.com

I’m a university freshman this year. One of the biggest transitions has been the responsibility shift of homework. I attended a high school with a strong academic reputation. I believe this was largely due to the emphasis on homework, complete with daily checks. However, in university, there are no teachers scolding you. Non-submitted work is much easier for them to mark.

Fortunately, I found Cal Newport’s post on the GTDCS (GTD for College Students) system. In this system, he designates a project called “Weekly Assignments,” which makes each piece of homework a date-specific action. GTDCS has been critical to surviving the transition, while many of my classmates routinely let homework fall through the cracks. Following is how I’ve implemented this portion of GTDCS using Vitalist.
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We’ve established that Launchy is a great time-saver in previous articles. What’s that? You still don’t believe me?

Another great feature of Launchy is that it indexes your control panel with the Controly plugin.

If you tend to forget the date like me (fine, maybe it’s just me), Launchy can tell you.