Cool Free Websites and Apps

Description:  Everyone knows the benefits of journaling, it relieves stress, makes you stick to your goals but what many don't know is that you can now also do it online from anywhere and never lose your thoughts again.  Penzu is an online diary that let's you write down your private thoughts securely. If you have been looking for a digital diary solution, look no more. I am confident you will love this free, private and secure way of capturing your thoughts and important events. It is of course entirely up to you what type of a journal you keep. Some people like to do a daily journal, while others want to capture their travels through Africa. And don't forget the bright minds looking for a solution to capture all of their ideas that are rushing through their creative minds, or the teenagers venting about their friends or perhaps their annoying parents. In addition to the free version, there is also Penzu Pro and Penzu Classroom with added functionality for those enth

Symbaloo - Generic webmix Description: Symbaloo allows you to organize all of your websites in one place. It is free and its biggest advantage over some other solutions it that it is based on a visual organization. Your preferences are stored in a cloud so you can seamlessly switch between your devices. The following short video provides a quick overview of how this service works. Creating an account: It essentially works as a bookmarking service. You can share your bookmarks with anyone by making them public or share them with a select group of users. The first thing you will want to do is create a free account, which is very simple, you only need to fill out four fields.   Symbaloo - Creating an account Creating a webmix using quick start: Once you sign up, you can start creating your webmixes, you even have an option to select the quickstart option, where Symbaloo will let you create a webmix using some favorite websites in less than a minute. The first op

Coursera - Welcome Screen Description: Over 4 million people from all around the world have already used Coursera to study anything from History of Rock, Songwriting, Financial Markets, Nanotechnology to Optimization of Antibiotics. There are currently 393 courses available to choose from offered by leading scholars from 83 different universities including, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia University, Princeton, Technical University of Denmark, University of Melbourne or The Hong Kong University of Technology. New courses are added frequently and are now also offered in various other languages including English, German, Spanish, French, Chinese and Italian, with the vast majority of  Coursera  courses offered in English today. There are various ways in which you can browse through the courses, you can view those that are upcoming or view them by their specific thematic grouping and choose one or more of the following categories: Coursera - List of Topical Categories of Courses

Bookboon Overview Description: Bookboon is one of a few different websites that provide free eBooks and textbooks. I have previously used  Bookboon  for travel guides (though I did not see any on the website today) and textbooks. It is a very nice site if you are looking for a simple book on something. Many choices are available, especially for those who are interested in business. Whether you want to learn how to write better, learn how to work with Excel or Access, brush up on your Statistics skills or become more entrepreneurial,  Bookboon  has something for you. The free version of each book contains some limited advertisements, however you have the option to download a book without the advertisement, however this is no longer free. They currently have books published in English, German, Swedish and Danish. If you would like to become an author, they seem to be very open to this as well. Check out  Bookboon , I am confident you will find a book that will interest you. The d

Remember The Milk Description: Remember The Milk is an online to-do list and task manager. It can be synced with various other programs such as Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, and Evernote. You can sign up for an account or simply log-in with your Facebook or Google account (I tried to log in with my google account and was not successful so I actually chose to sign up). Once you log in, you will see a screen that looks something like this: Remember The Milk - Screen with Tasks I would say that one of the benefits of  Remember The Milk  is the fact that you have different sections for personal, study and work tasks. You can create tasks, assign due dates, whether the task repeats etc. as you can with many other services. After just recently playing with Trello however, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed with  Remember The Milk . I think it is functional and a great free task manager, however I would have to admit that when it comes to the design and overall

Description: Trello can be used to organize anything from simple to-do lists to research projects or event planning. You can work on your own or collaborate with others. Additionally you can access these lists from all of your devices so waiting in line for your Starbucks coffee just became very productive. It is incredibly flexible, it allows you to create text or picture based "cards" that are behind the organization. Below you can see a sample board that someone has created. Trello - Example of a Board The  Trello  cards can then be organized, labeled, color coded... The front of the card provides a summary of the event. Trello - Card Front Side The back of the card provides all of the details and notes necessary for you to learn more about what is happening or needs to happen. Trello - Card Back Side Once you sign up, this is what the welcome board looks like. This board will explain to you how to use  Trello  and you can then set up your own board or boar

Poll Everywhere - How does Poll Everywhere Work? Description:   Poll Everywhere allows you to poll your audience LIVE through texts, tweets, or the web. One of the strengths of this service is that you can actually create open-ended questions as well. This short video shows you an overview of  Poll Everywhere . The audience's responses can be embedded right into your PowerPoint or Keynote presentation. There are various different plans available depending on your needs. There is a free option where you can create an unlimited number of polls but you can only poll up to 40 people per question. Also what you can do with the data is a little limited, however it is a great free option if you want to just do a few simple things. Additionally there are various different plans offered for corporate and educational settings that come with increased functionality such as moderating the answers so that inappropriate or redundant answers are not shown for your open ended questions.  T

Description: Padlet (formerly known as Wallwisher) is a web-based tool that allows you to build a wall of thoughts. It is a simple, yet powerful website with unlimited possibilities. You can build a private wall to organize your own thoughts or maybe create a visual list of goals or you can create a public one and share it with the world or even embed it on your website.  Padlet  allows you to create walls using different templates and you can add various multimedia. You can even use  Padlet  for real time collaboration with others. There are so many possibilities, I am sure you will love it. Padlet - Travel Bucket List Example Padlet  is very easy to use and very intuitive. One of its strengths is also in the various ways you can share what you create. The following is the screen shot of the sharing options, which all come with the free account: Padlet Sharing Options Others have used  Padlet  to plan events, to organize their Christmas shopping list, to collect and organ

Description: Dropbox is an online file management tool that is revolutionizing how we store, organize, access and share information. You can upload your files, photos, music (any digital file) to  Dropbox  and you can then access these files from any of your devices (it automatically syncs the information) or you can even access it securely from any other (public) computer by logging into the website. What this means is that you can forget about having to carry around a USB stick,  Dropbox  is a web-based tool that will make it possible for you to access your files anytime from anywhere. To learn more about  Dropbox , take this  tour .  Personal Experience: I personally use the free version of  Dropbox  and love it. At first I started using it because I was constantly transferring files between my work computer and my personal computer. Then I got so used to being able to access my files anytime from anywhere, that now I use it for all of my files. The best part about it is that y

Description: Delicious is a free web-based tool that allows you to organize and search your bookmarks so that you never again lose a link to something you find interesting or important. Whether you need to come back to the link a few times to write a research paper or you wish to visit it a lot, you can track it using Delicious and categorize it accordingly and if you no longer need it, you can simply delete it. You can bookmark anything you encounter using various different devices thanks to an app in combination with the browser tool. The site also lets you connect with other people and gives you suggestions for links you might find interesting that you can bookmark. At first you need to create your free account or you can choose to sign in with your existing Facebook or Twitter account. After you create a profile on Delicious , there are various sections of the website you can interact with. If you are using Delicious mostly to organize your links (its main purpose), then yo

Description: Need help finding time that works for everyone to schedule a meeting? Doodle is the  free scheduling tool you have been looking for.  Doodle can actually be looked at as multiple tools in one. It makes it easy to schedule appointments (single or group) and it can also be also used as a polling tool. When you create a free account, you can use both of these features and you can also sync your calendar with Doodle so that you do not need to switch from one to the other when you schedule a meeting (Doodle supports: Outlook, Google Calendar, iCal and Yahoo Calendar). Once you sign up for this service, you have two main options: To schedule and Event or to start a Poll. The following steps outline the process of scheduling an event (which is essentially a specific type of a poll). In the first step (of either type) you fill out basic information about your event/poll.  In the next step you select the possible dates you would like to hold your event Followed