About Online School

Online school projects vary, but just like traditional college, their format almost never changes. We’ll go into a breakdown of what kind of tasks online schools request from their students, and then into some free tools you can use to get them done without buying expensive software (like Microsoft Office).

In a offline school environment, essays are written and submitted, labs are done in class, dissertations are due over a semester, group projects are done via group meetings and submitted, presentations are presented. In online school, a group presentation isn’t always an option, and teacher-student interaction isn’t always an option, either.

Many online schools (like many offline schools) lean towards a forum-based approach, where you submit the answer somewhere on the forum and the teacher grades it after the deadline.

• Forum Projects: The posting-on-the-forums style benefits both the professor, who doesn’t have to maneuver through stacks of paperwork, and it benefits the students, who can complete the assignment at their leisure rather than needing to sit through a three-hour lecture about the novel, spending time that online school students do not have.
• Hand-Written Math: Online school math courses often require hand-written assignments that are scanned and submitted. It’s entirely too easy for an online school student to hire someone to do their online school assignments, so having someone hand-write an online school math assignment and scan it is a good way of making sure that online school students have done their own work.

Email and word processing remain as large tasks during online school, as with offline schools. For all these tasks, there are a fair number of free, usually open-source, good-quality software that you can use:

• Mozilla Thunderbird: The geniuses behind Firefox are at it again, and this mail application is tremendously powerful with an easy-to-use interface that will help you send more mail faster. You’ll never miss an online school e-mail with Thunderbird.
• OpenOffice Available on many platforms, free, and easy to grasp, OpenOffice and OpenOffice.org can do anything Microsoft Office can do maybe even better.
• Mozilla Firefox You’re probably using this right now; the free and best program for surfing the web is also the best for an online school students Internet-based research.
• WordWeb -WordWeb a free thesaurus/dictionary that also works as a Word Processor. An online school student’s best alternative to Microsoft Word.
• RoughDraft An online school students alternative to Microsoft Word, this program works more as a word processor than WordWeb, which works more as a thesaurus/dictionary.
• Maxima A free algebra calculation program which can turn algebraic expressions into graphical symbols.

With this free and brilliant software, no online school task is too difficult; and you don’t need complicated and expensive software to get the job done.

What other software do you find useful in your online studies? Post a comment and let us know.