Computer Support Blog

Organized events can define the entirety of your college experience whether academic or social, some of which can determine your friendships as well as your future.  Scheedule’s developers created it as a way to connect students to these events and make it as easy as possible to discover an event that can impact the college experience.  The app will look familiar to those who have used an online calendar, but there are a few things that make its service uniquely beneficial. Read more »

For decades, watching and studying game film has been a constant source of help for high school and college athletic teams.  Taping performances to learn from mistakes and discover where certain strategies work and don’t work is something that varsity coaches in dozens of sports do for their players.  However, athletes do not always have an easy time learning from the tape presented to them.  Not every player knows exactly what to look for or what the most important elements of their performances to inspect are when studying tape.  This lack of understanding can frustrate coaches and prevent time studying film from being productive for athletes.  Cool person in technology Vasu Kulkarni founded his company Krossover to prevent this from happening to high school, college and even professional sports teams. Read more »

Many high school and college students have experienced that moment of panic where they sit down to write their final paper and draw a sudden blank on how to approach it.  Many times primary sources and notes don’t seem to help and the student just can’t figure out how to structure their argument or tackle the necessary issues.  Cool product WriteWork wants to help students overcome this moment of panic by offering them the chance to see how others before them have attacked similar topics.  WriteWork is an online resource that offers students a database of over 120,000 sample essays covering a range of topics for students to use as resources and inspiration in their own essays.  Read more »

Taking detailed notes in class during college is essential in attaining a good GPA.  However, truly excellent and well-written class notes have value that some students may not realize—monetary value.  Students miss classes due to personal problems or sickness very often and they need help to get the information they miss out on when they aren’t in class.  A student who takes excellent notes can be of great value to those students who miss classes for any reason.  Now, a cool product in technology called NoteWagon wants to help students cash in on the value of their hard work in class while also helping students who would benefit from access to good notes.  NoteWagon lets students upload their class notes and post them online.  Other students can then log on and purchase the right to download the notes for the classes that they have missed.  If NoteWagon users lose any notes that they have downloaded from other users, they should get help from a data recovery service. Read more »

While universities are centers of education, they are also a business in many ways.  Reputation and student enrollment are major pieces of the puzzle when keeping a college successful.  However, both of those things drop when a college is unable to retain students from year to year.  Whether young people are dropping out of school completely or transferring to other colleges, it always hurts a school significantly.   Fewer students coming back means lower enrollment and therefore lower tuition.  Low retention rates also hurt a college’s reputation and make it more difficult to recruit new freshmen the following year.  Read more »

The job market has not exactly been thriving over the last several years, and this has led to major difficulty for many recent college graduates.  Jobs are not only harder to come by in general, but the ones that are available are often hard to find as well.

Gradseek is a cool product that wants to help both new members of the job market and businesses with open entry-level positions handle this tough situation.  With fewer jobs to go around, many companies require more experience even for lower positions when a job opens.  This shift has left many recent grads stuck and unable to apply for positions that would normally be a good fit for people.  Gradseek believes that companies might be better off using recent graduates as a resource that they can tap for talented individuals that can benefit a company regardless of experience.  Gradseek lets students put themselves out there with complete and robust profiles for potential employers to sift through when they’re looking for employees.  Gradseek believes that if they present businesses with complete profiles of recent graduates, companies will be able to find the best people for open positions within the ranks of those graduates.  The company believes this trend will hold true in all industries, from fashion marketing to office computer repair. Read more »

College textbooks are rising in price faster than college tuition, which itself is outpacing inflation.  Over the last thirty years, college textbook prices have increased by 812%.  This fact means that current college students should take every chance they can get to save money on buying books each semester.  Cool person in technology David Miller founded SlugBooks to help students in their quest for the best and lowest prices on their textbooks.  Many universities overcharge for textbooks in their bookstores because they know most students don’t have the time and information necessary to find better prices online or elsewhere.  Miller’s company SlugBooks takes the difficulty and time-consumption of textbook price hunting away with its online tools for finding good textbook prices.  Miller’s website lets students find the textbooks necessary for their classes and then searches the web to find the best deals available on those books.  Miller’s goal is to make it easy for students to find cheaper prices and spend the least amount possible on textbooks to help them save money for the semester but still got all the books that they need.  Whether someone is taking a class in Advanced Network Services or in Political Science 101, SlugBooks can help them find inexpensive alternatives to getting the necessary textbooks. Read more »

Compensation in any form is always a powerful motivator, and cool person in technology Jeremy Gelbart counts on that every day as he runs Ultrinsic.  Ultrinsic is a website that allows college students to put up their money for the chance to earn more through their grades.  Essentially, students deposit a certain amount of money to get access to the site.  Once a student has access, they can submit what courses they are taking in a semester and essentially place bets that they will receive A’s in those classes.  When a student comes through and makes the grade, they not only get their deposit back but also a monetary reward and their balance on the site increases.  When students fail to make the grade, Gelbart’s company takes their deposit and places it into a general fund.  Gelbart believes that students can use the site to motivate themselves to perform better and that an immediate monetary stake in their grades will give them a sense of urgency and drive that college students can sometimes lack.  Students that have trouble depositing to the site and submitting their courses should get access to PC tech support for help. Read more »

When one considers Facebook’s origins as a college-exclusive social network, one could say that the college environment is the birthplace of modern social networking and digital life.  Facebook leveraged college’s social scene to make mass communication easier.  What if an entrepreneur leveraged the social nature of college to help students with the real purpose of universities—education?  Entrepreneur and cool person in tech Jack Tai founded OneClass to attempt exactly that.  OneClass is an online resource for post-secondary school students that crowdsources study materials and class notes to form a large database of helpful tools for students.  OneClass sources course notes on a wide variety of subjects from students across North America.  It also stores organized study packets and video tutorials for many of those subjects.  OneClass focuses on offering study material provided by other students rather than formal textbook-style material provided by teachers or institutions.  In theory, this makes a lot of sense, as students would likely understand other students’ way of explaining things.  Anyone who has trouble accessing the notes or videos on OneClass should find remote tech support for help with a solution. Read more »

Many students dread dealing with textbooks, traditionally one of the major expenses of a college education.  Long lines at the book store, and high prices quickly adding up when a class may require five or six titles have been unfortunate experiences for many.  Luckily, digital textbooks are now a viable option.  With the right computer support, acquiring digital textbooks for all your classes is much easier, and cheaper, than buying traditional books these days.

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