Best tech for savvy students

　

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. -- Back-to-school shopping is the second-biggest annual spending event, right behind the winter holidays. Students from kindergarten to college are expected to spend more than $55 billion this year on back-to-school items, according to the National Retail Federation.

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The No. 1 category filling shopping carts: electronics. While the new iPhone and iPad grab all the headlines, students heading to class this fall might benefit most from lesser-known, less expensive tech tools, and the bells and whistles that make those hot gadgets useful.

　
　

Forget shelling out for a fancy backpack this fall. Lugging textbooks around is an inconvenience of the past. Anyone with an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch can download the CourseSmart App from the iTunes store. With it, they can view any of the 8,500-plus college textbooks they have subscribed to on CourseSmart.com anytime, anywhere and at no cost.

　
　

Have a few minutes and several assignments to wrap up? A Web connection would help. Download the WiFi Directory App, which uses an iPhone or iPad"s current GPS location to create a list of nearby wi-fi hot spots. It even indicates which ones are free.

　
　

Every student lives with the anxiety of losing her work to a spontaneous computer meltdown or a random disappearance of a document they swear they saved. Our shopping cart holds several tools to help combat this unfortunate but often unavoidable problem.

　
　

Clickfree Transformer for the iPod or iPhone insures that no computer mishap will cause a crisis. With it, students can turn their iPod or iPhone into a backup USB storage device to insure they have the documents and media they need everywhere they go. The transformer isn"t cheap: $49.99.

　
　

Tech-savvy students may prefer to backup their data with a cloud storage option. Dropbox, a free downloadable software program, allows them to drag and drop files to access on the Internet or from another computer into the "dropbox" folder that appears on their computer"s desktop. The software comes with 2 gigabytes of free storage.

　
　

Staying focused and resisting distractions is a key to being successful in school. With the free, downloadable word processor, OmmWriter, students can turn their entire back screen white or choose from four backgrounds, such as a snowy landscape.

　
　

Are American students studying more efficiently thanks to all of these improvements in education technology that didn"t exist decades ago? Probably not, though they are studying less. In 1961 full-time students at four-year colleges in the United States studied an average of 24 hours each week. By 2003 this average decreased to 14 hours, says the American Enterprise Institute. The study argues that lax standards are the culprit.

　
　

But don"t blame the gadgets. School is full of distractions.

　
　

(Claire Courtney, Forbes.com)

　

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