The FAFSA and Financial Aid in a Nutshell

The FAFSA and financial aid packages offered by universities can be difficult for the first-time college student to navigate. And if you're a first generation college student it can be even more difficult because you may not know who to turn to for advice. Fortunately, a lot of high school guidance departments are doing more than ever to help students understand the FAFSA and financial aid. Planet Nutshell produced two good videos that will also help students and parents understand the FAFSA and financial aid. The videos are embedded below.


Choosing Financial Aid in a Nutshell from Planet Nutshell on Vimeo.



Borrow Wisely: FAFSA in a Nutshell from Planet Nutshell on Vimeo.


These videos were produced by Planet Nutshell with funding from the U.S. Depart of Education, the Utah Higher Education Assistance Authority, and the Utah Education Network.

College Students Can Now Get 5GB of Free Dropbox Storage

The online storage service Dropbox is giving away an extra 3GB of free storage to college students who sign up for the service between now and December 10, 2012. This means that students who sign up using their university/ college email addresses will get 5GB of total storage for free.

The extra free storage is part of Dropbox's Space Race promotion. To get the free storage students do need to be at an institution that has at least 25 Dropbox users. So if you're a student who wants to make sure that you get the free storage you need to refer classmates to Dropbox.

The Faculties - Videos from University Lecturers for High School Students

The Faculties is an interesting video project, based in the UK, that presents short videos of university lecturers speaking on topics in their fields.

There appears to be two purposes for these videos. The first purpose is to provide short lessons to high school age students about topics in the subjects in which they have an interest. The second purpose is to provide students with information that will familiarize them with the expectations and realities of being a college student. For example, in the history section of The Faculties you will find a videos like this one about the Russian provisional government of 1917, but you will also find videos like this one about writing undergraduate history papers.

Applications for Education
The Faculties could be a good place for students to learn more about the subjects that they're considering pursuing degrees in. The Faculties could also be a good place for students to learn, in advance of stepping on campus, what they will need to do to have a successful undergraduate experience.

There are six sections to The Faculties;  English, Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, History, and Psychology.

Academic Earth - Videos of Top Scholars Teaching

Academic Earth is a video depot for individual lectures and entire courses from some of the top universities in the United States. Visitors to Academic Earth will find lectures and courses from Yale, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. Many of the lectures and courses can be found at various websites on the Internet. What Academic Earth does is take all of those lectures and courses and put them in one, easy-to-search, place. You can search for lectures and courses by topic, popularity, professor, or by university. I've embedded the first video from the Yale course Introduction to the American Novel Since 1945.



Applications for Education
Academic Earth makes it easy to find high quality, academically appropriate videos. These videos and courses could make a nice supplement to an advanced placement high school course. The videos can be embedded in your course blog where you can then have students watch and comment. Or you can, after embedding a video into your blog, post a questions for your students to answer as they watch a video lecture.

Thanks to Open Culture for another great video resource.