Study buddies, study breaks

One month has passed since the beginning of the fall semester and the shock of returning to school has long since set in and nerves have been completely rattled at the expectations of college courses. Now, students may be gearing up for their first of many major projects in class; written papers, Powerpoint projects, and presentations are well underway. To help save time (and sanity) here's a few websites students may benefit from whether you're trying to research for your projects or taking time off from them.

Study Buddies:

Amazon.com has developed member services geared specifically toward students to save them time and money. Amazon's Student Prime service is a free service that provides free two-day shipping on all items sold directly from Amazon. A one-day shipping option is available for $3.99. Amazon has also made it easy for students to acquire textbooks by offering a rental service for the Kindle device or the Kindle apps for PC, Mac, iPhone / iPad / iPod, or Android devices. This rental service will help save roughly 80% off the standard textbook price.

Amazon's textbook rental service is also great for students who may not have enough financial aid to pay for books; however, the limited number of textbooks available for Kindle- ready devices may prove to be inconvenient for many students. Still, being able to save 80 percent of the usual textbook price is a significant upside to this service if students can find their digital textbooks. The Amazon Student Prime service is an excellent way for students to save money on shipping costs when purchasing an item through Amazon.com. Even with the $3.99 one-day shipping, it is a significantly lower cost than standard shipping costs for most items shipped within the continental U.S.

Study Breaks:

When your brain has been burned out from the long hours of studying and research, take a load off with the website Onemorelevel.com. There you will find hundreds of games ranging from action/adventure games to puzzle games to strategy or online-based games. If you don't feel like cycling through all the games available on the website, simply hit the "Random" button on the left side of the page, and out comes a random game from their entire collection.

The amount of games Onemorelevel.com offers makes this website an excellent "time- waster" when you just want to sit back and have fun playing games on the Net. Although there may be other websites that host a larger collection of games, the fact that a username and password is not required to play any of these games makes it very convenient for people who just want to start playing a game without having to log in. The owners of the website add a new game to their collection every week day so the number of games is always increasing. Although there are many other great game websites on the internet, this one should be in everybody's Top 10 list.