Following up on last week’s little treatise on the study skills miracle that is the second notebook (one for mess, the other for success), we’re dipping once again into the Old School’s bag of tricks.

To wit: your every-day, plain-vanilla browser bookmark — a student emailed in support of this tool, and I agree: it can save a lot of time and frustration in managing your online studies.

How? It isn’t rocket science, of course, and you probably see what’s coming, but I’ll spell it out anyway. Let’s take a simple example: our CS101 course. This course has several resources that I use again and again, such as Bradley Kjell’s awesome Java tutorials, Oracle’s extensive notes on Java, my own notes (as Google Docs), and a few other bits and pieces. I keep a Learn folder on my bookmarks bar, and one of the sub-folders is for all my Saylor work. Inside that is CS101 (among others) and then all the major links I want to save for that class. It all looks like this:

I can save a link to the page anchor where I left off (more on that next week). This one points to www.saylor.org/courses/cs101/#2.2 and will take me directly to Unit 2.2:

Feeling impatient? Right-click and open everything all at once:

Without these bookmarks, I would have to sort through the course or my browser history to find older tutorials that I wanted to review; I’d need to remember where I left off in the units and navigate there again (which gets very old, very fast). I’d need to open up my Google Drive, find the CS101 folder, and drill down some more to get to my notes. With the bookmarks, everything I really need is in one place, and I can open it all in seconds.

Often despised, often forgotten, the bookmark has been carrying the torch of online organization since 1993…and long may it reign.

Next week: our courses have something called the unit outline. It’s more useful than you might think; we’ll show you how to use it to organize course notes and keep track of where you are in the course.