Seven tips and you haven’t had to pay a cent yet!

Sorry to spoil your student paradise, but you’ll have to pay for this one. However, it’s a small price to pay considering the potential cost if you don’t.

The greatest danger for most students today is the Internet. Yes, it’s brought a lot of benefits and pluses into our lives as we’ve seen in the previous seven tips. But there are also downsides, and one of them is Internet pornography.

Of course pornography has always been a temptation, but what’s changed with the Internet is:

• It’s so much easier to access, just a click of a finger.
• It’s so much easier to view in total privacy without anyone finding out.
• It’s so much cheaper, with so much available for “free.”
• It’s so much worse, with the most vile forms of porn side-by-side with “entry-level” porn.
• It’s looking for you, with many ways to trick you into seeing it.

Because of the above, many more people have accessed porn through curiosity, by accident, or by being targeted with it, resulting in many more people and a much wider range of people becoming addicted.

“But what’s the big deal?” many ask. “Where’s the harm in a little bit of porn?” Here’s the big deal; here’s the harm.

1. It’s a sin. According to Jesus, it is breaking the seventh commandment (Matt. 5:27-30).

2. It could send you to hell. See Jesus again (Matt. 5:27-30).

3. It’s hating your neighbor. If people didn’t watch it, people wouldn’t make it. If you view it, you are helping to create it. You are creating temptation danger for others, but also destroying the lives of those involved in making it, often against their wills.

4. It weakens the will: If you succumb to this, you will succumb to other sins too.

5. It weakens spirituality: Due to guilt, porn users cannot expect communion with God, delight in prayer, enjoyment in the Word, or spiritual growth.

6. It destroys usefulness: Few porn users are zealous or sacrificial in Christ’s service. Like other addictions is is a costly distraction that will adversely impact every area of your life, including your career.

7. It perverts your view of women/men: You will find it virtually impossible to look at any woman/man without lustful thoughts.

8. It will spoil sex: If you are an unmarried porn user, you are already undermining your future marriage by storing up perverse images and practices that will soil and spoil the most intimate moments.

9. It may end your marriage: 50% of Christian divorces cite porn use as the reason. “Gutted!” is the word heard most from broken and betrayed wives. “Gutted!” Think about that.

10. It will never leave you: Porn is sticky. Unlike other experiences it is not easily forgotten. Many ex-porn users will tell you that it’s virtually impossible to eradicate what they have viewed from their memories.

Given the availability, accessibility, danger, and wrongness of porn, we need help to stop it reaching us and to stop us reaching it. That’s where Covenant Eyes comes in. It’s a Christian company whose service is built upon Job 31:1 “I have made a covenant with my eyes; Why then should I look upon a young woman?”

Once Covenant Eyes is installed on all computers and mobile devices, you will benefit from the following services:

Internet Accountability: Covenant Eyes monitors the websites visited, the search terms used, and the YouTube videos watched, and lists them in an easy-to-read report for each user name. This is then sent to your chosen Accountability partner to start a conversation about healthy online habits.

Internet Filtering: This blocks inappropriate web content based on age-appropriateness. You can even create custom block and allow lists, or block the Internet completely at certain times of day.

This costs $9.99 per month for individual users or $13.99 for a family account which lets you have as many user accounts as you want. Yes, $9.99 per month is quite hefty for a student, but on the other hand, think of the cost if you do fall into temptation and become a porn addict. Maybe you can persuade you parents to take out a family account to cover you and your siblings. Personally, I believe it’s an essential part of parenting to cover each family member with a service like this.

And remember this is not just about porn – there are  many other Internet dangers we need protection from. Also, positively, this is about building good Internet habits and regulating time spent online in a disciplined accountable way.

Maybe you don’t want Dad or Mom to see your Internet choices. That itself may be a warning sign. However, you can choose other people to be your accountability partner – a mature friend or an elder in your church maybe. My wife is mine and I am hers.

For more detailed help, see The Porn-Free Family Plan from Tim Challies or my Top 10 Books on Fighting Porn, where you will find much Gospel hope if you are already ensnared.

Here’s the Covenant Eyes promo video and the sign-up.

Other Resources

New Student Tip #1: Dropbox

New Student Tip #2: Wunderlist

New Student Tip #3: Evernote

New Student Tip #4: Diigo

New Student Tip #5: Lastpass

New Student Tip #6: Calendar

New Student Tip #7: Feedly

Thriving at College by Alex Chediak (for students)

Preparing Your Teens For College by Alex Chediak (for parents of students)

Top 10 Books for Students

Blogs and websites have largely taken over from newspapers and magazines as sources of news, opinion, and articles on current issues. As a student who wants to learn constantly, pray knowledgeably, and witness effectively you will want to be reading a wide selection of the best blogs and websites.

Time Waster?
But how do you do this? Do you have to visit multiple sites every day? That’s a tiresome time-waster that you won’t keep up for long.

Instead, you want to use a Blog/Website Reader like Feedly which you can access via your browser or via an App on your phone or Apple Mac. Once you’ve signed up for this free service, you can immediately and easily start subscribing to blogs and websites so that any fresh content is sent automatically into Feedly for you to read, bookmark, or share via Social Media. You simply enter the name of the blog or website in the Feedly search bar and from the search results you choose what to  subscribe to.

I subscribe to over a hundred blogs and websites, which would take me a couple of hours to get round every day to check for new articles. But using Feedly, I can spend about 20 minutes skimming over the headlines and article summaries and pick the ones I want to read, bookmark, or share.

Where do I start?
That still leaves you with the big question of which blogs, etc. Feedly offers you a number of categories to browse for the best blogs in various subject areas. But to help you get started, I’ve attached a screenshot below of my Feedly subscriptions to give you some suggestions to start with. This also demonstrates the value of another feature on Feedly – the ability to organize your subscriptions into categories so that you can choose what to read based on the time you have available or what you are looking for. I have four categories:

• Christian Blogs (1): These are my first division blogs, the ones I read just about every weekday.
• Christian Blogs (2): These are my second division blogs, which I still try to read every day, but if I’m pushed for time I’ll leave them for another day.
• Technology: Blogs that help me keep abreast of technology, social media trends, etc. I read these maybe once or twice a week.
• Miscellaneous: A collection of blogs on writing, education, politics, weather, etc. Again, a once or twice a week read.

For the sake of space and usefulness to you, I’ve only included the first two categories in the screenshot. Why not pick 10-20 of them from from column 1 (Christian Blogs 1) to get started and then gradually add more if you are finding you can do this in a time-efficient manner. While you need to exercise discernment in all your reading, there are some blogs in the second column (Christian Blogs 2) that need to be read with greater discernment.

Other Resources

New Student Tip #1: Dropbox

New Student Tip #2: Wunderlist

New Student Tip #3: Evernote

New Student Tip #4: Diigo

New Student Tip #5: Lastpass

New Student Tip #6: Calendar

Thriving at College by Alex Chediak (for students)

Preparing Your Teens For College by Alex Chediak (for parents of students)

Top 10 Books for Students

For most High Schoolers, Mom is their calendar. She keeps track of classes, school trips, holidays, doctor visits, swimming club, etc.

Then students go to college, and chaos ensues as Mom steps back. Students start forgetting classes, missing meetings, double-booking swimming and volleyball, running late for just about everything, and just being in a constant tizzy.

The answer is not the back of your hand or blizzards of post-it notes. The answer is a calendar, ideally a digital one.

There are multiple calendar apps and services out there, but the two standouts are Google calendar or Apple’s iCal for Mac users. Whatever you choose, make sure your calendar has the following features:

1. Cross-platform syncing. You need your calendar to sync across multiple devices so that you can enter events and access your calendar wherever you are and whatever device you’re working on - cellphone, Tablet, PC or laptop.

2. Notifications. When you enter an event you should usually set up a notification as well, so that the calendar will send you an email, a beep, or a buzz a specified number of minutes beforehand.

3. Year, Month, Week, and Day Views. Sometimes you need to drill down to a specific day to see what you are doing at 12 noon. Other times you need to see the week on one page to identify areas of over-scheduling or perhaps areas where you can schedule study time.

4. Color coding. You may want to assign color coding for different kinds of events – classes, sport, church, etc. You definitely want to color code study time so that you can see at a glance if you are allocating enough hours to assignments and exam prep.

5. Start and finish times. You need the facility to enter start and finish times so that it blocks off a visible portion of your calendar and you don’t schedule anything to begin before the previous event ends.

6. Location. Classes take place in different buildings. Games and competitions vary their venues. You want a calendar that lets you enter where as well as when.

7. Sharing. This is not a must-have, but eventually (we hope) you will have a significant other in your life and you’ll want (I hope) him or her to know where you are and when you are available. It’s therefore helpful to have the ability to share calendars. And if you’ve got nothing to hide (!) why not make it available to your parents too, so that they can schedule family events and trips with you.

Let me finish up with a few extra tips.

1. Enter the event as soon as you can. Don’t wait until later and hope you’ll remember to enter it and get all the details right. Just get into the habit of entering the data immediately.

2. Schedule everything. It’s tempting to just schedule classes and other events that you must attend. However, unless you schedule some of the more optional events – they probably won’t happen. For example, you should schedule blocks in your calendar for studying, for exercise, for friends.

3. Schedule margin. Don’t schedule events so close that you are always rushing from one thing to another. Estimate how long it will take you and then add some margin to allow for traffic, unplanned conversations, etc.

4. Use small blocks. The best studying gets done in large uninterrupted blocks of time. So, where you see these possibilities in your calendar, mark them down. Then you’ll see other bits and pieces – 30 minutes here, 40 minutes there – what should you do with them? These are valuable but easily wasted time slots. Without undermining what I said about allowing for margin, you may want to use some of these 20-30 minute blocks for the multiple small to-dos of each day like email, phone calls, errands, etc. Don’t shorten, interrupt, and waste substantial study time blocks with these little things.

5. Check your calendar. No point in going to all the bother of entering all that data and then not checking it. Don’t just rely on the beep or the buzz a few minutes beforehand. Every Saturday evening or Monday morning you should look at the week ahead and make sure you have a good sense of what’s planned. Then every evening, check for the next day’s events and plan accordingly.

6. Accountability. It’s a good idea to ask someone to look at your calendar from time to time to see if you are using time well. Ask someone who is well-organized and self-disciplined to take a look and offer advice.

Other Resources

New Student Tip #1: Dropbox

New Student Tip #2: Wunderlist

New Student Tip #3: Evernote

New Student Tip #4: Diigo

New Student Tip #5: Lastpass

Thriving at College by Alex Chediak (for students)

Preparing Your Teens For College by Alex Chediak (for parents of students)

Top 10 Books for Students