I was planning to write a back-to-school blog this weekend, with information about some free online tools for students and instructors. ReadWriteBlog has beaten me to it with a great list of this year's most useful web applications for students.

I'd have made Zotero, the bibliographical program from George Mason University, my #1 choice. Zotero, a Firefox plug-in, is a powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways.

I'd have added Instapaper for creating fast, hassle-free website lists, perfect for saving web content throughout the day for later reading.

For visual learners, I'd also include Bubbl.us, a slick, free, easy-to-use flowchart/mind-mapping application or VUE (Visual Understanding Environments) from Tufts: Vue has been designed specifically to provide a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.

Then there's Dippity, which lets you construct digital timelines. Although Dipity is designed to be used with sites like Flickr, YouTube etc. to pull together topics chronologically, it’s equally useful for your own chronological material. You could use it (I have) to analyse narrative arguments in an article (or a plot, come to that); to organize events over a semester; to organize events in an historical time-frame. Easy to use, too.