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Okay, so you got a new computer as a high school graduation present, or as a hand-me down from your wealthy great uncle, or in a drawing at the mall, or in a fit of enthusiasm. Can it help you do something that helps you in academically? The answer, of course, is both yes and no:
The fact is that recreational computer activities (music, Email, text-messaging, gaming, on-line shopping, MyFace, &c.), although (mostly) perfectly legitimate ways to spend recreational time, easily work as distractions from mastering the material you need to understand in order to do well in the courses you are taking. This happens in a couple of ways:
Research announced in 2009 strongly suggests that the use of MySpace alone is correlated with a GPA difference of about half a grade among college students. Users, for example, might have a GPA of 3.0, while matched non-users might have 3.5.
Multi-tasking works better for young students than for old professors, but that it doesn't work really well for anybody.
Your computer can also be your enemy in another way: As a source of information, it can deceive you with foolishness and falsehood. Most professors think this happens far more often than it really does. (Professors probably deceive students with more foolishness and falsehood than the Internet does, but that is not something anybody really wants to investigate. Talk about embarrassing!) Therefore you must be constantly skeptical —"critical" is the preferred university buzzword— and ask yourself about whether what you are reading makes sense to you, and what sources of information it is based on, and how trustworthy the author probably is, and what the probability is that an error is likely to be corrected if a site is wrong.
Finally, because so much is available on-line, it is easy to copy stuff. That easily verges on plagiarism, which leads as directly as the university authorities can manage to getting you kicked out. More about plagiarism and other academic no-nos can be learned from a separate page on that subject, complete with sad, if darkly amusing, case histories. (Link)
Computer As Fancy Typewriter. A computer can be used to prepare class assignments, of course. It even has a spell-checker. (Use it, dammit!) But we all know that it is far more helpful than that.
On-Line Research Resources. At this point it is pretty clear than no traditional, paper-source library will ever again be bigger than the Internet. The Internet provides the best access to information in human history. If you are on-campus (or use a VPN client or follow the instructions on the university library web site to activate the "proxy server" function in your web browser so that you fool the Internet into thinking you are on campus), you have university-paid access to a vast world of subscriber-only professional journals and library collections, hugely increasing your access to responsible scholarship on all topics.
Basically, every university in the world today has a bigger and better library than any university in the world did thirty years ago. (Wow!) Learning to exploit it is not rocket science. Not bothering to exploit it is just stupid.
On-Line Class Materials. For better or worse, in most classes some needed material (including reading lists, assignments, and whatnot) is posted on a class web site. Some of it is static enough it can be printed out, but some of it (usually the best of it) changes constantly or is interactive, and your computer provides excellent access to it.
Nowadays many assigned readings are on the Internet, and more soon will be as publishers join the rush to provide Internet resources that can't be sold as used books at the end of the term. (They sell you a password that expires. Publishers have been looking for something like this ever since the first public library let more than one person read the same book.)
Taking Notes. Some students prefer to print out the electronic materials, on the theory that it is easier to take notes on a paper copy, with its attractively empty margins, than on an electronic version. And, asked to vote in my term-end survey, they still prefer paper and pen to any computerized note-taking software or machinery. Is paper really best? Maybe.
Other students have got used to using an ordinary word processor, or a dedicated note-taking program, and simply shifting between the window being read and their note-taking window. Some students have specifically recommended Microsoft's OneNote (Link) (packaged with the student version of Office or sold separately) and the freeware TiddlyWiki (Link). A little web browsing will bring you to other possibilities, including the cloud-storage Evernote program. (Several possibilities are listed here.) Unlike paper notes, with an electronic note file it is easy to insert URLs, to cut and paste passages, or even to copy a map. However most such programs don't provide easy links to specific parts of the source being read, so it takes some getting used to and it requires creative use of search terms to make this truly efficient.
Semi-Computers. Some students experiment with smart phones, PDAs, and various kinds of electronic readers and "pads." Although an occasional student claims that it "works fine" to do the day's readings on his smart phone in the bus on the way to campus, most dismiss such semi-computers as inadequate substitutes for the real thing in at least some of the tasks you need to be able to accomplish. (Nobody tries to write a termpaper on an iPod and lives to tell about it, as far as I can discover.)
Computers must be be an integral part of your study world, and you must be open-minded to their strengths, patient with their quirks, and aware of their weaknesses. Just like other friends.