^ My advice is be part of whatever local tech community you have in your country, IT HELPS A LOT KNOWING PEOPLE THAT LIKES THE SAME THING YOU LIKE. Or else you will be left behind. Most of the stuff I use now is due to the people in the Ruby Community, not because of school. 4 years in school, haven't taught me a single line to code Ruby, using Ruby on Rails to create web applications like twitter, using repositories, abusing the greatness of Git(and Github for that matter), TDD(Test Driven Development), Refactoring etc. Take note, tons of subjects at school, haven't used more than 5 of them in my field now.
Since you are a student, I am gonna give you advice:
Whatever you learned in school about IT, most of it will not be used when you work. You will learn what you want when you work, so don't mind switching from job to job if you can. I stopped at Web Development after going through Networking(Network Engineer), System(System Administrator), and Technical and Hardware(HP stuff). Don't settle.
School spoonfed you for sure. Nothing wrong with using IDEs, but they are not needed as well. Use a text editor when coding(Textmate, Sublime Text, or the best of the mall, Vim). For beginners, Sublime Text is the way to go.
Learning to use tools takes months. Took me 3-4 months to actually get the basic commands in Vim. Been using it for a year, still don't get everything about it yet.
Learn on your own, then ask people. Do not ask people without trying to learn on your own, you won't understand what they say.
Copying written codes off the internet is nothing to be ashamed of, as long as you know how they work.
Get your ass out of Windows and learn Unix based systems like Linux or Mac. Use what other people use, since if you get a problem, they probably have encountered it and has a solution on it, but they are most likely to have it in a Unix system. So if you encounter it on Windows, you maybe are screwed.