The Best Apps You Will Need To Have While In School

In an age of technology, having apps to help with school just makes sense. Check out this list below of amazing apps that will make your life a million times easier this upcoming semester!

Brainscape

Brainscape is one of many apps that offers a digital, completely hassle-free flashcard experience. Offering custom tailored timing specific to the individual users learning needs makes this one of the best apps for such a simple concept. It is equipped with sharing capabilities that help make the app extremely beneficial for study groups or teamwork.

In addition, there is a feature called cross-device syncing which effectively means that you can switch between your phone and tablet with ease throughout your study sessions. Brainscape is available for free on iOS, but there are in-app purchases available to gain access to pre-made sets of flashcards in categories such as world geography and foreign language vocabulary.

Duolingo

Duolingo is a free app for both iOS and Android that makes it extremely easy to learn a variety of languages on the go! The app is always adding more languages and new features to it. The basic structure involves passing individual lessons to move up, but there are also interactive stories that you can read and fun podcasts full of diverse speakers! There are also flashcards and other additional features available only on the web browser version.

If you upgrade to premium, you can even take progress quizzes to watch how far you’ve come! I personally highly recommend Duolingo, as it really adds a little bit of fun to the language by using silly phrases and gently encouraging you!

EasyBib

For anyone who frequently had to write papers, EasyBib is one of the best apps to make annotating and citing your texts infinitely easier. It is a major innovation in automating the long process of taking notes and converting them into your paper. Instead, simply open the app, direct the camera towards your books bar code, and it will open you up to a whole new world of essay writing!

One of the apps features involves having the full knowledge of over 7,000 citation styles, including MLA, ASA, APA, AMA, and many more! EasyBib is available for free on both iOS and Android.

SimpleMind

If you are trying to write a paper but are having trouble getting started, a mindmap can be a great way to get organized and start to develop your thesis and body. The benefit of using apps for this rather than paper is that it becomes exponentially easier to add a lot of branched off ideas, as well as longer bodies of text, such as quotes and citations. SimpleMind lets you add ideas and rearrange the connections on the chart as needed to fit the assignment. It is free for both Android and iOS.

Khan Academy

This is one of two apps on this list available exclusively on Apple. Khan Academy is a non-profit organization which seeks to provide anyone who wants to learn with knowledge. The app offers courses in nearly any subject that you can imagine, offering over 150,000 interactive exercises complete with step-by-step hints and instantaneous feedback.

Dragon Anywhere

Perfect for college students regularly attending lectures, Dragon Anywhere is one of the few amazing mobile apps that offers speech to text conversion. If your professor is reciting a lot of information to you and you want to highlight a key point by writing it down word-for-word, it is likely that you will find yourself only half being able to repeat it and missing the rest of the lecture.

While it may not be the most effective method to simple copy down everything your teacher says word for word in your notes, it is certainly worth it to have for small bits of important information, such as statistics or definitions. The apps free to download for both Android and iOS, and is subscription-based with in-app purchases.

Forest

If you need something to force you to focus, Forest is one of the best apps for you. It encourages you to stay on tack by slowly growing a digital tree in a virtual world for you to admire. It takes a minimum of thirty minutes before a tree can grow and be added to your forest.

The app does not lock you out of any apps or websites, but rather tries to persuade your consciousness with a warning not to get off task. If you check your phone or visit a non approved website before that half an hour is up, the tree simply dies. For each complete tree you grow, you will be awarded a virtual coin, which will then go toward planting actual trees in the world where there are problem spots in need.

You can download the app for free on Chrome or Android, while there is a $1.99 app purchase for iOS.

SleepCycle

One should never underestimate the importance of a balanced sleep schedule and being well-rested, as it can drastically affect your physical and mental health as well as your mood and productivity.

To optimize your sleep cycles and easily wake up feeling refreshed by downloading SleepCycle, one of the best sleep tracking apps. There are a wide selection of very effective alarm apps, but SleepCycle takes it the extra step further by including an intelligent sleep tracker integrated with its alarm system.

The apps main priority is to monitor your sleep patterns as it aims to only wake you up when you are resting in a light sleep stage, rater than deep sleep or REM. The app ensures that you will always wake up feeling well-rested, even when you have to cut back on a few hours of sleep. It is free to download on both Android and iOS, but there are in-app purchases for premium features such as relaxation guides, calming sleep sounds, and a collection of sleep stories.

Hemingway Editor

Have you ever finished a paper at 4 am, knowing its due just a few hours later, and desperately wanted someone to look it over for errors but there was no one around still awake? While Hemingway Editor does not have apps available on Android or iOS yet, their download of Hemingway for Web is completely free.

This website will evaluate your writing an offer a detailed breakdown along with hints on what categories you should pay more attention to when writing and editing. It is a fantastic way to check for spelling errors and typos, as well as goes a long way towards helping you recognize bad habits.

Mendeley

Perfect for courses where you will be expected to write multiple papers, particularly ones that require heavy or even intermediate amounts of research, Mendeley is a must-have in your list of apps! Rather than being stuck with a miss of unorganized PDFs, word documents, and other files scattered around your desktop, try using Mendeley.

This social website and reference manager app is meant for both students and the researchers themselves to make it possible to get more direct information. You can choose to follow researchers who publish word that you are interested in, save ad store your files in one location with up to 2GB of free data, create custom annotations for your notes, and create automatic citations for a variety of style guides. Mendeley has free apps for iOS and Android, as well as desktop versions for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

iHomework

This is among the list of Apple-specific apps and does require a one-time purchase on $1.99. iHomework is an all in one tracker app that is guaranteed to keep you organized and on top of all your assignments and other priorities!

The apps multiple settings allow you to keep track of all of your work and responsibilities while organizing them in whatever way makes it most manageable for you! Try sorting them by the due date, week, month, or class name. There are specific scheduling features to help you keep of bi-weekly classes or labs as well as other random, once-in-a-while events! You can even link your reading materials to the assignments scheduled in the app.

Since the apps entirely backed up by iCloud syncing, you can access your entire schedule on any of your devices, anytime, anywhere!

I hope you enjoyed reading through this list and have a few more school-friendly apps on your device now! Please let me know in the comments below what your favorite app to help you survive school is.