Apps You Need As A Student

As students, we are so used to our phones and other digital devices as distractions from our learning and study times. It’s so easy to get dragged down a rabbit hole, scrolling through social media posts, minutes turning into hours.

But there are quite a few apps you can find on the app store that can actually help you study, stay organized, and get productive.

Photo by Yura Fresh on Unsplash

Taking Notes

Note-taking is a big part of being a student, whether you’re in class listening to a lecture, or taking notes while reading trough your textbook.

Google Docs is a great option to take notes when you are in a group setting. You can easily share notes and documents digitally with an unlimited group of friends or team members. You can share notes, comments, and even have the option to “suggest” edits. Another great feature on Google Docs is also the “version history” feature. You can see a quick timeline of all the previous changes made by you and everyone else you’ve shared the document with. This feature also allows you to recover any previous versions of your document if you change your mind about any changes you’ve made.

OneNote is another great note-taking app. It is organized like a physical notebook, so you can create various “notebooks” with lots of different tabs within each notebook. This is a great option if you want to keep all your notes in one place. For example, you have four classes in Spring 2022. In OneNote, you can have four tabs—one for each of your classes—inside one notebook.

OneNote also allows you to take notes by typing them out or writing them out by hand (if you have a tablet). You can also easily add photos, drawings, diagrams, voice notes, etc. OneNote is a great tool for customizing your notes by adding checklists, tags, comments, and color-codes. And it is much easier to move components freely around the page, making your notes, completely unique to you.

Time Management

It’s so easy to lose track of time when we have so many things to do. Sometimes, we don’t even realize if we’re taking too long on something. By tracking the time we spend on each activity, we can figure out which activities we can cut on, and free up more time during the day.

Clockify is an app that allows you to track time. If you want to know how much time you spend on doing different activities throughout the day, Clockify is a great app that will allow you to do just that. When you are able to see the amount of time you put into each activity, you’ll be better able to allot your time in a more productive way (which activities you can spend less time doing, and which activities you can spend more time focusing on).

Through Clockify, you can track your hours, see a visual report of your activities, and even manage your expenses and budget.

Toggle Track is a great free option. It’s available as an app, but also as a web extension. You can easily track your time when you start an activity, and see your entries in a grid or calendar format. The Toggle Track Chrome extension is also able to automatically start and stop tracking time if your web browser is open. It even has the ability to detect when your computer is idle. It even has a Pomodoro Technique setting that automatically sets a time for you to do work, and automatically allots times for breaks and rests during that period of time.

Budgeting and Tracking Expenses

If you want to better track your expenses and set a clear budget, Mint is a great app to do so. You can connect your bank cards to the app, and it will automatically track everything you spend money on. You can set monthly budgets for each customizable category (groceries, shopping, etc.) and see if you are on track. Mint will also remind you of any upcoming payments, like to pay off your credit card or other subscriptions.

Tracking your expenses can get boring and tedious, Fortune City is a great app that allows you to input your expenses manually, but it feels like a game. The app is formatted like a city-building game. Your city gets bigger with each expense you input. For example, every time you input an expense in the “food” category, a restaurant building will pop up. Categories are customizable to your needs, and you can see a report of how much you spend on each category compared to others. It’s a fun and interactive way to keep track of your spending, and motivates you to keep doing so because it doesn’t feel like a chore, and more like a game.

To-Do Lists

As students, we often have more than just classes on our plates. We often have jobs, internships, or extracurriculars, clubs and organizations, as well as sports. It can be difficult to stay organized and make sure you don’t miss anything.

Todoist is an app that can help with that. Todoist allows you to create lists and categorize them (school, groceries, etc.), color code them, and even set a priority level. You can also sync your mail or calendar app, so all your scheduled events go into one place.

Todoist also allows you to collaborate with others and delegate a task to someone else. You can set due dates, have sublists, and see a report of your productivity, like how many tasks you’ve completed.

Microsoft To Do is another app similar to Todoist that allows you to stay organized by creating lists and color coding them. You can also share your lists with others and access your lists from your laptop and your phone.

Presentations

PowerPoint and Google Slides are both great and standard apps to use to create presentations. However, the themes provided can get boring. Use Slides Go to find a variety of themes and templates that you can apply to both PowerPoint and Google Slides.

Canva and Prezi are both great alternatives to PowerPoint and Google Slides. They both have unique customization tools, interesting transitions, and allow you to collaborate on a project with others. They are great alternatives if you want a more fun and interactive feel to your presentations.

Organizing Tasks & Assignments

If you want just one app that can house all your to-do’s and schedules, Trello is a great app to help you with that. On Trello, you can design your own board by creating cards customizable by you. For example, you can create “To-Do” , “Doing” , and “Done” cards to visually categorize the assignments you have. Or you can create a board specific to the essays you need to write and have “First Draft” , “Edit” , and “Final Draft” cards. Trello is a great option both for individual use, or for teams and groups, so you can see what each other are doing.

Notion is another great collaborative or individual workspace where you can truly customize your own “homepage” or board. You can use it to take notes, set up a calendar and to-do list, or even collaborate with others for a project. You can create your own templates, or search online for free and customizable templates other have created. It’s like having an all-in-one planner!