What’s the (h)Apps?
Over the course of my first year, I came across some (free) apps that really helped me and made my study life much easier! Of course, you don’t have to use these, I just thought I would let you guys know some things that helped me with the way I studied.
I will talk about three apps in particular.
- Anki Flashcards
- Soda PDF
- CamScanner
Anki Flashcards
Anki is a free app you can download for your Apple or Windows computer. It has companion apps for phones as well, however, only the Android app is free (the iPhone one is definitely not free — $37 whaattttt?!!).
Get Anki here.
Anki uses the theory of spaced repetition, meaning it tests you on the flashcards you make in a way that minimises the time spent studying them, whilst maximising retention. For example, when you first make a flashcard, it tests you on it immediately and then a few minutes later, then the next day, then a few days later, etc etc. It means the information gets locked in your brain, and you are reminded of the information at just the right time before you forget it.
When it tests you on the flashcards, if you are a little slow, or you get it wrong, it moves it up the queue and tests you on it more frequently until you are nailing it again.
There are different ways Anki enables you to sort your flashcards. You can make different ‘Profiles’, in which you have different ‘Decks’. So for example, I made a profile called MEDSCI 142, and I made a deck for each organ system. This meant that I could study each organ system separately, rather than all of MEDSCI together at once. You can add tags to your flashcards, and you can use these tags to make mega study decks for tests or exams. For example, I tagged everything that was going to be tested in the first test as ‘Test1’, everything in the second test as ‘Test2’ and also added ‘Exam’ if it was to be in the final exam. This meant I could be tested on everything jumbled up together in the week before the big tests.
As it is a free app, it is definitely not fancy looking and does take a bit of getting used to, but I just watched a few YouTube videos and I was away!
It does take quite a bit of time to make flashcards, so only make flashcards if you know you will use them and benefit from them — otherwise they will take up your precious time for no benefit. I liked the idea of having all the stuff I needed to know in one place that I could quickly test myself on before bed, or while you have some downtime between classes.
I will post some examples of my Anki flashcards from last year so you can see how I used it.
1. Basic Flashcards
This is your standard kind of flashcard, it asks you a question and you answer it.
2. Cloze Flashcard
This type of flashcard allows you to fill in the missing words.
3. Image Occlusion Flashcards
Anki lets you make flashcards out of images and allows you to cover up certain things in the images to test yourself, this is great for learning anatomy!
In this example, I have covered up multiple things on the image (yellow boxes) but this flashcard is only testing me on what’s behind the red box.
You can change the settings to test you on all the boxes at once; how I have done it here; or by only covering up the one it is testing you on (meaning no yellow boxes).
Soda PDF
I will talk about this in another post, but for most of my subjects, I preferred to take notes on my computer. I found the lecturers talked very fast, and if I was writing, either on my computer or by hand, I would find I would be writing down what the lecturer’s slides said, not necessarily what they were saying. I got really frustrated with myself, cause I felt like either I missed what was on the slides or missed what they were saying.
PowerPoint has this feature where you can type notes at the bottom of the slide you are looking at. I noticed this when a lecturer uploaded the PPT file instead of the PDF file. This meant I could have the slide open on my computer whilst I wrote in the ‘Notes’ section on PowerPoint what the lecturer was saying. I had all that I needed in one place and didn’t feel like I was missing out on any information.
There was only one problem with this method…99% of the time, the lecturer’s uploaded their slides in PDF format.
I looked for online converters from PDF to PPT, however, they only let you do a certain number before you have to buy their full version. Eventually, I came across this app called Soda PDF. It is a converter that you download, which means you can convert PDFs without the internet.
It is a little bit convoluted as they keep trying to get you to download their full version, however, on their free version you can do all the converting you need!
Get Soda PDF here.
CamScanner
This saved me SO much time in second semester for MedSci!! I will talk about how I studied for MedSci in another post, but for now I’ll talk about this app!
For MedSci, I found annotating the course guide was the best way to keep my notes, however it was hard to make flashcards out of all the pages of the course guide. It took such a long time to scan each individual page with a physical scanner so I looked for an alternative.
CamScanner is an app for Android and iPhone that uses your camera to scan a document using your phone camera. You can scan pages in batches or individually, and you can sort them into folders. CamScanner lets you quickly email the scans to yourself in PDF format for you to use on your computer.
The scans are actually amazing quality, and don’t be fooled by the fact that it uses a phone camera! I was skeptical at first, but trust me — it works!
This is how I made flashcards out of images in my MedSci course guide like you saw in the section I talked about Anki.
CamScanner is a free app, however (as with everything) there is a subscription service for the more advanced features. In saying that though, the free version is all you need!
Get CamScanner here.
Now that you have made it to the end of another long post, I really hope at least one of these apps helps you out this year!
