5 Essential Apps to Master Your Semester
Remember last semester’s time crunch when you swore you’d be more productive next time?😱
Fret not, we’ve got you covered. Here are five essential apps for students to beat the new semester woes. Don’t just browse through the apps — use them!
1 — Toggle
We’ve all been lectured on the importance of time-management ad nauseum. Yet many students (and people in general) stumble at the first step: accurately recording their time spent on various tasks. Most smartphones, tablets and smartwatches come preloaded with stock timer Apps but prove inadequate when you need to label tasks, sort them, and sync with other devices.
Toggle is a free time management app that tracks, labels and organizes your time spent. It is a popular cloud-based worklog app of choice for many freelancers due to its orientation towards project-work. Unsurprisingly, it doubles up as a decent time-tracker for students juggling multiple subjects and projects. Available on both iOS and Android, the app runs unobtrusively while you work, allowing you to monitor the time past, just by dragging the pull-down menu. You can even sync it with all your devices in real-time, so updating your latest time entry is a breeze.
Best of all, you can create colorful, detailed summary reports to check which tasks or subjects eat into your time the most.
2 — Google Calendar
Many of us already use this simple, robust calendar app to plan our schedules. But how many students (or working adults) use it to cement positive habits in their daily routine? Introducing Google Calendar’s “Goal” function — the simplest way to turn irksome chores you loathe, into positive, life-changing habits.
Goals schedules any goal such as a study plan or exercise into Google Calendar. It reminds you of your goals both the night, and 15 minutes before the activity. The app even allows you to defer activities and automatically reschedule them to better slots based on your prior compliance with the schedule.
If this quasi- Nanny-esque, intrusive training seems dubious to you, take heed: where once he exercised at most sporadically, the writer of this article now exercises five times a week and sometimes even more, thanks to Goals. Apply this iOS and Android compatible app to your study plans, skill building, and networking, and you’ll be amazed at the progress you make.
3 — Khan Academy
We’ve all had that lecturer — the one who over-enthusiastically adds to the confusion whenever you ask a question. Clear the air next time with Khan Academy’s free instructional videos on virtually any subject.
The explanations are clear, bite-sized, authoritative, and best of all — updated with new specialties unlikely to be found in your textbook. This makes Khan Academy app one of the top apps students should be using in the complementary education category. The best time to snack on Khan videos? During your breaks or long commutes.
Next time your Professor mentions an influential author, why not search the name in Khan’s app? It’s easy to follow your subject’s movers-and-shakers this way.
4 — PDF Markup Cloud
Students writing term papers, rejoice! Ever bookmarked a webpage only to spend hours scrolling for the sentence that caught your eye? Give your scroll-wheel a break with the award-winning PDF Markup Cloud’s latest web highlighter feature.
Simply highlight your desired text in Safari or built-in browser. Need a quick glance over your highlights using another device? No problem — PDF Markup Cloud saves them in a convenient, summarized list, and syncs it across all your devices. Best of all, you can save the highlighted page as PDFs, share and edit them directly in — you guessed it: PDF Markup Cloud. You’ll never need to export your valuable information to another document app again!
Feel embarrassed by your clunky handwritings and markups? Worry no more. PDF Markup is currently offering a solution to this. With every purchase of their Creativity 365 annual plan they are giving out a sleek, ergonomic Dash 2 stylus. With the help of a stylus you can avoid clunky handwriting and annotate more naturally.
5 — RefME
Plagiarism is heavily frowned upon in academic circles, yet students often turn in error-ridden references because citation styles are needlessly complex. With RefME, you can now use your Apple or Android device to automatically generate accurate references for any source, simply by scanning the barcode, or pasting in the source URL.
Do you need a special citation style? The app supports over 7,500 citation styles, and even organizes your references by projects. Use RefME if you want to spend more time writing your papers, and less on checking references.
Going back to school is never painless but using these apps on your smartphone or tablet can help ease the transition. Like this article? Share it with your friends and classmates!
Originally published at Kdan Mobile Blog.
