4 iPad Workflows That Will Increase Productivity as a Student
Tools to streamline the process of studying with the iPad
Going paperless has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made when it comes to my educational career. There are so many benefits when it comes to efficiency, storage, retention, and other important areas of studying that going paperless is most likely the future of education. However, it’s not just sunshine and rainbows when it comes to ditching paper and pens; navigating the tech that makes going paperless possible can be quite steep a learning curve. It takes some time before you nail down a good workflow, but when you finally do the ROI is huge.
With the fall semester coming up, many students will most likely be heading back to campus (unless we see a surge in COVID-19 cases before then, knock on wood). In this article, I’ll share my workflows so that you can get back to studying as efficiently as possible. The workflows will be centered around using Google Drive as the main “hub” for your study materials. Enjoy!
Lectures
Lectures are where your iPad really shines. The best app for taking handwritten notes with the Apple Pencil is, in my opinion, Notability. It’s $8.99 but easily worth the cost. We’ll be using Notability to take notes and keep the notes in Google Drive for easy access both on your iPad, computer, and phone.
Notability has an auto-backup feature that lets you choose to automatically store notes in either Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, or WebDAV. Now, you can choose either of these, but I’ve found Google Drive to be the most user-friendly. The point of automatically backing up notes to a cloud service is so that we don’t have to have access to our iPad when we want to look at our notes. Another situation where having them on Google Drive is optimal is when we want to look at our notes and use the iPad for writing at the same time.
How to set up auto-backup to Google Drive
- Open Notability settings
- Tap “Auto-Backup” in the left column
- Tap “Google Drive”. This will prompt you to sign in with your Google account so that Notability can automatically save any notes to your account.
- Tap on “Destination” and choose what folder you want to save your Notability library in. You’ll want to choose a generic folder name like “Notes” since we’re going to be choosing specifically what Notability subjects we want to automatically save in the next step.
- Tap “Subjects to Back Up” and choose what subjects you want to back up.
- Tap “File Format” and choose PDF. Now, you may want to go with “PDF + Recording” if you make use of Notability’s audio-recording feature, otherwise, choose “PDF”.
Your notes will now sync automatically into folders that have the same names as your subjects in Notability.
Handouts
I don’t think there’s a single student in the entire world that likes having a bunch of papers rattling around in their bag. It gets crumpled, you spill coffee on them, you can’t find them. Handouts suck. Some professors have opted to go with digital handouts, but paper handouts are still the most common. There’s a way around them, though.
We’ll be using the app ScanPro. The free version does the job just fine, but if you’re interested in upgrading to get a few extra features it’ll cost you around $46/year.
For ScanPro to work as smoothly as possible with our workflow we’ll be connecting it to Google Drive so that we can, with two quick taps, store our scanned handouts at the same place as our notes.
Connect ScanPro to Google Drive
1. Open settings
2. Tap “Cloud Services”
3. At the bottom, tap “Add service”
4. Tap “Google Drive” and log into your Google account. Done!
When you scan a new document, you’ll be given the option to share it, and after adding your Google account in settings you can share it directly to Google Drive.
Youtube Picture-in-Picture
The YouTube app for iPadOS is quite lacking in many features, one of them being Picture-in-Picture-mode. Picture-in-Picture (or PiP) can be really useful when you want to watch something on YouTube and take notes at the same time.
Since the YouTube app doesn’t support PiP, you have to use the YouTube web page in Safari. Luckily, all web pages are desktop-mode by default since the launch of iPadOS. I created a very simple shortcut with Siri Shortcuts that looks like a YouTube app on your home page but takes you to the YouTube website.
Here’s the link to the shortcut.
- Download Shortcuts from the App Store, if you don’t already have it
- Click the link to the shortcut above, and click “Get Shortcut”
- Press the 3 dots in the blue circle in the shortcut
- Tap “Add to Home Screen”
- Tap the icon next to “YouTube” and add this YouTube logo image
(Optional) Add your timetable to iCloud Calendar
This little tip only works if your university or school use a timetable platform that has the option to integrate into iCal. If you don’t know if it does, look for a download or subscribe-button, or contact administration to see if there’s the possibility to subscribe to your timetable. May be worth checking out!
Hopefully you enjoyed this article and found it useful! If you did, please consider giving it a few claps if you’re a Medium-user. Comment something that you find useful in your day-to-day with the iPad. Cheers, and stay safe ❤
