5 Must-Have Apps for Back to School
These five apps will help you survive the back-to-school season.
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5 Must-Have Apps for Back to School
Whether you’re in college or high school, going back to school after summer can be rough. You have to manage homework, after-school activities, and ideally find some time to relax and see friends and family. But even if you aren’t in school, these apps may still help you keep your life more organized and less chaotic.
Evernote
First and foremost is one of my all time favorite apps called Evernote. Now I’ve done an entire episode on Evernote in the past and for good reason. This is an amazing app that has a ton of features, meant to organize your life, thoughts, and random scraps of paper.
Basically this app is an organizational machine built from the ground up. It can take just about any type of data on a page called a note. Notes can be contained in Notebooks, and everything you add in to a Notebook can be tagged (like tagging something on Instagram). A note can be anything such as an audio clip (like a reminder you record while walking to class, or maybe an entire lecture), some text, picture, video, or any other type of media.
Automatically, it will date stamp each note, and if you’re using the mobile app, it will also tag the location of where you were when you made the note. This is really nice because sometimes I make a quick note, thinking future Eric will definitely remember the context … even though I inevitably forget what I meant. Having the location and time on a note is really great for notes to help remember your class assignments.
Let’s talk about how you might use Evernote because I’m a recent college graduate and have some suggestions. I would create a different Notebook for every class. I would take audio recordings of important lectures or parts of the class (with permission of course), and then type all of my notes into Evernote directly. Any paper that I received in the class, I took a picture of on my phone and added it as a note.
There’s even a feature in Evernote that will allow you to set reminders, which is great for assignments with due dates. Basically anything I did in class was put in to Evernote which meant that it was really well organized, easy to search through, and best of all backed up in the cloud!
You can even access it through pretty much any device, computer, or Internet browser, which makes it easy to take notes on your laptop and then study later on your phone.
Dropbox
Next up is Dropbox. I use Dropbox everyday. I keep all of my documents and smaller files like word documents and spreadsheets in it. I’ve also done a full podcast on Dropbox and all of it’s comptetitors, which you should really check out. After you install Dropbox, it behaves like any other folder on your computer, except that it syncs between all your devices. This means you always have the most current version of any document or project that you’re working on. Plus it keeps revisions of files, and backs up to the cloud!
It’s great to create a shared folder for group projects because you can sync folders and files between all the members of your group. Everyone has the most current information always!
Google Docs
While we are on the topic of group projects, lot’s talk about Google Docs. I love Google’s suite of free office tools. For a free signup with Google, you can use their entire suite of online office tools, which are really great. The one caveat is that you really can’t use them offline very well, but it has some awesome features that I’ve never seen anywhere else.
For example, Google Docs saves whatever you’re typing after every single key that you press. This means that your computer can crash, your battery can die, or your laptop can fall of a building and your paper will still be perfectly fine and backed up to Google. Above all, though, the best feature about Google Docs is the ability to edit the same document at once. Say you had a major paper to write with a group, instead of everyone person writing their part on a document and combining at the end, they would simply edit the same document that everyone was working on!
It’s pretty insane but you can actually see other users working on your paper all at the same time in real time. It makes group projects really easy, and you don’t need to buy any software because it’s all in your browser.
AnyDo
We talked about how Evernote has reminders built into it, but I always liked to have a separate app to set reminders for everything—not just school. AnyDo is a daily planner on your phone. My favorite part about it is that it will give you multiple reminders for everything that you put in it. For example, it’s great to have reminders set, but I always set it up to tell me both a week and a day before an assignment was due. It always keeps important information at the forefront of my mind.
Audible/Overdrive
This last apps you probably wouldn’t expect to use for school are Audible and Overdrive. Both of these apps will allow you to listen to audiobooks. Now this may sound really strange, but hear me out! Audiobooks are an amazing way to cut down on homework time. I used to find all of the books I needed to read in Audiobook form and would listen to them as I walked to class, drove home for visits, or just made meals. It’s a great way to cut down on the amount of work you have to do because you can do something else at the same time. Now it may be harder to take notes this way, but I still found it incredibly useful when I had a book a week to read between all of my classes.
On Audible you have to pay for your books, but Overdrive is a part of most libraries, and with a library card you can often get access to a large variety of classic audiobooks (most of the ones you would expect to read in a literature class). Since it’s through your library, the audiobooks are free.
I highly recommend checking it out it could save you a ton of time and money!
Now I want to know from all of you what apps do you think would be useful in college? Please post on the Tech Talker Facebook page.
Well, that’s it for today! Be sure to check out all my earlier episodes at techtalker.quickanddirtytips.com. And if you have further questions about this podcast or want to make a suggestion for a future episode, post them on Facebook QDTtechtalker.
Until next time, I’m the Tech Talker, keeping technology simple!Â
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