12 Must-Have Apps For Students

Being a 21st Century student can be so much fun due to modern technology. Today, there is almost an app for everything and this can make a student’s life easier, cheaper, safer, and more fun. Whether you want help with taking notes, revising, managing your time, waking up on time, or keeping fit, read this blog to the end to learn more about the most important apps that you should have as a student. 

1. Notion

Notion is a free app available for Android, iPhone, iPad, and iPod. It is a note-taking app that stands out from the crowd. It is mostly preferred by students due to its ability to adapt to different functions. Apart from taking notes, the app can help you manage projects, create a calendar, and write a daily journal, plan travel itineraries, and so on. It can help you organize your work and almost everything else in your life. 

The app also allows you to sync your notes across all your devices. Meaning you can type your notes on your tablet and access them on your laptop when you need them. Another advantage of Notion is that it has hundreds of templates that you can use to organize your notes more efficiently. 

2. Office Lens

Office Lens is a free app available for Android, iPhone, iPad, and iPod. The app is good for capturing complex diagrams. Depending on the course you are taking in college or at the university, you might find yourself faced with a real humdinger of a diagram from time to time. What do you do in this case? Do you scribble it or do you wait for the lecturer to explain it?

Luckily, you do not have to choose from any of the above choices if you have Office Lens. All you have to do is hold your camera up to the board and take a picture, and the app will crop out everything around it (including any backs-of-heads).

The best advantage of having Office Lens is that if you take a picture of something at an angle, the app will align and edit the image to appear as though it’s directly in front of you. Thus, Office Lens is very important especially when you have been cast to the edge of the room.  

3. Simple Mind

SimpleMind is a free app available for Android, iPhone, iPad, and iPod. Although the app is not for everyone, you will be lucky if it works for you. It is good at organizing thoughts. You easily access mind maps via your browser or as an app. SimpleMind gives you all the functionality you’d have if you were drawing a mind map by hand. You can even enjoy more options if you decide to pay for them but we believe that the free version is enough for all your mind mapping needs. 

The app has options that allow you to add multiple maps to a single page and use different colors. The app has the ability to expand and collapse branches which is ideal for navigating a huge mindmap on a tiny screen. 

4. Microsoft Office

This is a free app available for Android, iPhone, iPad, and iPod. With Microsoft Office, you do not have to carry your laptop everywhere you go.  It is not a single app but you should take the whole package instead of just picking one Microsoft Office offer. 

While using Microsoft Office, chances are that you will only use PowerPoint, Excel, and word but it is important to know that you also have access to Outlook, OneNote, and OneDrive in case you need them. Microsoft has made apps for the office’s leading lights and they are available on all the major platforms. 

Imagine remembering there is something you did or did not include in an assignment or an essay and there is nothing you can do about it because you can not access your laptop at the moment. With Microsoft Office, you can always access and edit files on your laptop anytime and anywhere as long as you saved the files to the cloud. 

Due to the collaboration between Microsoft and Google, it is now possible for anyone with access to a document to edit it simultaneously. This is a great feature when working on a group project as all members of the group can easily include their points on the document even when they are not using the same computer. 

5. Mathway

This is a free app available for Android, iPhone, iPad, and iPod. The app will help in solving those head-scratchers. The app will be of great importance to students who have math problems to solve at any point in their academics. 

The app can help with the simplest of sums to the most fearsome formulas. Is math giving you a headache? This app will put an end to all the sleepless nights trying to figure out what the numbers are all about. Worry not as Mathway will solve all your math problems. 

You only have to type the math problem and let Mathway solve it for you. If you want to know how the math problem was worked out, Mathway can as well give a detailed step-by-step guide on how to work it out. 

If you are a mathematics lover you will definitely love this app. Having the app is like having a lecture around 24/7 to explain everything you want to understand at your comfort. Are you bothered with having to type everything out? With Mathway you can just take a picture of the problem and Mathway will recognize it. This will help save you time as well.

6. Any.do

Any.do is a free app available for Android, iPhone, iPad, and iPod. This app will help make a big job feel easier. To-do lists help in breaking a large task into smaller, more manageable chunks. Any.do is the best app for this task. It has a simple design that makes getting things done more satisfying. 

Any.do allow you to sync everything across any compatible device. It also offers reminders so you don’t forget some important tasks. Apart from this, it makes it possible for a user to share lists with other users as well as assign different tasks to other users. It is very important when taking a group task to ensure every group member takes there of their tasks on time. 

On top of all the above advantages, the app comes with a widget to add your to-do list and tasks to your home screen for ease of access. Thus, you do not have to scroll through other apps to find it. 

7. Oxford English Dictionary

This is a free app available for Android, iPhone, iPad, and iPod. The app is a very important asset for academic reading and writing. A dictionary is a very important app on any phone no matter the brand of dictionary you decide to install. 

This mobile app contains more than 350,000 words, phrases, and meanings. It also has more than 75,000 audio pronunciations for words that are more difficult to pronounce.  The dictionary can help with definitions, spellings, pronunciations, and finding out whether a word is actually a word. 

You can also take a picture of a word and search for it when using Oxford English Dictionary and thus you do not have to always type words to find them in the app. The app will help you find the meaning of words you do not understand especially when listening to your lecturer to avoid being left behind in class. The advantage of having this app on your phone is that it can help expand your vocabulary. 

8. Mint

Mint is an important app for students who want to save money. It is a very popular budgeting app for students. Once you connect all your accounts to the app, you get a complete picture of all your finances and thus you can easily create your budget plan. 

Mint categorizes your spending automatically and with all this data you can determine how much you can spend on a weekend trip or a night out after paying rent as the app shows your finances and your expenses. With this, you can have more long-term goals like paying student loans or buying textbooks for the next semester. The app is free and available for Android, iPhone, iPad, and iPod. 

9. StudyBlue

StudyBlue is a very important app for students that helps with exam preparation, revision, planning, and taking notes. It is the largest crowdsourced library that has over 400 million flashcards, notes, and study guides from students all over the world. The app allows students to learn using virtue flashcards on their phones or tablets. By the use of StudyBlue, you can have constant access to your study aids for your study and memorization needs. 

This is a one in all app where you can create and share study materials as well as search for recommended study materials from your classmates, track progress, set reminders, and create custom quizzes that you can share with other users of the app. The app is available for android, iPhone, and iPad. 

10. RefME

RefME is a very important app when it comes to creating and collecting references and research materials for your assignments and projects. The app automates the referencing process making it possible for students to create references, citations, and bibliographies instantly just by scanning the barcodes of all the books, journals, articles, or any other sources. 

The app has thousands of open educational resources where students can start their academic reading and prompt further research. With RefME you get plenty of extra time to spend improving your work. If you are writing a research paper, the app will create a reference for you that you can easily export by emailing it to yourself or to Evernote. The app is free and also available for Android, iPhone, iPad, and iPod. 

11. Evernote

Are you looking for an app that will help you create, compile and organize notes? Evernote is your best choice as it will also help you organize all your other tasks. It is an all-rounder app that will organize your coursework, track due dates, type notes, and save related handouts, websites, and whiteboard pictures in one place. 

Note in Evernote can be created from text, drawings, photographs, online web content, and audio footage.  Once the notes have been created, they can be stored in electronic notebooks that can be annotated, tagged with labels, edited, searched, have attachments linked to them, and even exported for use in other devices. 

With the task manager feature, you can assign certain tasks and give them due dates, flags, and reminders. With this app, you can be sure to benefit a lot from it as a student. The app is free with some paid plans you can pay for if you wish to use them. The app is available for use on desktop, ios, and android. 

12. Forest

How often can you sit down to study and concentrate for 30 minutes? Most students can’t even concentrate for 10 minutes without finding themselves on their phones scrolling through their social media platforms. If you are facing the same problem, worry no more as “Forest” is a time management app that will help manage your time. 

The app takes a creative approach to help you stay focused by not touching your phone throughout the study session. How does the app do that? The app encourages you to plant a tree when studying. The more time you spend studying, the more trees you plant. Every time you want to start a study focus session, you plant a tree in your “forest” on the app. To grow a tree, you must not touch your phone throughout the study period, if you do, the tree dies. 

The good news is that the company that owns the app plants real trees around the world based on downloads and app usage. This is a win-win for both you and the earth. You get to concentrate more on your study and earth gets more trees.