10 Apps To Help Students Study Better and Learn Faster

Apps in Edtech

By Josh Sears

‘Tis the season for final exams! If ever there was a time to take advantage of all tools imaginable to help your students get the best grades possible, it is now. Fortunately, the app market has exploded with useful assistance, and here are some of the best apps I recommend to help your students study better and learn faster:

iTunes U

Apple’s own iTunes U offers a popular app with free lectures and coursework from many of the best schools in the world. Even if you don’t use it for your regular curriculum, you can still supplement with Stanford’s impressive tools on topics such as coding iOS apps or Statistics 101. The best part? It’s free! Well, if you have an iPhone that is–otherwise you’ll have to keep reading…

Cite This For Me

Whenever you borrow words or ideas, the given source needs to be acknowledged. Cite This For Me is a nifty app students can use to put together their citations and bibliographies. It not only uses your phone’s camera to scan a book’s barcode and create a citation, but also formats it in MLA, Chicago, or whichever style your school is using. It’s is free, and can be used on both iOS and Android phones.

Duolingo

This app is geared toward students who are learning a new language. Duolingo makes learning fun by turning lessons into a game. It can be used to practice Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Irish, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Italian, English and more. This app is also free, and can be used on both iOS and Android phones.

Wunderlist 

For best study results, Wunderlist will help your students with their time management skills. It can set due dates, reminders and to-do lists. The app is free, but a pro version lets you share your lists and work collaboratively on projects. Works on both iOS and Android phones.

iStudiez Lite

iStudiez is an award-winning app to help students manage their schedule. The Lite version covers one semester of up to five courses, 15 assignments, 15 classes or exams per course, five instructors and two holiday periods. If you get hooked and decide you can’t live without it, the Pro version takes away the limits. The Lite version is free, however, and works on both iOS and Android phones.

Timetable

Timetable is a great app to help students manage their school or university life, and can easily be downloaded from Google Play. It enters each user’s tasks from homework to exams only once, because this app syncs across all your Android devices. The best part? It mutes phones during lessons. A great tool for Android users, and it’s free!

Dictionary.com

Dictionary.com can meet all of your students’ English vocabulary needs, with 2,000,000 definitions, word origins and histories, Word of the Day, synonyms, antonyms and a thesaurus, among other things. The main app is free but comes with ad banners, and is extremely popular with both iOS and Android users.

Coursera.org

This is an online education site that has partnerships with many top colleges and universities, including Ivy League schools. Students can sign up and study at their own pace to supplement their knowledge, because these schools offer both curriculum course study materials and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). It helps students aim for higher grades and perhaps some scholarship cash. The courses are very affordable, and the apps can be downloaded on both iOS and Android phones.

MyScript Smart Note

If your students prefer to take notes instead of typing while studying, MyScript Smart Note recognizes handwriting in multiple languages. Even if their handwriting is more of a scribble, Smart Note is quite accurate in understanding it. It even allows users to edit your handwriting with special gestures, and offers an adjustable palm-rest feature, a drawing mode, and lets you insert math equations, images, sound or PDF files from various cloud storage services including Dropbox and Evernote. The app is free for both iOS and Android, but an upgrade gives you more features such as notebooks, unlimited pages, export ability and backups.

Evernote

Evernote features bookmarking, composing, clipping and more, and is immensely popular as a note taking app. You can download it on multiple platforms, and it’s all free. Don’t miss out on this little helper to help your students learn faster and better.

With the help of these apps, your students will have a significant leg up on their exams.

For more, see:

Josh Sears is a contributor at https://gryfin.com/ who is passionate about helping students achieve their full potential with study tips and hacks.


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7 Comments

Blake Bird
3/27/2017

This blog post is intriguing in the sense that it provides a solid framework for educators to utilize the ever-increasing access to technology to help better incorporate it into the classroom. This article provides a brief, but informative synopsis of 10 iPhone and iPad apps that teachers can use to enhance the learning experience of their students. These apps are all alike in the sense that they harness educational tools and simplify them to the point where students and teachers alike can learn quicker and easier. The app contents include dictionaries and thesauruses, bibliographies, foreign language learning games, and even software that analyzes and edits your handwriting! While this blog does not provide any recommendations on how to harness the power of these apps properly, it allows proactive educators to gain knowledge of the existence of these apps and proceed to incorporate them into their teaching.
The exponential rise of technology is happening so quickly that we are behind on the curve as far as actually implementing the proper technology to improve our education system. We are not at the level we should be with our reading, math, and science scores with respect to the rest of the world when evaluating K-12 test scores. While lack of proper technology implementation may not be the cause of our lack of performance in K-12 education, it is still an incredibly important issue because of the sheer potential our technology has to improve and further our education system. The implications of these apps and others regarding their potential to improve education could end up being a very useful experimental study that could be used by policymakers to implement new educational programs to help us keep up with our increasing technological potential. As far as the possible study goes, I would recommend setting up an experiment in which groups of students (separated for each K-12 age category and then broken into groups within that category) are placed in a few different technology-integrated classroom programs that incorporate different iPhone and iPad apps, as well as a control, and evaluate the longitudinal test scores of these students throughout the year as well as follow-up interviews with teachers and students alike. A study like this could have a big impact on the way we view how technology is integrated into K-12 education, and articles with knowledge like this need to spread and shared more so these issues can actually be addressed.

Cercube 4
8/10/2017

All the apps you added are really nice. And, I think YouTube is one of the best sources for anything. Especially for education. There are so many good channels that help you improve yourself in studies. iOS users have an advantage. If they install cercube on their device, they will not see even a single ad while playing youtube videos. One more thing is, students can download the videos to watch them later offline.

android application
12/20/2018

Now a days there are so many online resources which are available.
Among them you have provided the best list of apps which is really commendable and personally i like the detailing about each app.

Ruqyah al shariah
2/6/2019

Excellent blog and well written it definitely helps the students but there are many online apps available.

Abbi Sheran
3/10/2019

Thanks for sharing this list. I agree these are helpful for students that are already motivated to study. But it's not just about organization and lectures, sometimes it's just the drive to sit down and focus that makes it hard for students to get started. I suggest the Study Bunny app because it helped me be more productive. It's a timer that helps you focus because it rewards you for studying. I highly recommend, here's the link if anyone is interested: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.superbyte.studybunny

James Dooley
5/6/2020

Thanks for the article. There are indeed a wealth of online apps available, and a lot of free ones. I like https://www.codecademy.com/ and https://makeanexam.com/ which is designed to help improve grades, prepare for exams and develop better study habits.

Joy
5/16/2021

Thanks for the great list or resources! I wish to add one more though. If you are planning to hire a native tutor to help you with your language learning, check out Justlearn at https://www.justlearn.com/

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