If you’re a university student, the chances are that you also have a mobile phone. Thanks to the evolution of technology, mobile phones have gone from a luxury to a necessity. From children, to students, to adults, mobile phones have become the most useful tools in people’s everyday lives. So here are the 10 best student apps that all university students should definitely have installed already!
Applications are also being made every day to help to make people’s lives as easy as possible. This has also led to the creation of apps that focus around making the lives of university students easy and fun! Apps vary from helping students in the classroom, to helping students budget their money, to helping students organise a night out.
1) The Unicaf Mobile App
The Unicaf Mobile App, available on IOS and Android, is an app that allows you to access all of Unicaf’s desktop services from your mobile device! From applying for a scholarship to reading the Unicaf Blog, the Unicaf Mobile app makes your life easier by allowing you to do all this directly from your mobile phone!
2) RefME
This app is designed to help any student who is having trouble creating references in their bibliography. By scanning the IBAN or barcode of the book they wish to reference, RefME will generate a citation in any format you require; from APA to MLA to Chicago.
3) Notion
This note-taking app will help you organise your thoughts and allows you to take notes during your classes. However, this app’s versatility is its largest selling point. Aside from note-taking, this app allows you to create a project, organise your calendar, write a daily journal, plan travel itineraries and much more. This app does not only help you organise your uni work, but also organise your daily life as well!
And if that isn’t enough, this app allows you to synchronise your notes across devices, so you can type on your laptop, and be able to access the data on your tablet as well.
4) Office Lens
This app is fantastic for helping you understand diagrams that might not be clearly visible to you from your seat. You can take a picture of anything; a blackboard, a receipt, a newspaper page or a magazine article, and this app will automatically remove the glare, and any obstacles (like the back of any heads that are sitting between you and the blackboard). The app will also automatically rotate and align the image so that the subject of your image looks like you took the picture head-on. This app is ideal for when you are sitting in the far-back corner of the classroom.
5) SimpleMind
This app exists to help you organise your ideas, bring them to life and generate new ones by mapping them out in a diagram known as a mind map. The free version of this app should be more than enough for you, offering different colours of maps, pre-defined style sheets, and the opportunity to have multiple maps on a single page.
6) Mathway
For any students that use maths in their day-to-day lives, this is the best student app for you. Mathway is an app that allows you to type in an equation you are trying to solve, and it will give you the answer. And if you aren’t able to type the equation in yourself, you can take a picture of it and the app will recognise and solve it for you!
7) Oxford Dictionary of English
The absolute staple app for all students taking a language course. The Oxford Dictionary of English app is the ultimate dictionary app that helps students find definitions, synonyms and spellings of words they might not know. The app also allows you to take a picture of a word you don’t know and give you the definition of it!
8) Dragon Dictation
This app is a note-taking app that writes the text for you! All you need to do is talk into it and it will convert your speech into text that you can then save for later or paste into an email/text! Why waste all that time writing, when you can speak freely and allow your stream of consciousness to dictate the flow of your writing?
9) Microsoft Office
This is a bit of a cheat since we are talking about several apps, but for the sake of this article, let’s consider Microsoft Office itself as the app. The main three apps offered by Microsoft Office are arguably the most commonly used: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Powerpoint. These three apps have become a staple of office work around the world, followed closely by Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides respectively. And thankfully Microsoft has recently added a collaboration function to their Office apps so that multiple people can edit one document simultaneously. This makes group projects an absolute breeze!
10) Pomodoro Timer
The Pomodoro Timer app is by far the best student app. By studying in 25-minute increments, this app helps you concentrate on the work you need to get done, and helps you avoid distractions. And if 25 minutes is too long for you, you can adjust it to suit your needs freely! If you’re wondering what the word “Pomodoro” means, feel free to read our Study Techniques article to learn more!
11) Forest
The Forest app is another app that’s purpose is to keep you focused, however, this app is different in that it gives you an incentive! The app works in the same way as the Pomodoro Timer but in a more creative way. How does it do that, you may ask? By planting a tree! Anytime you want to focus on a task, launch this app and you will plant a tree to add to your “forest” on the app. As you study, as long as you have the app open, the tree, and over time the whole “forest” will grow. However, the moment you pick up your phone and switch over to another app, your tree will die. The more you are able to focus, the more trees you will collect to add to your forest!
Another fantastic reason to install this app is that the developers actually plant real-world trees around the world based on downloads and app usage, so it’s definitely worth downloading!
So there you have it, these are the 10 best student apps that provide you with the tools you need to further your studies, completely free of charge!
Now what are you waiting for? Get downloading!
