Being a college student can be very different from being a high school student. In college, you need to manage your study time and are expected to take a more active role in your studying. How do you make studying more effective and easier? There are some helpful tools and methods. This article provides a list of the best study tools for college students.
Cisdem Focus
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This article will talk about several types of studying tools. I hope they can help make your studying more effective.
In college, you don’t spend that many hours in class as a high school student does and are expected to study outside of class. You need to plan and manage your own time and maintain a study and life balance. That’s why time management is important for a college student.
Google Calendar is a great calendar and time management app for everyone, including college students. It’s easy to use and powerful and completely free.
You can use this free study tool to easily create your class schedule, add classes and make them a repeating event. Google Calendar’s notification can remind of your classes, so you won’t miss one or be late. For your time outside of class, you can also use Google Calendar to plan and schedule dedicated studying hours.
In Google Calendar, you can even create separate calendars for different areas, such as classes, dedicated study periods, part time jobs, social life, etc.
Exams and tests may be not that frequent in college but they are important. You don’t want to fail or miss one.
An easy-to-use, dedicated app called Exam Countdown may help in this regard. It can keep track of exam dates and send notifications to remind you. It helps you realize how much time is left and motivate you to prepare for the exam or test.
When it comes to studying in college, there can be so many things to keep track of and manage, such as reviewing class materials and completing assignments. A to-do list app can be an essential study tool for college students.
Available for Windows PC, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android, Todoist does a good job of helping students keep track of things and set priorities.
Todoist is powerful and flexible. You can use it in any way that you think is the most effective. For example, you can create projects for class tasks, exam tasks and more, and details such as deadlines and exam dates.
Some of the tasks may be more important or urgent than others. Todoist makes it easy to select the priority level for a task and helps you get the most important or urgent studying tasks done first.
Notetaking is important for all students. It is one of the skills required to be successful in college. To take better notes, one of the tricks is to use a good notetaking app.
Available for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android, Evernote is an easy-to-use and feature-rich notetaking app. You can use it to efficiently take class notes, other study notes and notes in general. If your class materials are in the PDF format, you can also add them to your note for easy access and view. In addition, it offers great features to easily organize and manage the notes you’ve taken.
Just like Todoist, Evernote is a powerful and flexible, and you can use it in a way that you think is the best for studying. If you are a fan of markdown, you can take study notes using a notetaking app called Bear.
Tip: Evernote supports calendar integration with Google Calendar, which can provide a sophisticated solution that you may need.
Here’s the scenario. You are using your Mac computer to study but can’t resist the temptation of watching some YouTube videos. If you are easily distracted, a distraction-minimized studying environment will help.
Available for Mac computers, Cisdem Focus can block distracting apps and websites during your study time. In addition to websites, pages, URLs with certain words and categories of websites, this tool allows you to block all websites except the ones needed for studying.
Cisdem Focus allows you to plan your study time with the built-in Pomodoro timer or by scheduling. It also lets you set a daily limit on app and website usage. This way, distractions are eliminated during the time periods dedicated to studying.
Available for Android and iOS, Forest is an innovative productivity tool. When you want to focus on studying, open this tool. Set a period of time (which is your focus session) and choose a tree to plant.
During your focus session, you can concentrate on the task at hand, such as a reading assignment, and your tree will grow. But if you end the focus session early, pick up your phone and open your favorite app (which requires leaving the Forest app), your tree will die.
If you don’t want your tree to die, you will have to be focused. As you spend more and more time focusing, you will be rewarded with a forest, which can help you stay motivated.
Want to make studying more effective, easier and even fun? Some learning tools may help. Quizlet, a well-known online study tool, is one of them.
Quizlet helps everyone study practically anything with flashcards, which is one of the most useful ways to study. In Quizlet, you can easily make study cards or lets Quizlet automatically create cards based on your notes. It can also generate tests based on your flashcards and give you feedbacks based on your performance in the tests.
There are several apps like Quizlet. Anki is one of them and is equally good. Anki supports adding images to cards and even allows you to blur parts of an image for free, which can make it a good learning tool for medical students.
When you write an essay or an email to your professor, you want to make sure that there are no spelling or grammar mistakes. In such a case, you may want to try Grammarly.
Grammarly is a free online tool to detect the spelling, grammar, punctuation and other mistakes in writing. In addition to the detection, it provides suggestions for users to consider. It can be used for either academic or personal writing. Grammarly has a premium version, which also offer some advanced features, such as word choice enhancement.
In college, you are expected to be more independent when it comes to studying and more. For example, if you miss a class, you need to get the class materials or notes by yourself from a classmate or other sources. In such a case, you may need a study tool called Course Hero. Tons of college students use Course Hero to share their class notes, class materials and other resources and help each other.
If, outside of classes, you’d like to explore more, you can check out Khan Academy. Khan Academy provides college level courses on math, computing, biology, chemistry, art history and more. All courses are free and easy to access. And you can study at your own pace. But it lacks interaction.
To become successful in college, some tools are helpful or even essential. This article talks about top study tools for college students. Some of them help with time management, some with notetaking and some with test and exams. High school students (and people in general) can also benefit from them. What tools do you use? How do they help with your studying?
Norah Hayes likes to share her tips on how to improve focus and stay motivated at work. She believes it is essential to eliminate all online distractions during work hours.
