Essential apps to streamline your studies

Uninterrupted, efficient and focused studying has never been an easy task for any student. The overly competitive world of today demands more from students than ever before. The contest is overwhelming and what we learn must be thorough both in terms of concept and practical skills. The good news, however, is that there are many apps that can help students streamline their studies and stay on top of the competition. Tactical and strategic use of these applications will provide a head start for the mindful student.

iStudiez Pro

The first thing an involved student need is an effective scheduling system. Without an organiser, it's easy to forget a crucial assignment, be late for an important class or miss a deadline. iStudiez Pro is one of the best organising tools available for free. It helps students keep track of their classwork, homework, projects, assignments, papers, classes and even grades - all in one place. It can be synced across multiple devices and different platforms such as iOS, Mac, Android and Windows. iStudiez also offers integration with Google Calendar and provides timely notifications on what's coming up. You only have to update the important dates and deadlines and the app will remind you to catch up on the homework you were about to overlook! 

Forest

A mindfulness app with a wonderful twist. Notifications are the modern-day enemy of a productive study session. They are designed to distract and draw you away from the task at hand. Forest is a productivity app that provides you with a beautiful incentive to stay away from your phone and stick to your studies. In the timer you set for a session, a virtual tree starts growing in your forest in the app. If you leave the app to check any notifications, the tree dies and you have to start over. The app is simple, effective and cute. What's more - they are actually partnered with a tree-planting organisation! Depending on downloads, the app actually donates to plant trees across the globe. There is no surer way to keep you from checking your Facebook unnecessarily than the possibility of a baby plant withering and crumbling. 

Dragon Anywhere

Need to make notes on the go? Is the lecture going by too fast to jot things down by hand? Dragon Anywhere is a dictation application that will help you solve these problems. Much more accurate and powerful than Siri Dictation, this app comes at a US$15/month subscription fee after an initial seven-day trial period. But the multifaceted use of the app makes it worth the investment. It captures all your dictations and lectures in both audio and text format. There are a bunch of useful voice commands to edit your notes such as 'Scratch that' or 'Go to the end of line'. Dragon can also be integrated with Google Drive and Google Calendar, and it offers the feature of importing your notes to other platforms such as Evernote. Overall, if you need to keep fast, clean and accurate notes through dictation, you cannot go wrong with Dragon Anywhere. 

Evernote

The next most crucial thing after efficient organising is, of course, note-taking. Revising notes is the cornerstone of preparing for the upcoming exam, and Evernote remains the uncontested app of choice for this purpose. Evernote makes organising all your notes fun. It offers some really cool extra features on the paid version, but the free subscription is more than enough to be a master of the notes you take. Evernote lets you enhance your notes with checklists, attachments, links, images, drawings and even audio clips. The free version offers features such as searching for text inside an image, clipping web pages, syncing across two devices and applying a passcode. It is hard to find a better replacement for Evernote when it comes to keeping your notes streamlined.

Quizlet

Flashcards! A proven and tested method of learning. Instead of old-school paper flashcards, there are now many smart flashcard apps that make memorising less tedious and more exciting. Quizlet is one of the most widely used flashcard applications. Essentially turning memorising into a game, it helps students study a practically endless variety of subjects. A student can either create his own flashcards or access sets already created by other users and professional instructors. Ranging from world history to GRE vocabularies, there are thousands of topics to learn, readily available for free. Quizlet is an excellent tool for learning language-based subjects. Whether to add a little spice to a boring course or to quickly go through the essential points before an exam, Quizlet is a truly helpful app.