Appwatch Special: AHEAD's Top Ten Apps for Students
Every Wednesday in a feature we call Appwatch, we post on our social media accounts about an app that we think students may find useful. Sometimes these apps are specifically aimed at students with certain difficulties - for example those with visual impairments or those with a specific learning difficulty - but mostly, they are apps which all students may find helpful, both in their personal lives and in the educational sphere. Below we round up our Top Ten favourite Apps (in no particular order) we've come across in the last year and provided youtube clips/links to explore further.
RefME/Cite This For Me - Take the pain out of referencing and citation!
RefME, recently rebranded Cite This For Me, is an ingenious referencing app allowing you to collect all your references by project in one easy place. Just use your camera to snap a barcode on any book and RefME will find the referencing information and put it into your preferred citation style (e.g. Harvard Style). Can also collect references from websites etc. very easily. Find out more about RefMe at their website.
Evernote - Cloud storage for all your notes, documents and project files.
Cloud storage for all your files, favourite webpages, photos etc. Key is the integrations with countless over apps and devices meaning you can save stuff to it so easily. Also great tags feature to help you organise and find your content. Also has note-taking functionalities.
Coggle - Web based mind mapping app!
Coggle is a web based mind mapping app which is great for project planning in a more visual way. Draw your project as a series of connected idea bubbles and move sections/ideas around to make sense of it.
Grammarly - web based spelling/grammar checker.
Grammarly is web based subscription service offering advanced spelling, grammar and citation checking - particularly useful for those with specific learning difficulties like Dyslexia.
Click here to see how students can use Grammarly to improve their writing and to get the free Grammarly browser extension.
Cogi - Audio recording app helping you capture only what you need.
Capture audio highlights of a lecture. Uses 15 sec buffer so when you realise this is an important part and tap ‘Rec’ it starts recording from 15 sec previously. Recording app designed to assist people who already take reasonably good paper notes!
Audio Notetaker - Subscription based app - sync lecture audio and slides.
Brilliant Notetaking desktop/iPad app which helps you audio record lectures, highlight different topics with colour, and sync with presentation slides later + add your own notes and annotations. Expensive as apps go (approx. $85 a year) but worth it for those who struggle with note-taking).
Office Lens - Turn your smart phone into a scanner!
Office Lens uses the camera on your phone to scan documents and allows you to save to your cloud storage accounts e.g. Evernote or share via email. Great for grabbing stuff for your projects from the library.
Trello - web based task management app.
Trello is a brilliant task managent app with 'to do' lists, reminders, task completion status and several other project planning functions. The shared workflow features make it particularly great for group work.
Glide - video messaging app - great for sign language users.
Glide is like any other messaging app (viber, what's app etc.) except it's geared towards easy video messaging, which makes it a great alternative for deaf students communicating with other sign language users.
CloudCal - See your schedule in colour coded circles!
Great visual, colour based scheduling app – can for example set a colour for lectures, another for study, another for project work and see your schedule visually. Add tasks and notes too!
For more interesting apps, search 'Appwatch @aheadireland' on twitter.
