Essential Apps for Next Semester, Part 1

In the past, we’ve looked at some of the go-to tools and techniques that college students should embrace to make sure they kick the school year off on the right foot. But with a “digital revolution” within academia changing how students gather information – and even reshaping the contemporary college classroom – there are a bevy of new apps now available geared toward addressing challenges facing the modern undergrad.

Anki App for Digital Flashcards

For instance, flashcards have traditionally been considered the gold-standard for memorization techniques among college students cramming before a big exam. Even though there’s an entire world of answers and information to be accessed on a freshman’s smartphone, memorizing key facts and figures is still key to passing a final without the aid of Google search.

Enter Anki, which is a desktop, Android and iOS app that allows users to create digital flashcards employing “Spaced Repetition” techniques to make facts easier to remember than when they’re simply scribbled onto index cards. Using text, photos, audio or video, you can create your digital flash cards and prime specific tricky answers to reappear right when you’re about to forget them. Aside from helping you save time creating cards, it helps keep the facts that you have down pat separate from the ones that require additional review, all from your smartphone. This keeps you better organized and even allows you to do studying on the way to and from class.

Cite This For Me for Accurate Referencing

As evidenced by Anki bringing flashcards into the digital realm, paper plays a much smaller role on campuses today. That isn’t to say that reports – from monthly term papers to entire undergrad thesis statements – aren’t still required to adhere by the same style rules professors have embraced religiously for generations.

As a result, a reference section and proper citations throughout any assignment remains that quirky little detail that so often shaves crucial points off of otherwise A-Grade written works. Cite This For Me, however, is an easy app that helps create correct references in more than 7,000 academic styles. You can create projects, annotate web pages and add quotes from books and journals using this app, taking care of one of the biggest pain points with conducting a research paper. You can even scan book and journal barcodes with your phone to have them automatically added to your bibliography in the style your professor prefers.

Of course, all the apps in the world won’t be any help if you don’t have a tool like LINK that can help keep your entire digital world at hand and organized in one pocket-sized package.

Learn more about how this storage and connectivity solution is the perfect school for college students and anyone looking to manage their digital clutter.