5 apps that make being a student easier

Being a student can be a tricky affair. In university, no one really cares whether you take your work seriously. You’ll find yourself on a slippery slope: missing lectures, procrastinating, and neglecting note-taking and hygiene.

So here’s a list of five apps that can make your academic life easier, in addition to having a menacing alarm.

1. Google Drive
Google Drive is essential when it comes to work. It allows you to create word documents, PowerPoints, and spreadsheets, and houses everything in one place – all you need to do is log into Google.

Drive can also act as convenient storage for sizable files of all kinds, which can then be shared to other Drive users.

While everyone raves about Evernote, the shrewd will instead exploit this exceptionally useful service, which is available across all platforms and is absolutely free.

2. Hootsuite
Like all sociable students, you no doubt have a number of social media accounts. Hootsuite allows you to keep track track of a few of them in one place.

Basically, you fill columns in a purely functional screen with content from the social network – handily allowing you to choose exactly what stream of content you want to see.

It isn’t particularly colourful or exciting, but Hootsuite, importantly, allows you easily check social media trends, and keep columns for key words, phrases or topics, which could prove very useful when researching.

It allows for Twitter, Facebook, Google+ +, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and even WordPress. It also runs on all devices and, while there is a premium version, the standard one is far from limited.

3. Kindle
All of your readings should be done on the Kindle app. Apart from its range of books and textbooks – which are cheaper than retail – Kindle’s interface allows for easy reading of PDF files and the like.

The highlighting and underlining tools work responsively on touchscreen, and there is the ability to find definitions of words. Kindle is across platforms, but is probably best on tablet.
There is also a cloud service for storing documents. And talking of the cloud…

4. Dropbox
Probably the most obvious one for anyone that has precious MS word documents. Dropbox can be a very useful application, since it is easy to use and allows for seamless transitions between devices, as well as sharing between users.

The downfall with Dropbox, however, is that it comes with a pretty low 2GB storage space for free users. If you really don’t need to hold on to big files, then Google Drive is the way to go.

Oh and while we’re at it, Dropbox can be used to get things on to stubborn Apple devices. Upload content to Dropbox that the iDevice refuses to take through iTunes, and simply download it using the Dropbox app on the iDevice, selecting the appropriate app to launch the content.

5. Chrome Extensions
We are assuming here that you are intelligent and use Google Chrome as your main browser. You do, right? Good!

Among the plethora of amazing Google Chrome extensions, Awesome Screenshot can be used snap any segment of a webpage and save it to your desktop. This can comes into great use when wanting to represent something visual from the internet, and not wanting to grapple with Print Screen, or not being able to embed.

Delicious is another great chrome extension (and app). It allows you to bookmark links and add tags to them, making it easy to store links in a systematic way.
You’ve no doubt heard of AdBlock, which is not specifically helpful to students, but it is the most effective free application out there – if of course you ignore the creator’s plea for donations like the rest of us.