In the middle of 2024, it is difficult to understand every component of our life without uniting it with some format or complement from the digital world. Understood almost as another limb of our body, cell phones and computers accompany us in practically all our daily tasks. For this reason, new applications and functions are developed daily to facilitate our daily lives in a variety of areas.
The technological revolution has also reached the world of studies. The use of encyclopedias, dictionaries divided into different volumes and large manuals and textbooks seems increasingly obsolete. Academic systems also adjust to digital; use of presentations in class, digital books, tablets, multimedia exercises…
At the same time, criticism and studies emerge on the increase in distractions for studying (generally, among young people) due to the use, proximity and availability of mobile phones and everything they provide. And it is true that maintaining concentration while using your technological devices to study can sometimes become a challenge for your abilities.
Therefore, in this article, we will focus on generating an open approach to the use of electronic and digital devices for studies. It is important to consider all the possibilities and facilities that these open up and generate, and that is why we propose ten applications that can be very useful for studying.
1. Forest
We begin this classification with the application for study and concentration par excellence. Forest appears on every list of apps to study, and its success is mainly due to its simplicity and functionality. This app offers you the possibility of planting trees until you generate entire forests, using your study time as fertilizer.
On its main page, you select the time you want to maintain focus and concentration. Additionally, you can schedule breaks once this countdown is over. As soon as this timer starts, a digital tree will begin to be planted, which will grow more or less depending on the time you have programmed. What facilitates concentration, in addition to the motivation to see your forest grow, is that if you use your cell phone for any function once the planting begins, the newly planted tree will die and you will have to start over.
This second app moves away from the functionality for concentration and attention of the previous one, and focuses mainly on generating more fun, creative and specific ways to organize our notes and study materials. Through this app, we have the opportunity to digitize all our materials, so it is super useful if you are in the habit of taking notes directly on top of your teachers’ presentations or using a Tablet. Thus, you can underline your texts, include images or notes in the margins and even generate complete notebooks for all your subjects.
This application facilitates complete immersion in the digital world applied to studies, avoiding you having to spend paper (and money) on printing your notes and being able to do so directly on your computer, tablet or device. The disadvantage of this is the use of screens and the temptation that this represents when studying and concentrating.
3. My Study Life
My Study Life is presented as the comprehensive application for student organization. Using this tool, any student can organize their school year, their daily tasks, future deliveries, projects to finish, exams…
And My Study Life focuses mainly on scheduling; in keeping your schedules and deadlines up to date and helping you have a more comprehensive vision of your school year. It is true that this application only has an English version, it has not yet been translated into Spanish. However, the simplicity of its design and structure makes it very easy to understand its functionality and gives the opportunity to adjust your needs to its functions.
4.Canvas
Canva has emerged in recent years as the best platform for text editing, presentations and posters. Gone are those Powerpoints without colors or life of their own; Canva offers an incredible and endless variety of templates to build visual outlines and slides that make it easier for you to understand, organize and present information. We recommend using Canva to improve your notes. Do not forget that the quality of the material you study and its aesthetic and visual component are very important to maintain attention and generate, even a little, dopamine.
Similar to the first app presented, Forest, Focus to do is an application focused on concentration. Specifically, its main usefulness focuses on establishing specific times to do Pomodoros. The Pomodoro technique is based on maintaining attention on a task for fixed intervals of time, usually 25 minutes of work with 5 minutes of rest between tasks. This app makes it easy to establish these time intervals, and sets alarms to adapt our study routines to the times we establish. We recommend using it with your phone in airplane mode to avoid temptations.
6. Kahoot
In recent years, Kahoot has entered the classrooms of schools, institutes and academic centers with force due to its great novel component for study and the rewarding gamification of its functionality. This platform has been widely used to generate games and exercises between students so that the study takes the form of a game similar to a television contest.
Basically, this app allows you to generate questions with multiple answers, accompanied by an animated format, with specific times to answer the questions and that motivates the competition for the fastest answer. Although its use has spread in classrooms as a group activity, Kahoot can also be used in your own studies. You can build a Kahoot to analyze the information you study, and above all to prepare for a multiple choice exam.
7. Quizlet
Similar to Kahoot, Quizlet encourages the gamification of study by encouraging the gamification of these processes. Gamification is basically defined by turning these processes into fun games and activities. Thus, Quizlet generates study tools and strategies through learning cards, learning games and assessments. These learning cards are very useful to help memorize and learn concepts. In addition, it is a collaborative app, which means that you can generate worksheets and share them with your friends and colleagues, or search for tools already generated on your same study materials.
8. Evernote
Similar to Goodnotes, Evernote allows you to digitize your study materials and play with your notes to completely adjust them to your study needs and tastes. Using this tool, you have the opportunity to generate notes and attach them directly to documents; as if you pasted a post-it on some printed notes or on a book, but directly in digital form.
In addition, you have the possibility of storing different materials in the cloud; not only text, but also audio and video. So, Goodnotes is presented as a whole shelf of books, documents and materials that would physically take up a lot of space and financial expense, but in this case you only have to make a couple of clicks and you have everything on your screen.
9. MindMeister
MindMeister works in a similar way to Kahoot and Quizlet, promoting the gamification of the study and making this process more attractive as well as interactive. In this case, MindMeister allows the online creation of conceptual and mental maps, which help to clearly establish the main ideas of the material studied.
Mind maps are organizational structures through which you store the relevant information for the study in a staggered or differentiated way. Through different types of lines, color codes, shapes, attaching files or images; MindMeister facilitates the creation of very complete and specific mind maps, which help you in the organization and generation of summaries that facilitate your learning and memorization.
10. Wuolah
Finally, Wuolah, a Spanish platform created by Sevillian students, has grown exponentially in recent years, becoming the go-to place for many students to obtain study materials. This app works as a joint and cooperative online library in which any student can upload a document; Whether they are notes, a paper, an exam model.
Thus, other students of the same course, of the same study discipline or a different one, both from the same and different universities or centers, can access a whole world of shared documents, facilitating the creation of notes and study materials more complete.
Conclusions
In short, it is important to embrace the technological era in which we live and understand that digital applications and platforms do not serve so much as a hindrance to studies, but, on the contrary, generate many advantages that must be understood, attended to and put into practice. . Through different and diverse solutions, new technologies can make our student life easier, simpler and faster, in addition to also helping us generate common and cooperative strategies with other students.
