Top apps, tools and websites for students
Posted by Anne Witton on Friday, September 7, 2018 Under: Resources
As I’ve gone back to studying, I’ve found some useful tools to help. As this new academic year kicks off, I thought it would be useful to share my favourites:
- Reference manager - Zotero (free). Zotero is a brilliant way of organising all your sources including books, papers, presentations, journal articles, videos, podcasts and more. It’s really easy to generate bibliographies from your source material and use tagging to organise and sort your material efficiently. It really is an excellent, powerful tool. (Alternatives are Mendeley and Quiqqa)
- PDF annotation - neu.Annotate PDF (£3.99). I use neu.Annotate on my iPad so that I can read and annotate material for my Master's on the go. Documents can be marked up in lots of ways including highlights, underlines, text annotations, stamps, photos and loads more. Documents can be exported with annotations and the app can sync to cloud storage like Dropbox.
Skim (free). This is a free, Mac-only PDF reader and annotating program. It is particularly good for bookmarking quotes and typing notes as you read which can be exported separately from the PDF. - Lecture note capture - Soundnote (£4.99). This is a simple but brilliant app that enables you to record a lecture at the same time as typing / writing notes and even drawing diagrams. The clever part is that the note-taking syncs with the audio so you can always track your place.
- Thought and project organiser - Cloud Outliner (99p). There are lots of ways you could use this powerful tool to organise notes, tasks, lists and projects. I find it helpful to structure writing assignments and essays so that I can work on manageable sections whilst not losing sight of the overall structure. Offers secure sync to iCloud and Evernote and export to a range of formats including PDF. (A decent alternative is Outliner.)
- Case converter - Convert Case (free). If you’ve accidentally left Caps Lock on or if a journal title has appeared in all capitals in your references, you can quickly and easily convert the case with this handy tool. It also features a character count and word count.
- Plain text editor - EditPad (free). If you want to quickly make a note of something or if you want to strip the formatting out of some copied text before pasting it into another document, this is a brilliant tool. I use it all the time as it’s so simple and effective.
- Academic search - Google Scholar (free) and Google books (free). Google need no introduction, but the academic search is a great way to find journal articles in particular. Google Books sometimes has the full text of books and I’ve found that many Bible commentaries have big chunks that are freely accessible. It’s also good for checking bibliographical information for referencing.
- Bible study tools - I have written a previous blog post on specific Bible study tools which Christian researchers may find helpful.
I hope you enjoy using these tools and that you find them helpful in your own studies. As a bonus, here’s a huge list of tools for researchers, courtesy of connectedresearchers.com.
In : Resources
Tags: study student tools app software
