The Apps You Need for the Upcoming Remote Semester

In our last post, we discussed the top 5 types of apps students should have before the new school year starts.

While it was a great overview of the types of apps that will help you manage your courses online, we wanted to provide you with our own personal recommendations of the specific products and services that will serve students well this September.

If you're headed back to class remotely this fall, you are likely preparing for a whole new world of virtual learning.

While online learning allows you to stay home and stay healthy, it also may present some challenges you aren't used to facing.

Suddenly having to learn from your kitchen table instead of in a room full of your peers can make communication, studying, and asking questions even harder than it already was.

Not to worry! With this syllabus of apps, you'll have access to a solid lineup of tools and resources to help you manage the upcoming online school year.

Best Fiends

Best Fiends is the mobile phone game you've probably heard of before, but if you haven't now is definitely the time! With a series of puzzles and memory games, this is a fun something that can fill up an awkwardly placed 30 minutes between classes. Playing a game that improves learning skills, like memory and recall, can allow you to take a moment for yourself while also keeping you sharp for your next class.

Download Best Fiends here.

Notion

Notion is the note-taking app you have always needed but never had. It's available through your browser, or as an app on mobile phones and laptops.  This accessibility is great because no matter where you are, you'll always have your notes available for impromptu study sessions. It also has incredible organizational capacity, which means you can store literally everything from all of your classes in it and it will still look like the latest edition of a well-organized encyclopedia. Notion allows for multiple editors to access documents and make changes at the same time, which lets you to collaborate with other students on note-taking duties, cutting your work at least in half (if not less!)

Download Notion here.

Vocalmatic

Vocalmatic is everything you never knew you needed for learning, whether that learning is remote or not. This is a software that exists to help people working with audio recordings save time transcribing their audio and video into text. If you've ever thought to yourself, "Gee, I wish I didn't have to spend so much time writing things down. I wish a machine could do it for me!" then pump those breaks immediately and pull up over here for a minute, because I'm about to change your life.

Using machine-transcribed audio can save you all the time it's ever taken you to write anything down. Whether you're taking notes in a lecture, writing out research, or actually spending time manually transcribing audio files, using Vocalmatic allows you to easily do all of these things in way less time. It is also available in 110+ Languages and Variants which makes translating an absolute breeze!

Get started with Vocalmatic for free here.

Slack

Depending on your school, we may be getting detention for this particular recommendation. Some schools or courses have specific communication apps that are determined by the institution you're attending, so you may not get much of a say in which one you're using. However, if you do have the choice, Slack is guaranteed to be your best one! Create channels for each of your classes, share documents, set reminders, and even integrate with other apps to explore the endless capabilities that Slack offers.

Get started with Slack here.

Calm

Using a meditation app is something that every student should consider going into a new school year, but especially this one! Handling the stress that comes with remote learning is a lot to take on, and Calm can help you curb it. The best part about Calm is that it's free! This is a huge plus for students on a budget, and is a great cost-conscious way to look after your mental health (the most priceless of your possessions!)

Try Calm for free here.

Anyone who has ever been a student knows how hard the workload alone can be. Adding the challenges of online learning to a regular semester makes it all the more daunting. But by using the apps we've listed here, you'll be prepared to handle anything the upcoming remote semester throws at you! ...even if it's, you know, throwing it virtually.