App Ed Review
By: Katrina McKinnon (January 30, 2020)
If your students have a little trouble adjusting in class after the festive season, you can help them get their groove back quickly.
Like freelancers, students often suffer from bouts of unproductivity and unbridled procrastination.
We have come up with four great productivity tools used by freelancers that can help your students to stay focused, boost productivity, and improve the quality of their work.
These apps and tools have a wide application beyond the classroom and can help you, the teacher, streamline your teaching process and become more productive as well.
Evernote
Going by the tag line, ‘Meet Evernote, your second brain,’ this app is a godsend for students struggling with essay assignments.
Evernote is a great asset for planning and researching an essay.
Students can use the app’s web clipper to grab useful information during their online research.
They can also use Evernote to jot down quick notes during class or discussions.
They can gather scanned documents, presentations, research papers, and store them alongside their notes.
In addition to going paperless, having their research and notes in one place can help your students stay organized and turn in their essays on time while acing the class.
Grammarly Spellchecker
Grammarly understands going through a stack of class assignments riddled with typos, dangling modifiers, subject-verb agreement mistakes, and punctuation errors can be frustrating.
Have your students pass their assignments through Grammarly lets you breeze through the paper grading sessions.
The app lets students turn in exemplary assignments in addition to improving their grammatical command.
It’ll point out common grammatical errors that include run-on sentences, missing commas, vague reference, wrong word usage, and more.
Gradually, your students will pick up on these errors and help them improve their writing styles and resultant grades as well.
The app offers a free plan in addition to paid individual and institution plans.
Forest App
Forest app understands that students have a strange attachment to their phones.
The constant need to check their phones ruins their ability to stay focused, and their academic performance suffers for it.
The app employs a fun and unique not to mention practical method to entice users to stay focused on critical tasks.
The app lets the students block phone access for a set period so they can focus on a specific task.
Once a user achieves the productivity goal, the company behind the app plants a real tree.
The tangible, real-life rewards attached to the app can motivate your students to stay focused for longer.
It makes for a fun and exciting way to improve their school performance while making the world a better place.
So far, forest app users have created a forest with almost 300,000 trees.
Imagination Prompt
Students have an incredible power of imagination, but sometimes this power needs a little nudge in the right direction.
That’s where Imagination Prompt comes in.
The app is on a mission to help students fire up their imagination, especially when nurturing their fledgling writing skills.
The app fires off a series of story starters to kick off the writing process.
Each click of the button triggers a different prompt to get the creative juices flowing.
Imagination Prompt also offers a guided writing challenge, which is an incredible way for students to improve their writing skills.
The app is available free of charge to all users.
There are a myriad of tools and apps that can help your students to become world-class learners inside and outside the classroom. Here’s a detailed review of some of the top apps geared to helping people become more productive and focused.
