Best Free Tools & Apps for Students: Get Ready for Back-to-School

Summer never lasts long enough for kids, and it can be a stressful time to get everything in order so that students have new clothes, school supplies, dorm stuff, and…back-to-school apps?

Yes, even the youngest of students can benefit from the wide range of mobile apps that are available today for both smartphones and tablets. We’ve got kids and have found these eight apps useful for each primary, high school, and even college student in the family.

And because it’s pretty much common sense that most students don’t have much of a budget to work with, we focused on apps you can download and use for free (with many offering upgrade options for a small fee).

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Editor’s Choice: The Best Tech Gifts for Back To School

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SwifDoo PDF Perpetual (1 PC) Free upgrade. No monthly fees ever.

Replace Your Traditional School Planner: MyHomework

What We Like

• Good for block scheduling, non-daily classes.
• Assignment notifications.

What We Don’t Like

• Cannot search for specific assignments.
• Limited integration options outside of the Apple family.

Remember when calendar planners were popular at school? Well, now students can take all their homework and schedule planning to the digital world with the myHomework app.

Not only is it incredibly powerful and intuitive to use, but it also features beautiful layouts for both smartphones and tablets. With the free version, students can track their assignments, get due date reminders, receive rewards for completing homework, and more.

For a small upgrade of $4.99, students can enjoy an ad-free app experience while gaining access to more theme options, a file attachment feature, enhanced app widgets, and external calendar access.

Download For:

iOS

Kindle

Mac

Chromebook

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Cite Sources Easily and Fast: EasyBib

What We Like

• Retrieve reference info about books and websites.
• Guides teach how to cite sources independently.

What We Don’t Like

• Free version includes distracting ads.
• Need premium account to create automatic APA citations.

How much do you love writing bibliographies for all your essay assignments? Probably not very much.

EasyBib seeks to take as much pain and suffering out of that task as possible but providing students with a free tool to generation citations. Automatically generate and export your citations from 56 different sources in over 7,000 styles.

Imagine how much time you’ll save!

Visit EasyBib

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Quiz Yourself on Your Knowledge: Quizlet

What We Like

• Resources are available in dozens of languages.
• Includes helpful tools for teachers and parents.

What We Don’t Like

• Study guide templates aren’t ideal for complex subjects.
• Information isn’t fact checked; some guides contain errors.

Similar to StudyBlue, Quizlet is designed to make studying as easy, fun, and effective as possible. You can create your own study materials (flashcards, tests, games) or browse through its vast library of materials created by other users.

For those who struggle with the old-fashioned textbook study strategy, Quizlet proves to be an ideal alternative for the fact that it supercharges the learning experience with both audio and video components.

There’s even an offline study feature that lets students use the app while they’re on the go with no internet connection.

Download For:

iOS

Android

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Perfect Your Spelling and Vocabulary: Dictionary.com

What We Like

• Decent voice search capability.
• Suggests synonyms and antonyms for words.

What We Don’t Like

• Cannot increase the text size.
• Features intrusive video ads.

Essay writing got you down? You’ll probably need a good dictionary and thesaurus to get the job done faster, and lucky for you this app has both rolled into one.

You get access to over two million words and can even use the “Word of the Day” feature to improve your vocabulary. These apps even work offline, so you can rest easy knowing you can look any word up without an Internet connection.

Download For:

iOS

iPadOS

Android

05

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Store All Your Files in One Place: Google Drive

What We Like

• Facilitates painless desktop-to-desktop file syncing.
• Supports hundreds of third-party integrations.

What We Don’t Like

• Less comprehensive than Microsoft 365.
• No way to password-protect individual folders.

Cloud storage is a savior for students, allowing them to share stuff with group members while keeping files updated for access across several devices. And it’s the ultimate solution to avoid losing work in the event of a computer crash.

Everyone uses Google, so Google Drive will keep all your stuff safely tucked away in the cloud for you. In fact, you get 15GB of free storage when you sign up for a Google Drive account, so you’ll get one of the best cloud storage offerings available now for free.

Keep in mind, however, that your Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms, Jamboard files, Google Photos, and Gmail messages all will be competing for that storage.

Download For:

iOS

Android

Desktop

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VSDC Pro Video Editor is a light professional non-linear video editing suite for creating a movie of any complexity. It supports the most popular video/audio formats and codecs, including 4K, HD and GoPro videos. Preconfigured profiles make the creation of videos for various multimedia and mobile devices absolutely hassle-free.

• Import from any devices and cams, including GoPro and drones. All formats supported. Сurrently the only free video editor that allows users to export in a new H265/HEVC codec, something essential for those working with 4K and HD.
• Everything for hassle-free basic editing: cut, crop and merge files, add titles and favorite music
• Visual effects, advanced color correction and trendy Instagram-like filters
• All multimedia processing done from one app: video editing capabilities reinforced by a video converter, a screen capture, a video capture, a disc burner and a YouTube uploader
• Non-linear editing: edit several files with simultaneously
• Easy export to social networks: special profiles for YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Twitter and Instagram
• High quality export – no conversion quality loss, double export speed even of HD files due to hardware acceleration
• Stabilization tool will turn shaky or jittery footage into a more stable video automatically.
• Essential toolset for professional video editing: blending modes, Mask tool, advanced multiple-color Chroma Key

Organize Your Notes and Collaborate With Group Membes: Evernote

What We Like

• Powerful search features.
• Supports fast syncing across multiple devices.

What We Don’t Like

• Limited free features.
• Premium plan may be too expensive for students.

Evernote is one of the most popular productivity tools used today. It’s perfect for busy students that need to organize homework with work and social events.

You can organize all of your notes, sound files, photos, email messages and so much more in a way that can be easily accessed any time you want, from any device.

It has a unique tagging system to help identify everything, which is what makes it such an ideal organization tool. Evernote even lets you collaborate with other Evernote users—making it a natural choice for group projects.

Download For:

iOS

Android

Desktop

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Automate Tasks to Save You Time and Energy: IFTTT

What We Like

• Compatible with many apps and online services.
• Impressive IoT device and voice assistant support.

What We Don’t Like

• No option to create multistep applets.
• Organizational tools are a little lacking.

Once you start using IFTTT, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. Lots of people use it to cross-post the same content on their social channels, but students can create trigger actions for all sorts of other academic and student life purposes.

Get automatic weather updates via email to prepare for that college football game, auto-generate new notes in Evernote from your Speak notes you took in lecture classes, or turn your Google Calendar events into Todoist tasks.

It also offersan additional suite of apps worth checking out for more specific actions.

Download for:

iOS

Android

The 8 Best Learning Apps of 2024

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