Must-have apps for your exam period

Concentrating during study hall is not an easy task and all of us, at one time or another, have run out of time by not properly organizing ourselves, getting too distracted, or abusing the phrase “I’ll do it tomorrow”. But the exam period is inexorably approaching and the stress of working against the clock is not much help. If you’re having a hard time hitting the books, these apps will help you plan your time better during the exam period.

Avoid distractions

A very generalized modern problem that might keep you from concentrating is that you can’t stop constantly checking your social networks. If you’re one of those who spends hours updating your Facebook timeline and wasting too much time checking for new gossip, Facebook Nanny might be the app for you: this Google Chrome extension only lets you log on to Facebook when you receive a notification; the rest of the time it will display a message that will remind you to get back to work every time you try to go to the site.

Also, when you get a notification, you can’t dawdle around thereafter checking your feed: Facebook Nanny deactivates itself for only a set amount of time before it reappears and blocks your access. This extension can be disabled at any time, but you have to have at least a little willpower, don’t you?

Another truly useful and less permissive tool is SelfControl, a free app for Mac and Ubuntu OS that blocks particular websites for the amount of time that you specify in advance. But unlike the previous app, once you’ve set the page blocks they will be totally inaccessible, even if you erase the app in a moment of weakness. Say goodbye to your distractions.

Get organized

Having a proper academic diary is a must, and allows you to organize your hours every day to help you get the best results in each subject. Schedule Deluxe is a free Android app that will help you manage your time during a course. Its features will display your class schedule, subjects, the professors who team them, exam dates, and even the credits you earn.

This academic calendar will share all the info you need so you can have a global view of everything you need to do and when. In the Schedule Deluxe agenda you can even note down which days and how many hours you plan to study for each subject.

A similar program for iPhone users is inClass, another tool that works like an electronic agenda for you to register your class schedule and exam dates. If you’re using inClass on an iPad its options are practically the same, except that you can also use it to comfortably take notes, adding both text and voice recordings or images. In addition, if your notes are perfect you can share them with your friends via Facebook or email.

The definitive alarm clock

Unquestionably, the biggest challenge in getting started with an intensive, marathon study day is getting out of bed. If you’re one of those that hits snooze every five minutes all morning long or switches the alarm off in your sleep, Alarmy is your solution: it won’t stop beeping until you wake up a take a photo of a particular place, thus forcing you to leave your bed.

When this app’s alarm goes off at the time you’ve set, it can only be switched off when you’ve taken a photo of a household fixture that you’ve saved previously. The trick lies in setting the fixture as something outside your room to forestall the temptation of taking the photo from in bed and then falling back to sleep.

Test yourself

It’s true that we’re spending more and more time connected, but that doesn’t have to be a problem if you know how to take advantage of the wonders of the Internet. Examtime is an online platform where, among many other features, users can create exams for all kinds of exams to test their knowledge and share them with their classmates. The multiple-choice questions can have one or several correct answers or be true/false. You can also add a time limit to answer them and configure them to appear randomly. The test-taker’s resulting score will depend on the value that you wish to give each question. Good luck!

Do you speak Spanish?

If your subject of study is languages, you might recall our recent post on Duolingo, a smartphone and tablets tool that will help you practice with vocabulary and exercises—adapted to your level—to study more dynamically and improve your fluidity. Forget staring at vocabulary lists for hours and hours. This system offers 15 different languages so you can brush up on your second language, whatever it is. You can also download it for both iOS and Android or log on from the app’s webpage.

Content presentation

Your final grade likely takes more into account than just your exam scores, probably also includes your project marks and practice assignments. Flip PDF is a utility that offers a simple way to give a new and original look to your projects and will help you get higher grades with its attention-grabbing and elaborate presentation tool.

When you’ve finished creating your project content you can convert the PDF documents into a digital magazine whose pages will flip like a real mag. The way it works is as simple as importing the text files and letting Flip PDF automatically mock up the document and add animations. The result can be viewed with or without an Internet connection, sent by email, or saved on a USB memory stick or CD.

Have you studied enough?

Study Checker is another free Android app that will tell you if you’ve studied enough or spent too much time messing around in the library. This tool will run detailed statistics on the hours you’ve dedicated to exam prep and to resting from your travails twwith chitchat, mapping your academic productivity trends.

In Study Checker you can note down the time blocks you’ve spent studying each subject and how long you’ve let you’re coffee breaks stretch on. Depending on the result, the program will verify if you’ve studied well or not.

On the other hand, if what you’re looking for are programs that will help you improve a particular subject, this article will introduce you to four programs to boost your math skills.