Today there are a lot of demands placed on students. Most of us aren’t just trying to get high grades, but also hold down jobs and find other ways that we can compete in the marketplace. After all, a degree is rarely enough. That’s all very stressful. Fortunately, it’s not all bad news as our recent spate of advances in our understanding of the brain as well as teaching algorithms has made it far easier for students to learn – particularly if we’ve got the right tools at our disposal.

So what are the right tools? That’s what we’re going to spend the rest of the article on.

Voki Presenter and Voki Classroom

Voki Presenter allows teachers and students to create a custom lesson with a personalized character. The Voki Classroom tool helps make managing classroom work even easier! With this software, you can manage the classroom Vokis, create personal profiles for each students, track grades and homeworks, review assignments online, and simplify other processes. No matter, if you are a private tutor or a school/college teacher, this software will definitely make teaching creativity easier to do.

Cold Turkey

The first thing that you should definitely consider in this age of distraction is Cold Turkey. No, they won’t love you for using it – but their grades will. You see, the program makes sure that certain websites are no longer accessible for your students. In this way, they won’t try to divide their attention between what they’re supposed to be doing and what they want to do.

So, block social media, Netflix and whatever other website they’ve recently decided is more fun than actually doing their work. From there, you’ll find it that much more likely they’ll actually get on with the project that’s actually due instead of trying to prove that multitasking isn’t actually bad for them.

Tinycards

The index card is not dead. Instead, it has gone online and it’s called Tinycard. This is a great tool to make sure students don’t just recognize knowledge but actually memorize it. In this way, they’ll have it at their disposal when tests and exams roll around.

The program allows you to go through subjects they’ve selected or make your own. In this way, students can learn about a whole range of subjects.

A good idea is to make sure students look back to sets of flash cards they haven’t looked at for a few months. In this way they’re far more likely to make what they’ve learned stick for the long run.

Bibme

One of the hardest things to get right for most students is how to correctly site what they’ve read in the articles they’re writing. This can often get them in a host of trouble.

So why not just use a program to do it for them? Bibme is a great citation tool that installs right on your computer. Of course there are citation generators that help students which you don’t need to install – which are great if you’re not working on your own computer.

The advantage of having something like bibme installed, however, is that you can also use it to keep track of the articles and books you’ve read. In that way, they form a library so you can find back what you’ve read a few months or years ago.

Alcamy

Described as part Wikipedia and part reddit, the idea of Alcamy is that rather than just absorbing information passively you instead become involved. You can submit material yourself or you can just set up an alert when somebody adds new information to the topic that you’re following.

In this way, your information can continue to expand and you can stay up to date with that is new to you and new to the world of science.

The data is presented in bite-sized chunks so that students can learn without needing to invest huge amounts of time. In this way, they can expand their knowledge about a lot of topics without having to put in a lot of effort.

Py

A great app for people that are on the move a lot and want to use the time they’ve got to learn about new things. The great thing is that you get a real sense of progress on this app as Py gives you a visual representation of what you’re learning and how far you’ve progressed.

These small gamification aspects can make a world of difference to people that might otherwise not easily be motivated to take part.

Last, but not least

These are great tools to quickly improve your knowledge in certain areas or to help you study. Do note, they all have a slight learning curve so generally it’s a good idea to get started with one and only pick up the next one when you’ve got that learned.

Otherwise it can be quite overwhelming.

Chris Mercer is a pro writer, developer and founder of Citatior, a powerful academic formatting tool for the students.