October has officially begun. Motivation from the start of the school year is wearing thin, the days are getting shorter, and everyone’s to-do lists are getting longer. While the beginning of autumn usually means productivity starts disappearing at the same rate as sunny weather, I believe it is the best season for cracking down on school work. But, when it’s time to “lock in”, it is often difficult to get a proper system going. With OneNote, Teams, Word, and Google Docs all vying for attention when it comes to organising your school work, it’s impossible to know where or when to start. In this article I will break down some of the most underrated apps and websites for studying and keeping organised. Read on to see your productivity levels skyrocket! (Terms and conditions apply: please note reading this article does not guarantee higher test scores)
1– Knowt https://knowt.com/home Knowt is a website too often gatekept. With Quizlet becoming even more greedy each year, charging £7.99 to study flashcards created by the community for free, flashcards are soon to become a long-lost study technique. If you are someone who loves a bit of spaced repetition and Quizlet’s Learn mode, you will be delighted to know that a completely free alternative does exist: Knowt. Knowt is marketed as Quizlet but better, even offering a Chrome extension that automatically turns past Quizlets into Knowts. This makes adapting your study technique from Quizlet to Knowt totally seamless. If you are studying a language, Knowt is a must-have. I would even go so far as to say that the user interface is more aesthetically pleasing than Quizlet. How the website’s name is pronounced is still unknown among the WHS community…
2– Vidstudy https://vidstudy.com//app.phpVidstudy is a website I found through Reddit. Although this doesn’t sound like a recipe for success – finding a website to reduce procrastination while actually procrastinating – it has changed the game for me. Vidstudy allows you to add all your subjects, and then you can use Pomodoro timers or stopwatches to track your studying. This really helps if you like logging how many hours of studying you do but don’t want to use an app on your phone, as it is a website. It makes me feel very accomplished when I can look at the ‘This month’ view and see how many hours I have logged. It is also useful for holding yourself accountable, as you can see how many hours of each subject you have done, making it easy to see if you are staying on track.
3– OneNote https://onenote.cloud.microsoft/ I know you are probably reading this and wondering why on Earth OneNote is on this list. It is hardly a niche source. If you think of OneNote as just an app you use during lessons, you are using it all wrong. Open OneNote and create a new notebook. Name it whatever you want. You can now make sections and put monthly goals, to-do lists, and brainstorms on here. Most importantly, it is the best app to make a study timetable. Instead of trying to work out how Excel functions, you can simply create a OneNote table. It is the most straightforward way to do things. For GCSE mocks and study leave, I made a table for each week to know which revision I was doing, same with my Year 12 exams. This year in Year 13 I have begun making a weekly timetable on OneNote and adding slots for when I need to do each piece of homework. Granted, you could do this on Outlook too, by adding Events, but I personally prefer how much more organised and clean OneNote feels. If you are feeling skeptical, fair enough. It isn’t the most instinctive way of organising yourself, but I personally am a huge advocate for the humble manually-typed-out OneNote table.
Hopefully these three simple tricks can help you up your game academically. Half-term is looming ever closer, so try and make the most of the next two weeks and implement some of these techniques if they work for you! The autumn term is a perfrect time to experiment with your studying so that by the summer you have all your strategies down pat.
