5 Tools Every College Student Should Be Using

When we’re attending college it’s always good to know a few tips and tricks to help you study or save time writing essays and solving equations. Thankfully, it’s now the 21st century and we have the internet which saves us the hassle and time spent making notes, editing, going to the library to research, and reading hundreds of academic journals and articles to find out the information we’re looking for.

Here are the 5 online tools every college students should be using to get the best out of their study sessions:

Google Drive

Google Drive is a cloud-based storage and syncing service that allows you to upload, access, and share documents with others in your network. It’s something a college student should use on a daily basis to create, edit, store, and collaborate on documents for their studies. Multiple users can view and edit documents at the same time, or leave editorial notes, making it the perfect tool for group projects and feedback from your peers.

It also reduces the amount of time it takes to save documents to a USB or to email them to the people who need them. And the best thing about Google Drive is it’s all free!

Cold Turkey

We all know the problem of when you’re at home or in a coffee shop trying to study or get yourself into the headspace to write an excruciating essay that’s due tomorrow at midnight, and notifications from the apps on your phone and laptop keep popping up and distracting you with cute pictures of cats or shocking political news. Cold Turkey is here to solve this problem when your willpower just isn’t cutting it.

Depending on your study strategy, you can use Cold Turkey for free to lock or block notifications and access to websites for a specified time window or until you’ve typed in a certain amount of random text. It will help you pay attention to what you’re supposed to be working on and help you focus for the periods of time specified by you.

Scribd

Once you’ve opened your blank Google Drive document and blocked out distractions with Cold Turkey, it’s time to do some research. Scribd is an online library that contains thousands of journals, articles, books, eBooks, novels, and just about anything else you can read or write.

You can forget about the old study habits of going to the library for hours upon hours and trying to pinpoint the exact quote you’re going to need for your research. Scribd makes it easy to search through their database to find exactly what you’re searching for. They even act as a publishing house, if you feel that your essay is so great that the world deserves to read it.

Chegg

Once you’ve researched your work, it’s time to make some notes and get writing. Chegg helps students with various methods of studying to create flashcards to remember their notes and retain information, solve mathematical equations or practice problems, and guide you through writing your essay.

Some great features of Chegg are the citation tool, which helps students to automatically create a bibliography in the style needed by the college, and the anti-plagiarism tool that watches out for those paragraphs that you think you’ve paraphrased, but haven’t quite nailed. Chegg will recognize any plagiarized phrases and flag them for your attention.

UniDays

Studying at college is much different from studying in high school, not only because the expectations and workload are huge in comparison, but you also have to support yourself financially during your time studying at college. Many colleges will help students to find their learning strategies and improve their study skills to help them gain the most out of their programs, but that won’t help with finances.
For more information about how to make your time at college easier, visit the ABM College Blog, and if you’re wondering why choosing to study at college might be the best choice for you, read our Reasons to Take a College Program blog.

Last updated January 2021