Welcome to the 2015-2016 school year!

As your new students settle back into the routine of school, you’ll be taking the time to get to know them: their strengths, their weaknesses, and most importantly, their habits. Helping an entire group of students you’ve just met navigate the new year can be daunting at best—and the demand can seem impossible if the students you receive have not learned smart study skills, or don’t know how to manage their time when working on a project. Fortunately, the technology in their pocket can become an asset when teaching kids who may or may not be entering your class with the best educational habits.

Having a list of apps students can use to help them improve their habits can make the difference between a successful and a struggling year. Here are a few apps you might want to remember when thinking of your students’ habits:

Flashcard Applications
Flashcards can be a strong student tool for topics that require the memorization of vocabulary, formulas, or other rote material. As a result, one of the very first things we’d recommend for teachers who have a lot of vocabulary or formulas in their curriculum is to encourage their students to use an app like Quizlet or Studyblue to help them remember important content.

The best part of both of these apps is that they’re customizable to your curriculum. For example, teachers can create classes within the Quizlet web platform, then invite students into their class. From there, students can be assigned decks of flashcards that the teachers can make based on their own content. Within Studyblue, students can join classes linked to your school or create your own decks of flashcards for you to use. (Some schools may hide their decks under price tags, but you can create your own for free.)

Both Quizlet and Studyblue are available as a web platform, and through iOS and Android applications.

Voice Recorder Applications
Differentiation can be a complex task for teachers; on top of working with IEPs and students of varying levels of ability, the task also includes adjusting for students who just require a different approach when delivering content. Apps that record voices, such as Super Notes and Smart Voice Recorder for Android, won’t fill the gap entirely, but can be useful for auditory learners or students who need things repeated more than once. Turning on the recording application at the beginning of class will put parts of the lesson at a students’ fingertips, even long after the bell has rung for the day.

To-Do Lists
Sometimes all a student needs to get stuff done is to write down what exactly needs to be done. To-do lists like Todoist and Trello can be a huge asset for this kind of thing—these apps allow you to quickly write down tasks, then view them from any device while you’re working. We’ve already written a full blog post about the ins and outs of Trello, which also provides other ways to use such platform, and the same applies to other digital to-do lists. Todoist also includes a Chrome add-on, allowing students to manage their lists without even having to navigate away from their webpage for the day.

Pomodoro Timer
This application can be a lifeline for students who struggle with managing their time and staying productive. Based on the Pomodoro Technique, the app’s timer automatically sets up four periods of 25 minutes, broken up by 5-minute breaks and concluded by a larger 15-30-minute break. Many people already find the technique helpful in shutting out external distractions, maintaining focus, and becoming more productive during their work periods. For a student struggling with attention difficulties, the breaks can be an outlet that help them focus when trying to perform tasks like homework, writing, or just paying attention in class. While this exact version of the app is only available on iOS, similar ones are also downloadable for free on Android devices.

How your students use these apps can be customized to your own classroom—either by recommending them to one or two students as a form of differentiation, or getting every student in the room to install it as a necessary part of your class structure. You can also use them as a teacher to help with your own habits. Here at Teq, we especially love using Trello to help keep our curriculum, assignment grading, and webinar schedules organized. I also love using the Pomodoro Timer to help me focus and figure out when I need to switch tasks!