Now that the new term is upon us, it’s finally time to face up to the fact that the holiday routines we’ve developed over the summer need to be packed up and put away for another year. Out go the lie-ins, lazy days and late nights, and in comes homework, homework and more homework.
Adapting to the new term and the return to school can always be a bit of a drag, even if you see yourself as a particularly motivated student who is looking to make the most of the new term. Thankfully, there’s no need to feel like you’re just being thrown in at the deep end. Because there are tons of apps out there that can help you dive right into the new term and develop effective study habits and keep on top of your workload right from day one. Here are some of our favourites.
Undoubtedly one of the toughest things about the new term is getting back into the rhythm of doing homework. The problem isn’t that you’re lazy or demotivated, but instead that you’ve had close to two months of not having to do any homework at all and so are out of the habit of planning your time effectively. So what you need is a little nudge to help you stay organised.
MyHomework Student Planner is just the app to help you do this. It contains all the tools you need to track the homework you have to do and schedule when you’re going to do it, and it even lets you set reminders to make sure you don’t let any assignments slip through the cracks.
The new term offers a great opportunity to develop more effective study habits that will help you both improve your grades and find the day-to-day demands of school work easier to handle. The problems with developing habits, though, is that you can’t just click your fingers and adopt them perfectly. You need to set yourself goals and monitor your progress.
This is the idea behind Habit Streak. It’s a great app that makes you set your goals and then expects you to keep it updated with how many of them you’re achieving each day. It stores your progress and lets you see exactly how well you’re doing.
Vocabulary-learning apps
One of the most onerous challenges of studying a language is that you constantly need to keep on top of vocabulary. This isn’t just a question of learning new words, but also making sure that familiar ones stay remembered and on the tip of your tongue. If you can develop good vocabulary-learning habits, however, you’ll be rewarded with fantastic grades.
With “little and often” being the best way to approach vocabulary learning, it’s a skill that was practically designed to be mastered through apps, which are the ultimate vehicle for doing things in small doses. And there are hundreds of vocabulary-learning apps out there. Some are specific to a particular language, while others cover dozens of them; and some of them let you add in new vocab, while others focus on helping you revise what you’ve already learnt. Just have a look on your device’s app store and have an experiment to find the app that works best for your language and way of learning!