20 Great Mobile Apps for Online Students

Students looking for an app that helps with exam preparation and assignment management need the BenchPrep Companion. For online students looking to prepare for graduate school entry tests (GRE, GMAT, LSAT), and other courses, BenchPrep includes innovative games, flashcards, and progress assessment. BenchPrep even analyzes strengths and weaknesses, which helps students focus on enhancing their scores....

Canva is the go-to app for all graphic design needs—from novice to professionals—one can create beautiful designs for presentations, business cards and more. Canva has thousands of free and customizable templates, provides photo-editing, and is perfect to use alongside Pixlr and Google Slides. Students love the simple drag-and-drop functions, and the wide variety of fonts helps create the perfect design to share with anyone.

When writing academic papers, another helpful tool is Copyleaks Plagiarism Checker—a cloud based device that analyzes papers in seconds. This app allows one to upload files (DOC, PDF, RTF) or a scanned photo of the paper. Copyleaks can even check the copy of a website just by inserting the URL, and the results can be easily shared with others.

This is the perfect app for any students who think on the fly and need an efficient way to take notes, set reminders, send messages, emails, and more. Dragon is faster than typing and can save transcriptions for later editing, or Dragon can be used to update social media applications. Dragon supports various languages, and can effectively save students from long hours of typing—students can now just dictate instead..

Students will never need to worry that their citations/reference page is incorrect again. EasyBib: Citation Generator can scan a book’s barcode, or the search function allows one to enter different source titles from websites, newspapers, etc. EasyBib can help students become efficient researchers by creating up-to-date bibliographies, including MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, and thousands of other citation style bibliographies.

More and more online students are using Evernote to help stay organized and collaborate with others. Evernote is a virtual notebook and storage app that allows you to take notes, clip and collect notes (virtual/handwritten), create checklists and reminder notifications, and highlight articles or lecture notes.

While most of the Google Apps are essential for any student or professional, Google Slides takes presentations to a new level. Google Slides is perfect for a team presentation, allowing others to work on the presentation simultaneously. Students can choose from a wide variety of templates and work on and offline. Google Slides also works with PowerPoint—creating a seamless way to present inspiring and informative presentations.

Grip is ushering in a convenient way to network and connect with other professionals. Especially for those who might attend networking events and conferences, Grip is a match-making app for attendees. Grip takes anonymous swiping to the next level and notifies the user of a “handshake” or a mutually interested person, and builds a bridge for engagement.

LinkedIn is an essential app for any student who is planning to enter the job-market. LinkedIn makes it easy to create an online resume and virtual profile, search for jobs and internships, and network with colleagues. Millions of professionals on LinkedIn can follow organizations to stay current with the latest trends in various industries, and create new successful and economic advancements.

Another well-known and essential app for online students is Lucidchart for mind-mapping to workflow/process diagramming needs. Lucidchart’s easy-to-use, drag-and-drop functionality can integrate with other apps or can be combined with other programs to get group projects done. This helpful diagram builder also features a share/collaborate function that works in real time, and diagrams can be exported as a PDF, PNG or Visio (Pro version).

Millions of users are using Magisto for all their video making and editing needs. Magisto, voted Best Video Editing App, can transform photos and videos into a creative story. Add music or effects and use this app with Google Slides to impress others with your presentation skills.

Millions of people are using Memrise to boost their foreign language learning skills. Memrise was voted Best App of the Year for its course variety, native speaker videos and innovative design by linguists that helps one learn, practice and have fun. In addition to languages, Memrise also includes other categories, such as Arts & Literature, Math & Science, History & Geography, and more.

Mendeley is designed for academics to manage their references, share documents with colleagues and annotate together. Millions of researchers are using Mendeley to connect with the worldwide academic community and stay informed with current research. Mendeley allows one to share and store datasets, and even includes a career search function geared towards academia/research positions in various fields.

Online students can mind-map using MindNode—a brainstorming app that includes organizational and project management features. This mind-map app can be used along with a word processor to flesh out ideas. MindNode allows students to make connections from their ideas, turn thoughts into step-by-step tasks, and share these maps with others.

MyStudyLife provides a helpful way to organize homework, create a to-do list, and manage class/course schedules. This super organizer app combines a daily planner with reminders so nothing falls through the cracks. More than just a to-do list, MyStudyLife helps one stay up-to-date on their courses and coursework, and stores data in the cloud, including exam scores and more.

For students who need a photo editor with style, Pixlr is perfect for novice or professional photographers. Pixlr offers students the ability to create collages, add effects, overlays, filters, text, and can even “photo-shop” images. For a more practical approach, Pixlr also allows one to crop, resize and balance a photo with the “auto-fix” feature, making this a helpful app for students who need to add images to reports or presentations.

Online students will love using the Pocket app, which allows users to save links, videos and articles for later. Pocket is also available offline, and features a clean, easy-to-read layout that is customizable. Pocket takes care of all the save-it-for- later links with tagging and Text-to-Speech features, and even allows one to share or recommend links to others.

Slack is helpful for online students who need a project management app that also functions as a helpful forum for group projects, helping everyone on the team to stay organized and on task. The archive feature includes a user-friendly search through conversations function, and even allows for scheduling reminder-notifications. Slack is easy to use and trusted by millions of users to help them get their jobs done.

StudyBlue is more than just a study tool or flashcard app—students benefit from the crowdsourced information to succeed in their studies. This collaborative library provides customizable study-guides, notes, flashcards, quizzes, and allows students to track their progress and create study notifications/reminders. Students can also add images and audio to flashcards and compare their study-guides to others’—anytime and anywhere.

Zoho’s Writer is a free word processing app that allows you to write on or offline, simultaneously work on the same document as your teammate, and features helpful templates. Online students can open, save and export Writer documents as a Microsoft Word document, PDF, ODT, HTML, or TXT file. This word processor also features a clean and distraction-free space to write, receive comments, and includes the option to share the document and collaborate with others.