It is valuable for students while investigating on the web diaries or getting to instructional exercises. It is another one of the best Mac apps for students. With this application, you can make changes, fix mistakes, and even transfer new data or pictures to a PDF. The Best Note Taking Apps for Students. On Windows and Mac, and mobile apps on Android and iOS that are updated with new features often. Evernote’s meant as a catch-all filing cabinet for.
College is a heady time. New places, new friends and new beginnings come with new challenges. Despite (or perhaps because of) excessive warnings about how “different” college will be from educators and parents, new college students are often overwhelmed by the new expectations. If you don’t want to succumb to stress, you’ll need some apps to help keep things organized. Taking notes effectively is a crucial part of succeeding in college. And depending on your professors’ teaching style, you may need to take rapid-fire notes from lectured material. If you want to keep up, you can either learn shorthand or keep digital notes. Most of us type faster than we write (or think, in some cases) so you can stay up to speed easily. Once you’ve settled on taking notes digitally, you’ll need to find the best app. While Apple’s Notes is okay for quick lists or doodles, if you’ve got a Pencil, it’s not powerful enough to organize lecture notes. Here are the contenders for the best note-taking apps for college students on the Mac.
Evernote
There’s a ton of note-taking apps for college students out there, but Evernote is by far the best. It should be no surprise that it’s included in this list. It’s accessible, flexible and versatile, with powerful organizational options and deep third-party support. It offers the most reliable sync, PDF annotation, and support for a wide range of document types. Text styling isn’t as expressive as it could be, but the use case is more about collecting and organizing content from a ton of different places. Using the Web Clipper extension, you can grab content from JSTOR, Wikipedia, Google Scholar and more, then annotate your clips in Evernote. This feature alone is a godsend when you’re doing a ton of digital research, and it far surpasses the utility of Pocket or another read-it-later service. You can sync between two devices for free (Mac and iPhone, for example) or pay a few bucks a month to sync to unlimited devices. If you have a few extra dollars, it’s well worth the fee.
Best Note Taking Apps For Macbook Pro
OneNote
If you don’t love Evernote, OneNote is an absolutely great alternative. If you’ve already got Office for Mac, OneNote is included in your subscription. It features many more formatting options that Evernote, but the design concept is a little different. It’s heavily optimized towards typing notes, rather than collecting information from a wide variety of sources. You can still include images, graphs and PDFs in your notebooks, but that function isn’t as integrated as Evernote. Essentially, OneNote is a different graphical interface for Word, designed to expose more organizational features. If you like Word, you’ll love OneNote. Users that want to recreate the flexibility of a spiral notebook will be pleased with the expanding formatting options, but we’ve never found typing in Word to be that delightful. If you already have an Office subscription, give it a try: you’ll probably find something you like about it!
Bear
Bear is designed to make note-taking beautiful. It relies on plain text MarkDown formatting, applying roughly the same range of formatting options that Evernote allows. Notes are organized into collections based on hashtags, so there are no notebooks to be created and organized. It’s more like a flexible tagging structure. The app is definitely built for simple note-taking, and doesn’t have as many organizational features as Evernote or OneNote. Depending on how you feel about those apps, that might be a turnoff, or it might be appealing. There’s limited support for adding pictures and files to Bear, but you won’t have the in-place annotation tools you get from Evernote.
Simplenote
Simplenote is a cross platform, plain text note taking app that’s much beloved by minimalists. If you want to keep your note taking really simple, then Simplenote will be perfect for you. The simple, clean layout is a joy to use, and it’s free of distracting formatting features. However, it lacks a lot of the secondary features that make Evernote and OneNote so powerful. Of course, if you’re dedicated, you can take create text-only formatting to organize your notes. Multi-platform sync is great for folks with a ton of devices. And if you need to take notes on the fly, you’ll find the fast mobile app useful for quickly capturing inspiration. But if you need something that can collect input from a wide variety of sources, you’re better off looking at Evernote.
nvALT
nvALT is built for Notational Velocity, a note-taking platform designed for lightning fast, keyboard-only operation. Its perfect use case is during a phone call. When you want to write something down quickly, you tap the key command, which reveals nvALT from the menu bar. Then, you start typing, and the note is saved immediately. You don’t need to title it, tag it or do anything else. While it’s amazing for that use, it doesn’t provide the broad use that other apps offer, so it might be a little limiting as a note-taking app for college students.
You might also like:
Six Macbook Accessories Every High School And College Kid Needs
Best Note Taking Apps
Top 5 Apple Gadgets for Back to School Shopping
How to Encrypt Your Evernote Notes
By Drew Thomas |
When you’re first beginning your PhD, it can be a bit overwhelming. How in the world are you supposed to organize everything? Not just your reading lists, but other things. I have my thesis to write, grants to apply for, research trips to arrange, Pubs & Pubs articles to write, and digital humanities projects I’m a part of. And somehow, I’m supposed to maintain an active social media presence! To do all of that, I use a plethora of apps, tools, plugins, and websites. Below, I list items I’ve used, currently use, or know about but haven’t adopted for myself. Everyone is different and responds to various time managements tools differently. Maybe you’ve tried a few over the past semester or maybe you keep procrastinating. Remember, it’s not about the tools, but how you use them. https://browninsurance476.weebly.com/blog/mac-email-app-exchange. At times I have the tendency to get so caught up in systems that I lose sight of the goal! So if they don’t work for you, ditch them. https://browninsurance476.weebly.com/blog/how-to-remove-apps-from-mac-pro. Hopefully, some will help you, even in the tiniest of ways, to progress a bit more easily to that submission deadline.
Research
Google Scholar | A great search engine that searches universities, academic publishers, and other depositories for peer-reviewed research. A great way to find new or unknown research.
Zotero | A fantastic reference manager that lets you save references from websites with the click of a button. Great for organizing research and searching through research.
Mendeley | Similar to Zotero, a great reference manager, particularly favoured in the sciences. Also, has a PDF reader and acts as a social network for collaboration and sharing.
Quiqqa | Another reference manager with many built-in tools, such as cross-referencing articles cited in the footnotes of your other articles.
Notes
Notability| A great mobile note-taking app, specifically optimized for tablets.
Evernote | A great note-taking app that syncs across devices. You can tag and organize your notes. It even reads your handwriting!
iAnnotate | One of the best apps for annotating PDFs on a tablet. I use this regularly to read journal articles. It also syncs with Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
Adobe Acrobat | Adobe has stepped up to gain some of the tablet market gained by iAnnotate. The new annotation features on the free version are quite impressive.
ZotFile | The savior of my PhD. ZotFile is a Zotero plugin that extracts your annotations from your marked up PDF documents. If you highlight text in iAnnotate or Adobe Acrobat, ZotFile extracts it and adds the notes to the bibliographic record in your reference manager, making them fully searchable. Never read an article twice.
Best Mac Note Taking Apps Students And Researchers Using
Data Backup
Dropbox | An independent cloud storage device that syncs across all your devices.
Google Drive | Google’s Dropbox alternative. You can directly save your email attachments to Google Drive.
iCloud | In addition to backing up all of your research, if you have an iPhone it will automatically back up all of the photos you’ve been taking in the library all day.
Task/Project Management
Trello | A great project management tool using the kanban method, often implemented with the Getting Things Done productivity hack. It’s great for collaboration and visualizing your progress.
Slack | Slack is a messaging app for teams. Instead of using email, it keeps all of your project messages and notes in one place.
Bullet Journal | Ok, this isn’t an app. It’s an old-fashioned notebook. But it’s a great analog system of keeping track of your life, allowing for constant evaluation of what you spend time on. Read Laura’s recent post on getting started. I’ve been doing it about two weeks now and am loving it.
Writing
Scrivener | A great text editor that is perfect for writing chapter drafts. It allows for shuffling around bits and pieces until your draft is in its final form. Then it can be easily exported into Microsoft Word.
Grammarly | Think Microsoft Word grammar check on steroids. Grammarly is a plugin that makes your writing easy to read and mistake free (and helped with this post!).
Travel Planning
Skyscanner | One of the best websites/apps for finding a cheap flight. You can also search prices within an entire month or find the cheapest month to travel.
Kayak | Another great website for finding air tickets. The best feature: the ability to use a flexible search, which searches the days near your selected dates for the best price.
Hopper | A great app that tells you if your plane ticket is a good deal. It shows you the best days to fly to your destination and the best day to buy a ticket for that specified route.
RyanAir | In case you missed it, RyanAir have updated their carry-on luggage policy; you can now bring two bags in the cabin free of charge. Just won my vote!
Airbnb | If you are going on a short research trip, but a bit longer than you’re willing to stay in a hostel, Airbnb is your best option. You can get a nice place for a great price, meet some locals, and learn about the city.
GateGuru | Long layover in an airport? GateGuru will show you all the restaurants and shops in the terminal.
Google Trips | A great new app from Google that will automatically collect your travel details from your emails and allow you to download maps for offline use.
Social Media
Twitter | Needs no introduction, but I use Twitter for purely academic purposes. A great way to network and to learn about calls for papers and jobs.
Academia.edu | LinkedIn for academics. It’s great for finding papers by a scholar you’re interested in. Read why it’s a good idea.
Buffer | A great app for managing your social media accounts. You can schedule posts and use their plugin to add articles on the web directly to your queue.
TweetDeck | Twitter’s user interface for its advanced users. Manage multiple Twitter feeds in one place, schedule tweets, follow hashtags, and watch it update in real time.
Nuzzel | Link your Twitter account (or others) to Nuzzel and it will provide you with a daily digest of the most popular news stories from your Twitter feed.
Stay Focused
Best Mac Note Taking App For College
Headspace | Need to clear your thoughts? This nifty app helps you clear your head and focus on meditating.
7-Minute Workout | A healthy body leads to a healthy mind. If you don’t exercise regularly, try this app to help get your blood going and your mind focused.
Tomato Timer | The key to staying focused is having small, scheduled breaks. Use this timer, which implements the Pomodoro technique.
RescueTime | How much time do you spend checking your email or Facebook? RescueTime keeps track of how you spend your time so you can be more productive.
AdBlock | The best Google Chrome plugin. Get rid of those pesky, distracting ads.
StayFocusd | Another Chrome plugin that limits the amount of time you can spend on specified websites. Only 30 minutes on Facebook today! Want this across devices? Try Freedom.
f.lux | It took a few days to get used to, but I love it! F.lux removes the blue light from your computer monitor when the sun sets so the bright light won’t keep you up all night.
Spotify | Because I couldn’t get through a day if I didn’t have my music.
Staying Secure
LastPass | With all these apps and tools, you probably have way too many usernames and passwords. Never use easy passwords. Use a password manager to keep track of them all.
1Password | Another popular password manager. Never use the same password for multiple websites.
Drew Thomas is a PhD student at the University of St Andrews. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Theology and Philosophy from Saint Louis University and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University. His PhD is a study of the rise of the Wittenberg print industry during Martin Luther’s Reformation. He is currently the Communications Coordinator for the Universal Short Title Catalogue and the Digital Developer for the Caroline Minuscule Mapping Project. You can follow him on Twitter at @DrewBThomas or on Academia.edu.
Best Mac Note Taking Apps Students And Researchers Must