Free Apps That Save My Grades

It’s Thursday afternoon. I’m on the subway and I have a 50 minute commute ahead of me followed by a 4 hour class. I could easily zone out and enjoy the live theatrics of public transportation. In fact, two seats down from me, a woman has begun irately screaming into her cell. Just as I’m about to settle in for a good show, my iPhone pings. It’s my ScatterBrain app reminding me that I was supposed to have read a stack of articles for class. Of course I set the reminder, hoping that all I would have to do was review my notes, but until this moment, they’ve escaped my memory.

Okay. Fine. I can handle this. Luckily, I always save documents as PDFs and load them into my Drop Box account (a free online document cloud). All I need to do is launch my Dropbox app, and open the PDFs in my Adobe Reader app. I can read the articles, highlight sections and add notes in the margins for class discussion. Piece of cake, crisis averted.

Except, I’m also supposed to write a reflection that discusses the importance of the articles in relation to topics covered in class. I have 30 mins left in my commute. So, sure I can handle that, never mind that the subway is now packed, and the two people on either side of me are seriously invading my personal space. I launch my Plain Text app, create a new document and save it under my "grad school" file with the rest of my last minute papers. I’m type away at the text, use the in app word count feature (500 words should be enough right?), and email a copy to myself to print out at the computer lab. Assignment completed, grade saved.


The Apps

 
 ScatterBrain A reminder/ task app that allows you to create color coded categories to organize your tasks and set reminders.



Dropbox an free online cloud storage service. Create a free account at Dropbox.com and access your documents on the go with the dropbox app.

 
  
Adobe Reader a PDF reader app that allows you to annotate and mark up PDF documents. Comment and text features make this useful for reading on the fly.

 

Plain Text a text editor with folder organization options. Create and send files to email or sync them to dropbox. Word count feature is handy in understanding how much text has been generated.