Andrew Dear
3 min readSep 26, 2019

Students working at a table with their laptops
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

With school already started and well on its way. It’s time to start honing your studying methods with the great tools available online. Staying organized is one of the most important things you can do when trying to excel in your grades. Here I will reveal a list of free online services that we have carefully curated to help students do better in school and get better grades.

Trello
Link: https://trello.com

Create priority lists for everything going on in your life and school and view them side-by-side. The great thing about having your priority lists stacked beside each other is you get to move items from one phase to another with ease. This enables you to track all your accomplishments and deadlines by moving them forward up through their phases. For example brainstorm, research, draft, final draft, and to complete. This creates a natural flow that could only be replicated with a whole crap ton of wasted post-it notes.

Example account: Student Research Project Board

WebCull
Link: https://webcull.com

As a student, a large part of your research and schoolwork is all online. With so much depending on the web, you need to start organizing all these resources for quick access. You also potentially need access to these links from your computer and devices. Throwing your links into a document or Google sheet is neither clean nor organized. This tool works from any browser including mobile. It’s good for organization on top of a powerful search tool letting you search within the content of the websites you save. It dramatically improves how you hang on to your web resources needed for school work.

Cram
Link: https://www.cram.com

Okay so if you haven’t heard yet, flashcards are known as one of the most useful tools when working on memorization. As you likely already know, being good at memorization is a huge aspect behind doing well in school. This is why it’s essential that you know to use flashcards to study. Nothing compares to being able to test yourself over some time to see how well you know your material. This is one of the best free online tools that we could find to easily create and use virtual flashcards. Also once again reducing the amount of paper you need to study. #saveatree

Mindmeister
Link: https://www.mindmeister.com

A mind map is a diagram to help visually organize a project or general information. It helps you visualize an entire idea or plan from a single view and is useful when creating the blueprint for almost any information that gets complicated. Just the creation process of a mind map can help solidify your understanding of a topic and serve and as a powerful referencing tool help you progress through a school assignment. Mindmeister makes the process of making an almost impossible chart like this, a simple and easy task.

Learn more: https://www.mindmeister.com/content/education

Grammarly
Link: https://www.grammarly.com

If you use Google docs or Microsoft word, you’re not using the best grammar-testing tool out there. Actually, if you’re not using Grammarly you’re probably missing a lot of errors in your writing you otherwise wouldn’t. When writing just this article, I used it to look for mistakes, and it found 14 grammar errors that Google Docs and MS Word completely missed. If your schoolwork is graded on grammar in any way using this tool is essential.

Keep
Link: https://keep.google.com

Keep is definitely one of the lesser-known efficiency tools by Google. It’s designed to work just like post-it notes. So whenever you need to quickly jot down an idea or something you need for later, this is your paper saver. It’s very quick and responsive design enables speedy note-taking, which is excellent for in-class notes. It also converts speech to notes to make it even easier and faster to take down and important piece of information you need for later.

Andrew Dear
Andrew Dear

Written by Andrew Dear

Software architect with over 20 years of experience

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