Best Note Taking Apps for Students
In high school or college, you spend a lot of time taking notes. You have several different options for this purpose , and which one is best for you, depends on your style of doing notes. Your best bet is to choose software and stick to it so you don’t have to worry about moving things around later. Here’s how to make the right choice right from the start.
Evernote is the most feature-rich note-taking app out there, provided you don’t mind paying
Evernote has long been popular with students, and while it’s not always obvious how you use it, once you master it , Evernote is a great place to download anything that means notes, to-do lists, audio. , images and more.
Evernote does a lot. In addition to basic features like RTF notes and images, it has in-app image annotations, OCR support for scanning paper or whiteboards, email integration, easy note sharing, web clipper, and many organizing tools. You can keep to-do lists with tasks, and then add due dates for those tasks before you share the list with people involved in a group project. Evernote is a giant and therefore has an ever-improving interface for Windows and Mac, as well as mobile apps for Android and iOS that are frequently updated with new features. Evernote is designed to store all the thoughts, ideas, and images that you come across in your day-to-day school life.
Evernote’s uniformity means that it overwhelms some people, and it takes some effort to truly master it. It also has so many different organizational methods that it’s easy to spend more time deciding where to post a note than writing it. It can also be a little slow and cumbersome, especially if you are trying to use mobile apps on older devices.
Another big Evernote trick is its recent price hikes . Free users can now use Evernote on only two devices, such as a phone and a computer. If you want more, you’ll need to shell out the premium plan. Fortunately, there are currently 75% discount for students on premium plans for a full year (which should translate to about $ 18 per year).
OneNote is free and works even better if you’re using Microsoft Office
Microsoft’s OneNote has come a long way in recent years and easily keeps up with Evernote in features. Despite being part of Microsoft Office, OneNote is still completely free, making it a great option for students. This is even more attractive if you already use Microsoft Office for most of your schoolwork . OneNote is available as a desktop and web app , and for Android and iOS .
At first glance, like any other Office application, OneNote is a complex application to work with . You will find that it has a variety of menus, tabs, and options. While it’s tricky to get started, OneNote is great for anyone who loves to really dig and organize their notes. You can create separate notebooks for each class, add text formatting to text, draw in notes, highlight text, and more.
If you actively use the rest of Microsoft Office, OneNote really stands out because the entire ecosystem is tied together. You can paste spreadsheets from Excel, extract clips from emails, or link studies to Word. OneNote also does many of the magic tricks that Evernote does, including importing images into notes, drawing directly on notes with the stylus, writing sound to notes, and easily saving links from any browser. You can also easily share notes with other classmates.
As with most Microsoft apps, OneNote’s biggest flaw is its sheer scale. It is packed with menus, which means that writing an idea quickly is out of the question. It’s also not particularly pleasing to look at, and between the awkwardly colored tabs and the vibrant purple color scheme, the design alone can put a lot of people off.
Google Keep – Free Short Notes App
Google Keep is a free Google note-taking app designed to record notes, lists, photos, and audio. Besides the web version, it is available for both Android and iOS . We’re big fans of Google Keep because it falls somewhere between sophisticated note-taking apps like OneNote or Evernote and simple ones like Simplenote.
Google Keep does almost everything you’d expect from Google’s note-taking app. You can easily organize your notes with a color-coded system, search for anything with a powerful search engine, share your notes with others, and everything is synced to your Google account. Students will appreciate the simple voice recording options and the ability to easily convert images to text , which comes in handy when teachers are still handing out handouts to you. Keep also has a clipping extension so you can add URLs to your notes, which should be a huge help when researching a variety of topics.
Unlike Evernote and OneNote, you don’t have to spend a lot of time learning how to use Keep. Just download it and it makes sense right away. It’s also well integrated into the Google ecosystem, so something like saving emails from Gmail works seamlessly, although there’s still no direct Google Drive integration.
There are other drawbacks to this simplicity, such as the fact that you cannot format text, you cannot organize notes into different folders, and Keep does not work well with large blocks of text. Keep is best for those who don’t mind using the search function to find notes and are not too verbose in their notes in general.
Simplenote is best if you only want to store text
Not everyone wants to make voluminous and complex recordings. Some people just like to jot down a few sentences. This is why we are fans of Simplenote . Simplenote is free for Windows , Mac , iOS, and Android .
Simplenote is a simple text editor with little organizational tools. You can only enter text without formatting. You cannot add images, audio or video. You cannot add web clippings or integrate emails. However, you can organize your notes with tags, and the simplicity of the plain text means Simplenote searches are reliable and fast.
That’s all. That’s all Simplenote does. The lack of features is a feature in itself, however, and if you’re attending classes where you just take basic text notes, Simplenote is all you need.
Pen and paper are still good
Look, you probably spend way too much time staring at your screen these days. You write articles every other day, take a couple of online lessons, and when you’re not busy with a pile of homework, you lose your connection to watching Netflix. That’s all to say, sometimes the best note-taking app is not an app at all, it’s just a regular notepad.
Good old pen and paper can come in handy for other reasons as well. First, if you’re easily distracted, a laptop has the advantage of not having internet access. Notepads are also surprisingly customizable, with many different organization methods like Bullet Journal or edge lines . Notepads also let you take notes in whatever style you prefer for each subject, whether it’s creating columns, mind maps, or whatever.
Pen and paper have a lot of problems too. You cannot search in notes, easily share them with classmates, or access them from various devices if you accidentally forgot your documents at home. Many people can also type much faster than they write, which means you need to pay more attention to what you write to keep it concise.
However, you will still need to choose a good notebook and pen. You have tons of options, but Moleskine are popular favorites and come in a variety of sizes with different types of paper. The handles are arguably less important to most people, but if you’re looking for a popular choice , Pilot handles are always a good choice.