In these times when we discuss the opportunity or not of BYOD at school ( Bring your own device ), that is, the possibility for students to be able to bring and even use the smartphone in the classroom, without wanting to enter directly into the question, we see here how much this can be useful .
Strangely agreeing with the current education minister, I believe that if not used to play and going beyond the use to create Whatsapp groups, the smartphone can become the ideal study companion for everyone, to do research on internet and as a virtual assistant to better follow lessons, take notes, repeat and correct homework.
Although many disagree in granting the use of cell phones in the classroom, especially psychotherapists, modern smartphones must be considered as computers, the use of which must be taught and disciplined in order not only to study, but also to do some examples, to learn to understand the real news, to have the keys to interpret the thoughts of part of influencers, journalists and ordinary people, to recognize hoaxes, to avoid viruses and malware, to understand the concept of privacy, to limit the spread of negative thoughts and cyberbullying.
In this article we therefore see how to use the smartphone in the classroom and at school in a useful and productive way .
READ ALSO: Best Apps for school and university
1) Organize your commitments
Traditionally, the school diary always remains the most important object, but using a certain type of application it is possible to have a more complete schedule that is also interactive, with alarms and automatic suggestions.
Agenda apps for reminders and tasks are therefore perfect for always knowing what to do and when to do it.
Among these, for example, you can choose Microsoft Todo, for Android and iPhone, which organizes all the activities, tasks, queries, classwork and also wanting study progress.
2) The diary to mark grades, lessons, classwork and other things
The app of the School Diary, for Android and iPhone, works wonderfully to have an electronic register in which to store grades taken, grades, subjects, absences, tasks, checks for those who want to have the diary always synchronized.
Alternatively, you can use the MyStudyLife app, very complete but only in English.
3) App for taking notes
A smartphone and even better a tablet can work very well instead of the classic paper notebook, for taking notes.
Applications for writing notes such as Google Keep and Onenote provide the ideal layout for writing quickly and for collecting notes so as not to lose them, to sort them and to synchronize them automatically with the computer.
4) Voice notes
To follow the lessons in the classroom, you can use your smartphone to record the teacher's voice as you did with old portable cassette recorders.
We have seen, in another article, the best apps to record voice and sounds on Android, while on the iPhone you can use the included recorder app.
Furthermore, even if with more difficulties, with a smartphone at school you can also write notes under dictation, directly, with voice recognition and speech-to-text technology.
We have seen, in another article, how to dictate verbally on the Android smartphone and iPhone.
5) Stay focused
To meet those who say that the smartphone is only a distraction in the class and does not help, there is an app like Forest that forces the student to stay focused and not to touch the phone for a certain period of time.
It is not one of those apps to block the internet or apps like Facebook, but only that it controls how long you can stay without turning on the smartphone screen.
It takes at least thirty minutes of inactivity to grow a tree to add to the forest and if you check the phone first or visit a blacklisted site, the tree will die.
6) Scanner and photocopies
Once when we needed the notes of a friend or the page of a book that we didn't have, we went to the copy shop to make photocopies.
Today you can use the phone directly and take a picture of the page to be scanned using a scanner app for Android and iPhone.
The app scanners also work with OCR technology, to make the photographed text editable and also work well for photographing the blackboard in the classroom.
7) App for group work
To make the organization of a research or a group study, there are several applications also used in the workplace.
For example, Trello is number one for managing group projects with a multi-user to-do list allowing for real-time collaboration.
Google Docs is also useful and functional, both because it includes the Office Word and Excel apps without anyone having to pay for them, and because it facilitates collaboration on tables, presentations and written texts.
In the end, thanks to the apps, you can study together even if everyone is at home.
8) App to plan study hours
Without complicating life too much, you can use a timer to keep on the screen to be used to study and schedule breaks.
With the " Tomato Timer " apps for iPhone and Android, you can take full advantage of the time available by maximizing productivity and concentration.
9) Dictionaries and Translators
Whoever says that the smartphone should not be used at school perhaps does not remember how uncomfortable it was to carry around the enormous vocabulary of Italian, English or Latin.
Today these vocabularies can be consulted from a tablet or from an Android and iPhone mobile phone using various apps such as Google Translate (which can translate any language, including Latin) and like the Italian Dictionary with synonyms and antonyms (Android and iPhone) just to do some examples (in the stores there are dictionaries and vocabularies of each language).
10) Math solver
Some apps are smart enough to solve math expressions just by framing them with the camera.
This is the case of the magical Photomath application, free for Android and iPhone, which becomes fundamental for all students who want to check the resolution of functions and expressions of mathematics and algebra.
Another application that can not miss in the classroom is the calculator and in another article we have seen the best calculating apps for Android and iPhone and the best math and algebra apps.
READ ALSO: App to do school homework: reading, diagrams, translations, immediate calculations
Strangely agreeing with the current education minister, I believe that if not used to play and going beyond the use to create Whatsapp groups, the smartphone can become the ideal study companion for everyone, to do research on internet and as a virtual assistant to better follow lessons, take notes, repeat and correct homework.
Although many disagree in granting the use of cell phones in the classroom, especially psychotherapists, modern smartphones must be considered as computers, the use of which must be taught and disciplined in order not only to study, but also to do some examples, to learn to understand the real news, to have the keys to interpret the thoughts of part of influencers, journalists and ordinary people, to recognize hoaxes, to avoid viruses and malware, to understand the concept of privacy, to limit the spread of negative thoughts and cyberbullying.
In this article we therefore see how to use the smartphone in the classroom and at school in a useful and productive way .
READ ALSO: Best Apps for school and university
1) Organize your commitments
Traditionally, the school diary always remains the most important object, but using a certain type of application it is possible to have a more complete schedule that is also interactive, with alarms and automatic suggestions.
Agenda apps for reminders and tasks are therefore perfect for always knowing what to do and when to do it.
Among these, for example, you can choose Microsoft Todo, for Android and iPhone, which organizes all the activities, tasks, queries, classwork and also wanting study progress.
2) The diary to mark grades, lessons, classwork and other things
The app of the School Diary, for Android and iPhone, works wonderfully to have an electronic register in which to store grades taken, grades, subjects, absences, tasks, checks for those who want to have the diary always synchronized.
Alternatively, you can use the MyStudyLife app, very complete but only in English.
3) App for taking notes
A smartphone and even better a tablet can work very well instead of the classic paper notebook, for taking notes.
Applications for writing notes such as Google Keep and Onenote provide the ideal layout for writing quickly and for collecting notes so as not to lose them, to sort them and to synchronize them automatically with the computer.
4) Voice notes
To follow the lessons in the classroom, you can use your smartphone to record the teacher's voice as you did with old portable cassette recorders.
We have seen, in another article, the best apps to record voice and sounds on Android, while on the iPhone you can use the included recorder app.
Furthermore, even if with more difficulties, with a smartphone at school you can also write notes under dictation, directly, with voice recognition and speech-to-text technology.
We have seen, in another article, how to dictate verbally on the Android smartphone and iPhone.
5) Stay focused
To meet those who say that the smartphone is only a distraction in the class and does not help, there is an app like Forest that forces the student to stay focused and not to touch the phone for a certain period of time.
It is not one of those apps to block the internet or apps like Facebook, but only that it controls how long you can stay without turning on the smartphone screen.
It takes at least thirty minutes of inactivity to grow a tree to add to the forest and if you check the phone first or visit a blacklisted site, the tree will die.
6) Scanner and photocopies
Once when we needed the notes of a friend or the page of a book that we didn't have, we went to the copy shop to make photocopies.
Today you can use the phone directly and take a picture of the page to be scanned using a scanner app for Android and iPhone.
The app scanners also work with OCR technology, to make the photographed text editable and also work well for photographing the blackboard in the classroom.
7) App for group work
To make the organization of a research or a group study, there are several applications also used in the workplace.
For example, Trello is number one for managing group projects with a multi-user to-do list allowing for real-time collaboration.
Google Docs is also useful and functional, both because it includes the Office Word and Excel apps without anyone having to pay for them, and because it facilitates collaboration on tables, presentations and written texts.
In the end, thanks to the apps, you can study together even if everyone is at home.
8) App to plan study hours
Without complicating life too much, you can use a timer to keep on the screen to be used to study and schedule breaks.
With the " Tomato Timer " apps for iPhone and Android, you can take full advantage of the time available by maximizing productivity and concentration.
9) Dictionaries and Translators
Whoever says that the smartphone should not be used at school perhaps does not remember how uncomfortable it was to carry around the enormous vocabulary of Italian, English or Latin.
Today these vocabularies can be consulted from a tablet or from an Android and iPhone mobile phone using various apps such as Google Translate (which can translate any language, including Latin) and like the Italian Dictionary with synonyms and antonyms (Android and iPhone) just to do some examples (in the stores there are dictionaries and vocabularies of each language).
10) Math solver
Some apps are smart enough to solve math expressions just by framing them with the camera.
This is the case of the magical Photomath application, free for Android and iPhone, which becomes fundamental for all students who want to check the resolution of functions and expressions of mathematics and algebra.
Another application that can not miss in the classroom is the calculator and in another article we have seen the best calculating apps for Android and iPhone and the best math and algebra apps.
READ ALSO: App to do school homework: reading, diagrams, translations, immediate calculations
