For days when your brain isn't braining

It's that time of the year again when you're scrolling down TikTok and all you see are "study with me" videos. Whilst it's great to watch, sometimes you can get stuck and think, "I wish I could study that easily". The good thing is, you can!

Sometimes you might just need some extra support, so we've put together our top 5 apps/tools to help you when studying.

Grammarly: To keep your writing accurate 🐸

If you spend ages going over your assignments, making changes and looking for grammar and spelling errors, we recommend you try Grammarly. It's a writing assistant that helps you improve your writing quality and spellchecks for you as you write. It's also great for accessibility for those who may have learning disabilities and for non-native English speakers.

Before you ask, no, it won't write your essays for you, but it will provide feedback on your writing to help you understand the 'writing rules' and any changes it makes.

Forest: To stop you from procrastinating 🌲

Struggling with productivity and motivation to study is a very common theme in student life, so what better to help than an app that grows virtual plants? Forest helps improve focus and productivity by planting virtual trees to help you stay off your phone when doing tasks. It's great for students who get easily distracted while studying. When you are ready, just set a timer on the app for however long you'd like to concentrate for, and the app plants your virtual seed. If you stay in the app and avoid doomscrolling, your tree grows, but if you leave the app, the tree sadly dies. Successful study sessions add trees to your forest so you can visualise your productivity over the week, and you can create group sessions to share with friends - you could do a weekly prize for who's got the most trees!

Gizmo: To turn revising into games 👾

Say hi to Gizmo, your new little purple friend, who helps turn your notes into flashcards and quizzes. It's a great way to understand content better, and it's easy to use. You can either type up your notes or drop in a PDF of information, and Gizmo will make everything for you. One brilliant feature of Gizmo that sets it apart from other flashcard tools is that when you don't understand the content or get an answer wrong, it says, "explain like I'm 5". It breaks the information down and uses examples in the simplest way to help you understand it better. 

The Universal Sandpit: To break big concepts into bite-sized learning 📚

The Universal Sandpit is an assignment tool that creates step-by-step assignment structures designed for students with dyslexia and SEND learners. It has features such as breaking tasks into small chunks, prompts to help you start new tasks, help with balancing tasks and self-care when planning your day and even an emotional regulation pathway. There is also an 'Explain To Me' feature, similar to Gizmo, but you can ask it to explain any concept and choose the student age you want it to break down to. So if you're having a hard time taking information in or understanding a topic, this could really help you. 

Speechify: Your text-to-speech assistant 🦋

Similar to Grammarly, Speechify helps with spellchecks and grammar errors, but it's a text-to-speech assistant. So instead of reading through your writing and spending ages looking for errors, you can hit the speech button and the assistant reads your work out loud for you. Speechify has a very fun feature where you can select a celebrity as the voice, and yes, Snoop Dogg is on there!

Remember to take regular breaks from studying, drink plenty of water and spend some time outdoors. If you're feeling stressed and anxious during exam season, don't be afraid to reach out to your friends, family and tutors. You can also contact our partners at Health Assured, who can give advice on wellbeing and managing your uni work ❤️