Study More Effectively With These Innovative Apps and Websites

Using apps and websites to supplement your IB study sessions is nothing new, particularly not to us at Lanterna. We’ve collected our tutors’ top recommendations for the best apps and websites (that you might not have seen before) to take your studies to the next level!

(2) and (3) written with Jascha Schäfer.

I talked last week about how to design the perfect IB Study Session (if you missed that, read it here!), so how about we try and improve studying in general just a little bit more?

Some of these resources are more well-known than others, so we hope that there’s something here for everyone which they haven’t tried before – they’re all free, or at least have a free version, and can be used via app or on the web. Also, this post is entirely unsponsored – these are our genuine recommendations!

1. Better time management – GetRevising

If you’re anything like me (a born procrastinator – I mean, fantastic former-IB student), you’ll do any task but the one you’re supposed to be doing at any given time. For me, that also included making a plan of the tasks I would then later procrastinate on doing. It’s a genius system, I’m well aware.

At last, the solution is here. GetRevising.co.uk will save you the time you’d otherwise spend (read: waste) meticulously planning the study sessions which never happen – they do it for you! Just tell them your deadlines and when you have time to study, and they’ll sort out the rest.

2. Better study overview – Notion

Notion is a wildly popular note-taking app that has recently exploded in popularity. This app is easy to use and satisfying for the organisation of notes and questions, and it also has a neat feature that allows for a unique revision technique.

Toggle lists let you write out questions and show you answers when you click the expand button. Think of it as using flashcards. Check out this video that shows how you can use that feature to study using the active recall method; a technique demonstrated to work well by numerous studies.

3. Better flashcards – Brainscape

It’s smart learning that we love – shoutout to our old faithful Quizlet here too, but it’s time for a new flashcard tool: Brainscape.

Like Notion, Brainscape exists as a website for desktop users and an easy-to-use app you can find for iOS and android. Brainscape is a flashcard app that lets you say how well you remember a card from 1-5. With this information, Brainscape will preferentially show you cards that you are still weak at until you have mastered all cards in your deck!

Tools for prioritisation built right in to flashcards? Yes please.

4. Better languages – Conjuu

For some, the fact you have to take at least one foreign language on the IB is a dream come true, for others not so much. If you fall in to this second group, then one of the main things you might be struggling with is the grammar of your acquired language – particularly, in the case of Spanish, French, German, Italian and many others, you have to deal with conjugating verbs. This is particularly tricky if you’re a native English speaker, and is something most struggle with at some stage.

Conjuu has you covered – I personally used this app while studying Spanish on the IB, and have used it during my time at university to learn Italian verbs too. The full version is very inexpensive and is the best way I’ve found to learn to conjugate – properly! The app developer has versions for all the languages mentioned above, with free versions available for Spanish and French.

5. Better assignment management – Trello

As you might already know, the EE and IAs can very quickly become overwhelming. Your IAs are all at different stages of completion, your TOK essay is nowhere to be seen, and your EE deadline is creeping up on you like the nightmare it is. This is why we love the IB!

Trello is a great way to get a handle on things – by creating a “pipeline”. Break down the assignment into lots of smaller tasks, which can then be moved along the project pipeline depending on how much progress you’ve made. This is a great visual representation of what can sometimes be overwhelming and mysteriously difficult tasks to finish.

So there we have it, our top 5 study apps and websites to help you improve your learning. If that’s not enough, however, then why not check out our own great free resources? Click here to take a look. 

Thanks for reading this week 🙂