We’re going to go over some of the best note-taking apps for students. Some are for college, and others are just good general apps that help with schoolwork!
You can take pictures of work or whiteboard lectures and turn them into slideshows or whatever you want with these note-taking apps.
1. Typora
Typora has been around since 2013, and you may never have heard of it. But this open-source offline word processing app — that works on Mac, Windows, Linux, and even Chrome OS — has a lot going for it. It’s one of the best word processors. Markdown syntax highlighting. You can get this excellent tool for free today.
If you haven’t heard about WordPress yet, you must be living in a cave. It’s one of the most popular content management systems around. And that makes complete sense – it’s a perfect solution for any business that needs a website on their side.
2. Ulysses
Ulysses has been a popular writing app for Mac users for years. It was introduced in 2014 to help writers focus on their writing, and it’s quickly become one of the best writing apps for both note-taking and long-form essays or articles.
Ulysses is a fantastic note-taking and writing app for both Mac and iOS. It’s been around for a few years, but I’m only just getting started using it. Compared to other note-taking apps I use, it’s fresh, pleasant, and is a pleasure to use. Despite the premium price for a Mac app, if you use a Mac and do any severe writing at all on your laptop, Ulysses is worth every penny.
3. Slite
Slite might not be a familiar name to you, but it’s one I’ve been using for the past year to write content for this site. Slite is an online editor that takes advantage of Markdown, a simple markup language that makes it easy to create structured documents.
While Markdown is simple enough to be implemented in a text editor and eliminates much of the need for multiple formatting tools, new users tend to find the learning curve steep. If you’re looking for a way to write a curriculum or papers, Slite is the easiest way to create and share your content.
Slite is an excellent tool to create, edit and collaborate on documents online. The Markdown editor formats the text as soon as you apply the Markdown syntax. It also lets you embed images, videos, and tables.
4. Google Keep
Google Keep is a note-taking app from Google that’s best described as a streamlined version of Evernote. It was built to help folks keep track of everyday tasks and notes within a mobile environment, where the user gets to choose between typing out text or recording audio. Google Keep is a minimalist way to create and store text notes on your Android or iOS device.
It’s most helpful in complementing other Google services, such as Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Calendar. It’s not going to replace Evernote or OneNote for most people, but having it around can help you get things done. Google Keep is a new service by Google that aims to take the slightly defunct Google Notebook.
But instead of being just a plain notebook, or full-screen text editor, it’s something in between. Although Keep is currently a bit limited — lacking more complicated features like tables — it already has me finding uses for it in my daily workflow.
5. Apple Notes
Apple Notes is a free note-taking app that’s great for elementary organization and taking down meeting minutes. It allows you to create multiple notebooks, and when you make a new note, it automatically adds the date to the title and tags it accordingly.
Apple Notes comes with essential and automatic formatting features: If you begin typing in bold, for instance, it will apply the bold typeface until you stop typing. An image feature lets you insert basic images selected from your device’s camera roll or an image URL on the Web. Apple Notes is a word-processing program for the Macintosh that syncs notes between iPhones and iPads, and other Mac computers.
It’s available on the Mac App Store at no cost. Since it was released alongside iOS 9 in September 2015, Apple has been adding features to Notes.
6. Bear
Bear is free, open-source software for writers you can use from your desktop or smartphone. You can write using Markdown and even sync snapshots of your notes and the ability to publish them across multiple platforms. Bear doesn’t do everything Scrivener does, but it will get you through 80% of your writing needs.
Bear, a Markdown note-taking app for iPhone and iPad, was released by developer Silvio Rizzi back in April. By any measure, it was a hit. Archiving notes is a small but valuable feature in Bear — this is especially true for long-term projects or messages that you aren’t currently working on. You can archive a note to pull it out of both search and organization without actually deleting the information.
This is helpful if you’ve been meaning to get back into something but still find value in the note itself.
7. Roam Research
In Roam Research, every note is linked to other messages. You can make a text anchor from anywhere within a note. Text anchors help you quickly reorganize your notes by bringing related information together. You can also use Roam Research’s list view to organize and filter messages like you would in any other note-taking app.
Linking can be one of the core features of Roam: a collection of your notes (what we call “Pages”) can easily link to each other, so you can always find them again. If you look at any notes I’ve taken with the Roam app, you’ll see that I use a web instead of relying on a bullet-point outline.
A web has the advantage over a method because it’s more fractal and doesn’t assume a hierarchy to the knowledge constructed: there is no distinction between headings or subheadings; headings are parented nodes in a fractally branching network of notes.
8. OneNote
Microsoft’s note-taking app, OneNote, has become immensely popular in recent years. But Microsoft isn’t the only one paying attention to the demand for better note-taking software: Evernote updated its web interface and added a range of new features earlier this month.
I use several different note-taking and productivity apps on mobile devices, and for the most part, that title is held by Evernote. I say “for the most part” because there are some things that bother me about Evernote.
OneNote is Microsoft’s free cross-platform note-taking app; if you’ve bought your Xbox One using a free OneDrive account, then you already have it (if not, you can grab an Office 365 Personal 30-day trial with 1TB OneDrive storage). While the interface still needs some work, and it doesn’t have some of the features of Evernote (scannable documents, for instance), it’s compelling even in its current state and will only get better.
9. Evernote
Evernote is the most popular note-taking application, and for a good reason. It’s free. It allows you to take handwritten notes using a stylus or finger (and then lets you export these notes into Word, text, or PDF). You can also clip articles from the Web and add them to your archive. I use Evernote to keep track of recipes from the many cooking blogs I follow.
If you enjoy recipe archives (or travel blogs), this is a great way to organize them from the kitchen. I also like using Evernote for writing short stories and poetry, as it keeps everything in one place without me having to shuffle through folders on my computer. Evernote is an excellent tool for taking notes and collecting web content, especially when you’re on the go.
I find articles and pages that are interesting to me while I’m working or browsing. But once I’ve read the article, it usually gets lost in Safari or bookmarked to a folder in my bookmarks bar (don’t ask). With Evernote, however, I can save the page and make sure that it doesn’t get lost! You can also highlight and make notes on a specific part of the page you are saving.
10. Notion
This gives you a lot of potential for creating great-looking, flexible pages, and a large part of Nation’s strength is that it gives you such control. Notion lets you do all of that and more on any page efficiently. Tables in Notion aren’t just charts; they’re databases.
Think of Notion’s databases as Google Docs and Google Sheets mashed into one: Every row in a table is its Notion page that you can go into and update. In this post, I will give you two ways of using databases: one for advanced users and one for everyone else.