Sunday 26 February 2012

Get Your School Schedule & Homework In Order With Studious [Android].

For students, there haven’t been a lot of quality apps for Android to track our class schedule, notes, and homework. Yes, there’s Google Calendar; Google Tasks, Astrid, or Taskos; and Google Docs, but those tools are made for general-use purposes, and aren’t tailored to be a student’s best friend (unless the student is very flexible with those services).

However, a few student-specific management applications now exist, and one of them is well worth mentioning. Let me introduce you to Studious. This little homework app Android can easily become a student’s best companion at all times of the day. It includes some pretty cool features that students won’t want to pass up on (including one that pleasantly surprised me).

Installation is, as with all Android apps, very easy. Just search for Studious in the Android Market. Once it is downloaded and installation is complete, go ahead and launch it!

User Interface and Features:


You’ll be able to tell really fast that Studious aims to be very simplistic. The only screen you see is an empty “Classes” screen, with only a button to add a new class. If you hit the Menu button, you only get a button to add a class as well. Go ahead and add a class that you have.

Adding A Class:


Adding a class is pretty easy. After entering in the information, you’ll have the opinion to choose different sound profiles for your classes, so that you can have your ringtone up all the way when you need it to be, and then automatically go silent when you’re in class. Besides making the phone go silent during class, you can also set it to vibrate, “airplane mode” so that you don’t get anything that might make a sound in the first place, or the current sound profile. When you finish, hit Save and return to the previous screen.

You will now see the class you added, and nothing else has changed. Tapping on the class, however, leads to some more functions.

Adding Homework:


After tapping on a class, the first screen you’ll see is a place to add Homework. When you add homework, you can input things like title, problems (as in problem numbers, particularly useful for math), a description, the due date and time, as well as when you’d like a reminder about the homework.

Adding Notes:


Not only can you add homework, but you can also add notes. While you might not want to type out a lecture’s worth of notes on your phone, it can still be helpful for little things that you need to jot down, or remembering where another set of more complete notes are located. The great thing about adding notes is that you can also include images in your notes, similar to what Evernote lets you do. Being able to use text and images in your notes helps out in your learning experience as a student.

Conclusion:

That’s about it! There aren’t any options to configure whatsoever, staying in line with its simplistic design. This looks like a great idea and I’ll more than likely be using it quite often from now on. Hopefully a larger community can be built around this app, or hopefully more features will be integrated over time. It would be great if there would be a way to sync the information to your computer.

What do you think about the Studious homework app for Android? Is there another app or method that you think would work better for students? Let us know in the comments!

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