Summer is officially behind us, and while I’m currently ignoring the fact that I’ll be cramming for exams again in a few weeks, preparing for a new semester has always been my favorite part of being a student. While back-to-school season once meant picking up fancy new pens and spending hours in a stationery store, it now involves just as much time deciding which apps are actually worth carrying into another semester.
Over the years, I’ve tried more student apps than I can count, and my setup has gradually become cluttered with tools that all do slightly different versions of the same thing. This time around, I’m simplifying things. I’ve narrowed my entire student toolkit down to five apps that cover pretty much everything I need.
Notion
My semester lives inside Notion
Notion is the one app I’ve been using since middle school, and I refuse to begin a new school year without it by my side. Before every semester begins, I spend an admittedly embarrassing amount of time setting up a fresh dashboard for it. Every course gets its own space, my notes have somewhere to live, and I keep all my important assignment and exam deadlines within reach.
I do all my note-taking exclusively within Notion, and since everything is already organized by course, I never have to wonder which folder or app I dumped something into three months ago. My schedule for the entire semester, as well as other things like my budgeting, reading lists, and personal to-dos, also live there.
The biggest reason I’ve stuck with Notion for so long, though, is that it can be as simple or as complicated as I need it to be. I can create databases to track assignments, embed lecture slides and PDFs, build pages for individual courses, and link out to the other tools I use without turning my setup into a maze of separate apps.
While the initial learning curve Notion comes with can be frustrating, I’ve always appreciated the flexibility the tool offers. You can keep things painfully simple with a few pages and checklists, or go all-in with databases, relations, templates, and different views of the same information. That flexibility matters a lot over the course of a semester, because the system that works during the first week of classes rarely looks exactly the same once assignments, readings, group projects, and exams start piling up.
I also use Notion as a sort of dumping ground for anything I know I’ll need again. Articles, useful links, reference material, project ideas, and random resources can all be tucked into the right course page instead of disappearing into my browser bookmarks. For group projects, I can share an individual page without handing classmates access to the rest of my setup, which means it can double as a lightweight collaborative workspace when I need it to.
That’s ultimately why Notion is the hardest app on this list for me to replace. It doesn’t necessarily do every job better than a dedicated app, but it gives everything else in my student toolkit somewhere to live.
Gemini Notebook
Basically my AI study partner
Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM, is my favorite app on this list by a fairly ridiculous margin. I’ve used it for just about everything over the past couple of months, but students are still the people I’d recommend it to most. Unlike a lot of AI tools that tack on a few education features and call it a day, NotebookLM feels like it was built around the parts of studying that are actually annoying.
At the start of every semester, I create dedicated notebooks for each course I’m taking. As the semester progresses, I fill these notebooks up with lecture slides, textbook chapters, PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, and whatever else a professor throws at me. From there, it becomes a sort of second brain for each course. I can ask questions about my material without worrying that the answer is being pulled from somewhere completely unrelated, since its responses are grounded in the sources I’ve given it and come with citations I can jump back to.
Where it really earns its place, though, is once exams start creeping closer. I use it to turn messy notes into study guides, generate quizzes, explain concepts I’m struggling with, and surface connections between material I probably wouldn’t have noticed myself. Audio Overviews are especially useful when I don’t feel like staring at another page of notes, since I can turn my course material into a podcast I can listen to while doing something else.
I’ve tried plenty of dedicated flashcard apps, PDF chatbots, AI summarizers, and study assistants over the years, but NotebookLM has gradually replaced most of them for me. I don’t love every direction Google has taken it recently, especially as it has expanded beyond being purely a study and research tool, but its core experience is still incredibly hard to beat as a student.
- OS
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Android, iOS, Web-based app
- Developer
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Google
- Pricing model
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Free
NotebookLM is Google’s AI-powered research notebook that reads what you upload and helps you transform it into structured summaries, explanations, and visuals.
Cap
Screen recordings shouldn’t require a video-editing degree
This is an app that’s very different from the rest of the list, and it’s one I only came across recently. However, given how many presentations, demonstrations, and project submissions are now handled virtually, I’ve always needed a screen recorder somewhere in my student toolkit.
A very recent example came up last semester, when one of my courses required me to record a roughly 10-minute presentation for a project. I used OBS Studio for it, which did the recording part perfectly well, but everything that came after was far more painful than it needed to be. I spent over a day editing the footage, fixing awkward pauses, trying to make the recording look presentable, and stitching everything together. Even after all that work, I still wasn’t particularly happy with the final result.
Cap is exactly the kind of tool I wish I’d had then. It’s a completely open-source, self-hostable alternative to screen-recording tools like Loom. Its Studio Mode records at full quality locally and gives you a built-in editor afterwards, so you can polish the recording without immediately throwing it into a separate video editor. More importantly for presentations, it can automatically add things like cursor effects and zooms that make a screen recording feel much more intentional without you manually keyframing every movement yourself. For a project where I’m walking through slides, demonstrating software, or showing code, that’s more than enough editing power for me.
I wouldn’t use Studio Mode every time, either. Cap also has an Instant Mode that’s better suited to those much smaller moments where recording a video is simply easier than explaining something over text. As a computer science student, a lot of what I’m working on already lives on my screen, so if I need to show a classmate why their code isn’t behaving as expected, demonstrate something to an instructor, or quickly walk someone through part of a project, I can record it and send them a shareable link almost immediately.
Given that Cap is an open-source project, you don’t need to pay anything to use its desktop recorder for personal use. Studio Mode is completely free locally, with no recording time limit, so I could comfortably use it for the sort of 10-minute presentations I was previously wrestling with in OBS!
Canva
It makes it look like I tried harder than I did
This is a classic that you’ll find as part of almost every student’s toolkit, and for good reason. The moment an assignment involves anything more visual than a standard document, Canva is usually the first app I reach for. I use it for presentations, posters, infographics, diagrams, resumes, and pretty much every other project I do throughout the semester.
Presentations are probably where I rely on it the most. Starting from a blank PowerPoint slide has never been particularly inspiring, whereas Canva gives me enough templates and prebuilt layouts that I can get the overall design out of the way and focus on what I’m actually trying to say. Once I find a style I like, keeping the rest of the deck consistent is also much easier than manually recreating the same formatting slide after slide.
It’s equally useful for the random assignments professors assign every now and then. If I’m asked to make an infographic, flowchart, poster, or anything else that’s slightly outside the usual essay, chances are Canva already has a template that gets me most of the way there! Its huge library of icons, graphics, stock images, and other design elements also means I rarely need to start hunting across the web for assets.
Google Tasks
Boring is exactly what I want from a to-do app
While I’ve experimented with Todoist, TickTick, Structured, and all the other fancy to-do list apps, I find myself coming back to Google Tasks every single semester. It doesn’t have nearly as many bells and whistles as most of its competitors, but I’ve realized that’s exactly why it works so well for me!
I usually keep separate lists for university, work, and personal tasks, which is enough structure to stop everything from blurring together without turning organization into a project of its own. For university, that means anything from assignments and readings to forms I need to submit and tiny tasks I’d otherwise convince myself I’ll remember.
Google Tasks also fits particularly well into the rest of my setup because it integrates directly with Google Calendar. Anything I give a date automatically shows up alongside the rest of my schedule, so I can see an assignment deadline in the same place as my classes and other commitments. Recurring tasks are handy for things I need to do every week, and if I don’t complete a dated task, it doesn’t simply disappear into yesterday’s list either.
I’m sorted this semester
The best part about all of the apps above is that you don’t need to pay a cent to build this setup for yourself. Their free tiers cover everything I realistically need as a student, which makes it much easier to recommend them without attaching yet another subscription to your semester. Now, all that’s left is actually surviving it!
