A digital toolkit for content discovery and curation, collating and organising information, communicating and collaborating, reading and research, writing and referencing, presentations and publishing. This list has been tailored to meet the general needs of my students in the core media and cultural studies units of a tertiary level creative media degree. All recommended apps and services are either free to use or offer free versions with some user restrictions. For more app options, check out these comprehensive listicles featuring an extensive selection of apps bundled into the following categories: Apps for Creativity, Apps for Writing and Blogging, Apps for Presentations and Apps for Content Curation.
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Train yourself to double or triple your reading speed, without sacrificing comprehension. Absorb knowledge, faster.
Hemingway App is a program that highlights common text errors. You can use it to catch wordy sentences, adverbs, passive voice and complicated words. If you see a yellow highlight, shorten the sentence or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red.
Milanote is an easy-to-use tool to organize your ideas and projects into visual boards. Add notes, images, links and files, organize them visually and share them with your collaborators. This is a great tool for managing creative projects and it's free.
A new tool that blends your everyday work apps into one. It's the all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.
Academia.edu is a place to share and discover scholarly research and connect with academics in your field of interest.
For many of us, key-typing is slow and thus time-consuming. Speechnotes lets you type at the speed of speech (slow & clear speech).
Speechnotes lets you move from voice-typing (dictation) to key-typing seamlessly. This way, you can dictate when convenient and type when more appropriate. You can also dictate and edit your text results right away, and continue dictating. This is a browser-based app which also makes it quick to launch and convenient for email and other online communication.
Switch effortlessly between using the keyboard and your voice to type out notes. Work smarter and more productively with fast, accurate dictation and transcription.
Annotate the web, with anyone, anywhere.
We’re a nonprofit on a mission to bring an open conversation over the whole web. Use Hypothesis right now to hold discussions, read socially, organize your research, and take personal notes.
MeisterTask is an intuitive collaboration and task management tool. Create a project, add as many team members as you want, assign tasks and follow each other’s progress. MeisterTask’s flexible project boards adapt to your workflow and make sure everyone is always on the same page.
WasteNoTime is a browser extension which is designed to help you manage your time spent on the Internet more efficiently.
Discord is the easiest way to talk over voice, video, and text. Talk, chat, hang out, and stay close with your friends and communities.
WorkFlowy is an organizational tool that makes life easier. It's a surprisingly powerful way to take notes, make lists, collaborate, brainstorm, plan and generally organize your brain.
Wordpress helps you create a free website or easily build a blog on WordPress.com. Hundreds of free, customizable, mobile-ready designs and themes. Free hosting and support.
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.
Diigo is a powerful research tool and a knowledge-sharing community. Use Diigo for better reading and research with annotation, highlighter, sticky notes, archiving, bookmarking & more.
Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.
Bring your life's work together in one digital workspace. Evernote is the place to collect inspirational ideas, write meaningful words, and move your important projects forward.
Feedly connects you to the information and knowledge you care about. We help you get more out of you work, education, hobbies and interests. The feedly platform lets you discover sources of quality content, follow and read everything those sources publish with ease and organize everything in one place.
Instant grammar checker, pagiarism checker - online proofreader. Check your grammar right from your browser or Microsoft Office. Improve your writing in emails, documents, social media posts, messages, and more.
The NaturalReader text-to-speech application converts PDF files, MS Word documents, and e-books into spoken words. NaturalReader saves you from experiencing eye strain, and lets you sit back, relax, and listen. It is also an efficient proofreading tool; it not only picks out mistakes in your work, but gives you a good sense of the natural flow of what you have written. NaturalReader is a great help to students with dyslexia or other learning difficulties.
Find over 80 million publications, 8 million researchers and 1 million answers to research questions. ResearchGate is a network dedicated to science and research. Connect, collaborate and discover scientific publications, jobs and conferences. All for free.
Improve your focus and boost your productivity. Block out annoying noises and create the right environment for working or relaxing. Noisli is the best and most beautifully designed productivity companion throughout your day. No matter if you are in an environment where it is too loud or too quiet, with Noisli you can create and listen to your favorite background sounds in order to focus and concentrate on your tasks.
Create and edit web-based documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Store documents online and access them from any computer. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files.
Automatically reference everything correctly with CiteThisForMe. Save your work forever, build multiple bibliographies, run plagiarism checks, and much more.
Rewordify.com helps you read more, understand better, learn new words, and teach more effectively.
Keeping up with the latest research is tough. Millions of new research papers are published each year. Then there’s reports, white papers and company documents. Your usual research tools can find the most recent or influential ones, but you still have hundreds of papers on your desktop – and no time to read them. Skimming the abstract doesn’t give you enough insight into how important a paper could be to your work.
Habitica is a free habit building and productivity app that treats your real life like a game. With in-game rewards and punishments to motivate you and a strong social network to inspire you, Habitica can help you achieve your goals to become healthy, hard-working, and happy.
Intelligent Speaker is text-to-speech browser extension which transforms any written text into speech and reads it aloud. It works with web pages and local files. Intelligent Speaker supports Google Docs. You can listen to books, articles, news and any written content. Our product runs on the best text-to-speech engine technology which guarantees human-like voice, smart text recognition and natural sounding.
When you find something you want to view later, put it in . Pocket lets you save articles, videos or other various content on the web so you can easily find and read them later.
Thesaurus and word tools for your creative needs. Search for synonyms, antonyms, rhymes, sentences, plurals, past tense, present tense and lots more.
Create, share and collaboratively work on mind maps with MindMeister, the leading online mind mapping software.
Mendeley is a free reference manager and an academic social network. Manage your research, showcase your work, connect and collaborate with over six million researchers worldwide.
Zotero is a powerful, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources and then share the results of your research.
Pinterest is a visual discovery tool that you can use to find, share, organise and present ideas for all of your projects and interests.
Download free Acrobat Reader DC software, the only PDF viewer that lets you read, search, print, and interact with virtually any type of PDF file.
Apogee creates MLA/APA-formatted customizeable citations in one click, so you can focus on your research, not your cites.
Headspace has one mission: to improve the health and happiness of the world. And with millions of users in more than 190 countries, we’re well on our way. You can try Headspace for yourself and learn the essentials of meditation and mindfulness with our free Basics pack.
Adobe Digital Editions provides you with a way to view and manage media rich eBooks and other digital publications. With Digital Editions you can read EPUB and PDF eBooks downloaded via your EBrary subscription on your desktop computer.
Sleepytime helps you figure out when to go to sleep and when to wake up, by estimating sleep cycles based on 90 minutes each. This is the app store link, but it's also available on Android.
Is your computer keeping you up late? f.lux is a free download that warms up your computer display at night, to match your indoor lighting.
Stand Up! is our fun, flexible work break timer. By now you know that sitting down is slowly killing you, and we want to help you live longer. It's as simple as standing up! It's also great for RSI sufferers, or anyone that needs to take regular breaks.
Thank you Jodie! This is a very helpful list and so is the layout of your page, it inspires me!