The Best Student Planner

How Many Stars: [rating=4]

For whatever reason, teachers and professors derive some twisted pleasure from overloading you with course work. I’m willing to wager it stems from a psychological condition rooted deep in a person’s psyche. Or maybe it’s revenge from their student days. Hard to say. Either way, more likely than not, you have loads of work that you have to find time to do between class and engaging in the social habits that define your student years.

Finding a strategy for planning academic obligations is crucial for success in school. Whether you’re the type who can manage everything in your head or every single task needs to be on a note card pinned above your bed, finding what works for you can make the difference between success and well, “retaking” a class.

If you find you’re the type that needs things down on paper, I highly recommend myHomework. The app allows you to set up your schedule and organize approaching assignments and tests. Designed to be used by High School and College students (although there’s no reason to think your Middle School sibling/cousin couldn’t benefit), the application is optimized for phones, tablets, and the web. And what really gives this app the edge on other planners in the market is that it allows to create an account to keep your schedule synced across devices! I can’t tell you how important yet overlooked this is!

Design wise, this app is clean and easy to navigate. It doesn’t implement the Holo standard, but that said, it’s also multi-platform (Android, iOS, Windows 8), so it would actually be more surprising to find it using the Android specific UI. Even still, the experience is clean and seamless on both the phone and web experience. It does suffer the similar fate of numerous apps when it comes to tablets though. While it does use a tablet specific interface, it still doesn’t quite know how to utilize all that space, which gives it a somewhat “under designed” feeling. That said, the functionality will probably leave you forgetting about design frustrations.

This app is also paired with Teacher.io, a planning application for instructors, but that ultimately doesn’t mean much considering few teachers actually use it. Ultimately, I would love to see some kind of calendar integration (ideally with Google Calendar, but Outlook and iCal would be great as well). That kind of integration would make things really helpful for planning, especially if you don’t do all you life planning in myHomework.

I also wouldn’t mind some kind of Evernote or Google Drive integration for note managing and linking. When I was testing out the app Studious, I found it offered built in note taking, which I thought was a great idea if there could be some beefier integration and sharing options.

So don’t let your instructors get you down! Stay on top of your work by organizing it with the excellent myHomework, which is currently free in the Google Play Store.

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