As a student who starts out every school year vowing to change my study habits, become more organized and quit procrastinating but ends up falling back into old habits within a week, I need something more than the average paper planner to keep me on track.
This has led me to a relatively new tool: planner apps.
Planner apps allow you to keep track of homework assignments, meetings and other societal obligations from whatever device you carry everywhere, rather than in a small notebook that may eventually wind up forgotten and unused in the bottom of your bag.
Although most smartphones come with default calendar apps, planner apps such as myHomework offer more efficient and convenient ways for you to manage your time.
myHomework is specifically designed for students’ schedules at any level of education. In it, you input your class schedule down to the specific day and hour. You have the option to color code your classes, which lets you demonstrate which classes you hate by assigning them an ugly brown or gray. You can view your class schedule in a monthly, weekly or daily view.
You can also add all of your assignments to your myHomework calendar, which you can customize for type of classwork and urgency, and they will show up on your calendar the day they are due. You can also set notification reminders to ensure you do that class reading, turn in that paper or show up for the final on time.
Additionally, since myHomework is an account-based app, you can download the app on multiple devices and have the same information on all of them.
The app offers benefits, but there are some drawbacks as well. Although all the above features are available for free, you have to pay $4.99 annually for a premium version in order to remove ads, unlock most of the customization themes and have the ability to add files to assignments. The app is designed specifically for school and classwork, so you need to use a different app to account for your extracurricular activities as well.
One other drawback is that myHomework works in collaboration with an app called Teachers.io so students can interact with teachers and find class-related information online, but none of K-State’s professors actively use Teachers.io. This means that unless your university uses the Teachers.io, you can’t enjoy that feature, and you’re stuck typing in every word on your screen the old-fashioned way. What would make this app more ideal for the average K-State student would be the ability to synchronize with K-State Online so that anything your teachers have on Canvas or Classic would automatically transfer to your planner.
myHomework can be downloaded for free from Apple’s App Stores, Google Play, Amazon Apps, the Windows Store and the Chrome Web Store, and it includes everything basic a student needs.
Although a $5 app may seem expensive compared to the free games you constantly download to fill up time that you could actually use productively, consider it both an investment and solid replacement for the $20 planner that will collect dust in your room all semester. I would rate myHomework 4/5 stars.
Chloe Creager is a sophomore in animal sciences and industry.
