School 2.0: Apps That Turn Education Upside Down

Apps, we have tons of them on our phones and tablets, we tap on them day and night. Check the weather, send a message, kill some time, make a grocery list, put on a tune, tell a secret, snap a photo, find a word, get directions, check in. But mobile apps have become so much more complex, and packed with functionalities that make our lives a bit simpler, but also those that have the potential to make our lives so much better.

First, the Internet has brought us access to all the information known to mankind, and the rise of mobile has brought them to the palms of our hands. Moreover, they made it possible for us to use the little bits of spare time we have scattered around the day and make great use of them. Through the few inches of screens in our hands we can learn a new language, a new skill, read a masterpiece, roam a museum, solve complex math problems, on the go.

Khan Academy – For Just About Anything

The story of Salaman Khan, an MIT and Harvard graduate who created an educational non-profit  Khan Academy is a well known one. It now has thousand of educational resources, lectures and tutorials about math, medicine, history, chemistry art history and just about any subject, and it reaches 10 million students a month. Oh, btw, if you’re practicing for your GRE’s, it’s pretty awesome for that too as it will give you a deeper understanding of the matter at hand, especially if numbers aren’t your strongest suit.

Lernen Sie Eine Neue Sprache!

I’m personally not a big fan of language learning apps. As a linguist, I always find something missing, something off, a methodology not quite fit for language learning. I have yet to find something to complain about when it comes to Duolingo. It’s fun, interactive, well designed in terms of language teaching, it challenges you and it actually produces results. It is currently available for Spanish, English, French, German, Portuguese and Italian, and works great for most of them, although you might want to grab a grammar book if you’re set on learning German. There’s a lot of grammar there that you might want to have at hand, neatly stacked in spreadsheets.

Pair it up with Wordflex, if you want to take your linguistic explorations to the next level. There are 2 million language nodes in this dictionary/thesaurus / interactive reference book that allows you to learn more about the words you’re using by navigating through a tree-like linguistic structure.

Why Not Attend Harvard? Or MIT? Or Princeton?

We couldn’t make this list without Coursera, the platform that brings content and courses from the best universities in the world to make their courses in physics, humanities, biology, business, programming, history, social studies… basically any field you’ve ever wanted to major in is there, and there are even structured certified programs, if you’re itching for a career change or just want to get awesome (and certified) in something new.  It’s available as an iPhone app so start browsing courses while you’re waiting int hat line, for the train or when you’re stuck in traffic.

Science Lessons Meet Life Lessons

Technology, Entertainment and Design, that’s what it used to stand for, but it has since become so much more.  It operates under the motto “ideas worth spreading”  and the speakers cover a wide range of topics they’re familiar with. TED Talk stages are places where curiosity meets science meets humanity, and it’s knowledge in its best form – passed on from human to human, information packed in a story that makes it matter to the masses. With the app you can listen to them on the go. In the time it takes you to listen to one single, you can learn something about how your brain works, or another culture, or a problem you weren’t aware of, solution you never knew existed.

Snap! I’ve Solved It!

Photomath doesn’t exactly make you smart as much as it allows your phone to be smart for you, at least where math’s concerned. It’s really simple- download the app, snap a photo of that horrible math problem you cannot untangle and let PhotoMath take care of it for you, leading you through all the steps of the process. Use it wisely (not to cheat on tests!) and you can unravel the mystery that math poses to a lot of us. And the best thing is, the app is totally free and will remain so. The team behind it mostly built it to demonstrate what their text recognition technology can do, and they just mught have launched every math teacher’s worst nightmare.