10 really useful apps for autistic students
For autistic students, school learning often needs a variety of supports to ensure proper comprehension and retainment. Luckily, with the development of helpful apps for students with special needs, there are more resources than ever for autistic students to learn in a way that best complements their unique way of learning.
Despite what you might hear, especially from parents, smartphones really aren’t that bad. In fact there there are thousands of apps out there that are genuinely make student life more productive and time efficient. We’ve put together a list of our favourites down below.
1. Evernote
Evernote is probably the most popular note-taking app in world and has developed a solid reputation among students and professionals. It is known for its extensive features with a simple and accessible interface, allowing users to efficiently capture, organize, and search notes. It also syncs between several devices and integrates with third-party programs.
- Capture, access, organize, and search the notes
- Sync and easily switch with other devices
- Simple and elegant navigating and easy to grasp
- Additonal features such as task management system, Web Clipper, Document Scanning, Character Recognition, Tasks, and Calendar
- Integration with apps like Google Calendar, Google Drive, Outlook, MS Teams, and Gmail makes it extremely useful for working students
Evernote
https://evernote.com/
2. Google Keep
Google celebrated it’s 25th anniversary in 2023, and continues to dominate all our lives. so it will come as no surprise that they have tools and programs to cover almost everything.
Google Keep is part of Google Workspace for Education and is a robust Google tool that can help teachers and students create and share notes, lists, and reminders. It is generally seen as a more basic alternative to Evernote and is completely free, but this depends on your preferences and needs.
Google Keep is loaded with fun features that can help students get organized, track progress, take notes, and more.
- Google Keep will help students manage their time and track their assignment tasks, set up reminders, so they don’t forget and manage their time in and out of class.
- Bookmark web pages and add them to your Google Keep notepad. This is particularly useful for saving relevant classroom websites, tutorials, and resources that students need for particular assignments and throughout the year.
- Google Keep makes it easy to keep lists. Students can keep their spelling and vocabulary lists and easily access it from any device to study.
- Google Keep allows you to set up time and date reminders to remember all of your due dates. It also helps you remember to complete tasks when you arrive at a certain location. For instance, students may need to remember to talk to a certain teacher when they arrive at school in the morning. With a location-based reminder, Google Keep will send a notification to your device when you arrive at that location.
- In Google Keep, students can jot down quick notes to themselves about a particular class or subject. They can also share those notes with other students in their group or class. If the notes get too long, you can just copy them to Google Docs.
- With Google Keep, students can easily keep track of each project, tasks, notes, and due dates. These notes can be shared with the teacher so he/she can monitor progress and help students learn how to manage big projects.
- Google Keep has a great feature that allows you to draw on top of an image. This means you can annotate and illustrate learning!
- School can be very hectic with a lot of daily tasks and procedures to remember. Google Keep enables students to create checklists to remember things like to drink water, homework, bring school bag back home.
Google Keep is part of Google Workspace for Education and integrates sweetly with Google Docs.
Google Keep
https://www.google.com/keep/
3. Google Doc’s Voice Typing tool
If you have difficulty transferring your thoughts into the written word, Google Docs’s Speech-to-text software can be a real game-changer. The app can also be of particular use to people who have Dyspraxia.
The accuracy and ease of Google Doc’s Voice Typing tool was described by some as “shockingly accurate”, which we think is debatable. As useful as it can be, we recommend speaking slowly and clearly and using proper grammar.
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- Voice typing can also help to remove the challenges of speed note-taking and prioritising information some autistic students face in lessons or lectures.
- Enables students to create their own transcript of lessons or lectures
- As schools, and in particular colleges and universities are becoming more inclusive lessons and lectures are often recorded for students to review and process at their own pace. This allows students to listen to the recording through their headphones and speak the recording out loud as I they like to capture notes.
- Google Docs voice typing saves students time by allowing users to transcribe audio content in real time, reducing the time required to transcribe content significantly.
- Google Docs voice typing is very user-friendly and straightforward, making it accessible to users of all skill levels.
- Google Docs’ audio-to-text feature is free with every Google Docs account, making it an affordable solution for audio transcription needs
Google Docs
https://www.google.co.uk/docs/about/
4. Grammerly
Grammarly is a writing tool that acts as your collaboration partner in every stage of the writing process—helping you eliminate grammar mistakes from your writing, brainstorm initial ideas, format citations accurately, and everything in between, so you submit your best work with integrity.
Using a artificial intelligence algorithm, students can perform essential check on all of their writing, quickly checking in real time for any mistakes.
- Free to use, but there is a paywall for the more outstanding features
- Checks all the grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes with high accuracy
- Easy to understand explanations
- Can check the tone of your message
- User-friendly and easy to use
Grammerly
https://grammerly.com
5. Stay Focused
If you are concerned that you may be spending too much time on social media, messageing apps, or just your smart phone in general, Stay Focused may be a useful app for you. Stop wasting valuable time on phone. Focus on other important things in life
- Helps reduce mobile phone usage by blocking apps
- Helps students focus on their work or studies
- Helps increase concentration and productivity
- Reduces valuable time wasted on phone
- Track daily time spent while using the apps
- Quick play pause without changing existing settings
Stay Focused
https://www.stayfocused.me/
6. My Study Life
My Study Life is a cross-platform education planner and study management system that enables students to keep track of their entire schedule in one app. Students set up their classes by entering subject names, teachers, classrooms and times, which are then entered into a weekly schedule that students can easily access and use. Students can also enter holidays and exams into the app, allowing them to see what is coming up in the school year.
- Track and get reminders for your classes, homework and exams.
- Easy-to-use interface
- Users can store homework, assignments, reminders, and revision tasks in the cloud, accessible anywhere
- Users can keep important exams alongside their classes and revision tasks
- Users receive reminders for unfinished tasks, upcoming exams, and classes before they start
- My Study Life seamlessly syncs data between devices, allowing users to use the app even when offline
My Study Life
https://mystudylife.com/
7. Instapaper
Instapaper is a simple ‘read-it-later’ social bookmarketing app for saving web pages to read later on your device. It enables students to turn web content – articles, stories, posts, videos, and even long emails – into a great reading experience. It a very accessible way to save and store articles for reading: offline, on-the-go, anytime, anywhere.
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- Drag & drop to reorder
- Offers a speed reading feature
- Customisable swipe options
- Choose a different font, increase or decrease the font size, space out paragraphs and alter the indentation
Instapaper
https://www.instapaper.com
8. Microsoft Lens
Office Lens is a mobile scanning app that allows users to take photos of documents, whiteboards, receipts, business cards, and other written objects. Lens automatically formats the scan to straighten, crop, and color-correct before exporting as a PDF or image file.
Office Lens is really useful for students, in particular students who find copying from whiteboards difficult, as you have all you have to do is hold your camera up to the board and take a picture, and the app will crop out everything around it.
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- It allows users to scan and create digital copy of any printed or written text1
- Copy tables from pictures
- Convert handwriting to text
- Scan physical books to electronic formats
Office Lens
Office Lens for Windows 10 is no longer available for download from the Microsoft Store as of January 1, 2021. To continue to enjoy all Office Lens features, we recommend downloading and using the latest version of Microsoft Lens for iOS or Microsoft Lens for Android on your mobile device.
9. Mathway
Mathway is a free app and online math problem solver for students who need a bit of assistance with their math. Mathway helps solves math problems in various mathematical fields such as algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, and statistics. It’s been described as like having a tutor in your pocket.
It provides step-by-step solutions to the problems you enter, and you can also use it to graph equations and inequalities.
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- Supportive features for guided practice
- Solve problems in basic math, pre-algebra and algebra, calculus, statistics, finite math, chemistry, trigonometry, and linear algebra
- Allows the user to take photos of the math equation and solve it for users
- Supports any type of equation with multiple variables, brackets, parenthesis, and special operators
- The glossary contains more than 300 math concepts, definitions, and principles
Mathway
https://www.mathway.com/
Platforms
Android, iOS
10. Google Drive
Google Drive is a free cloud-based file storage service developed by Google. Google Drive enables users to store, access, and share media files and documents in the cloud and online.
You can access Google Drive on the web by heading to drive.google.com, or you can download the free Android app. You can also view all your files via the Drive folder on your PC with Google Drive for Desktop, but you need to download the software first.
- Access files from just about any device with an internet connection
- Integrates with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, cloud-native collaboration apps
- Helps free up space on your local hard drive
- Keep files organised and in one place
Google Drive
https://www.google.com/drive/
To find out about how I AM can offer support contact us at admin@i-am autism.org.uk or give us a call on 0161 866 8483
