Do apps help students thrive or waste their time?

Since most phone apps are free, a majority of the people who own a smartphone download apps to their hearts’ content.

Some apps provide a lot of helpful tools and information to become more efficient in life, and the others provide entertainment, whether it’s a game or YouTube. For students, some helpful apps are the Remind app (a teacher-to-student app to provide homework info and communication) or the Grades app (where students can simply access their Aeries portal). Being students, we’re also going to download apps that heavily include entertainment, like Snapchat or Instagram.

How do apps help us thrive in school? There are many apps like Grades and Remind that are extremely helpful to students. If we are ever pressed for time and we need to edit a Google document on the go, the various Google apps provide an on-the-go edit system for students. If students forget to write down their homework, they can check the Remind app for all the homework assignments posted by the teacher. There are even apps that help students with their math homework!

Even though these apps help us with our homework, we all talk about how we procrastinate way too often. Our procrastination is mostly influenced by our phones. But what’s on our phones that makes us so distracted? Apps. Social media and other entertainment apps take 75-90 percent of our time when we’re doing homework. Sometimes, knowing what people did today is way more important and exciting than figuring out how to draw a sine graph. These entertainment apps keep us distracted and awake in the middle of the night.

Overall, the whole app idea is like a double-edged sword. It can either help students’ efficiency or impede it.