Free Tools and Resources for Students
Money plays a very important part of student life. In fact, money is viewed as causing more stress than diet, relationships, grades, and social life, with 79% of students worrying about making ends meet. Many students believe that this falls down to the fact that there isn’t enough funding or support to help them through their studies.
While it might not be possible to increase your income as a student (you are supposed to juggling assignments, lectures, reading, group work, and placement after all), but it is worth looking at ways that you can reduce your spending.
One way that you can minimise your outgoings is by taking advantage of all the free resources that you can use while being a student (and after you graduate). Here are some of the best free resources for students.
By taking advantage of this free student research guide and the resources below students can reduce their outgoings.
Google Drive
Google drive is a free, cloud-based Microsoft-style cluster of programs. You can share your work with your peers too if you’re doing group projects.
- Google sheets = Excel
- Slides = Powerpoint
- Google docs = Word
- Forms = Surveys
Using google drive is much cheaper alternative to Microsoft office. While it’s important that you have the software available to do your coursework you can always copy and paste across any writing from google drive to Microsoft when you go to your college or university library. If you’re on the lookout for captivating powerpoint templates designed specifically for educational purposes, consider exploring the various creative options available on different websites.
ReciteWorks
Free software that checks academic writing to insure that all references are cited correctly. Recite is optimised for those who use APA or Harvard referencing styles.
Sci-hub
Sci-Hub is a website that provides free resources to students. Using this website you can access millions of research papers otherwise locked behind paywalls. I’ve purposely not linked to Sci-hub as the website is often taken down due to copyright issues.
You could use this website to access free academic literature or choose to pay big publishing companies that do not compensate the researchers who contribute to the journals.
Amazon Prime Student
Prime Student gives students all the benefits of Prime membership, with a free 6-month trial and then 50% off the normal price of Prime, including:
- Get unlimited One-Day Delivery on millions of items
- Stream thousands of movies and TV shows with Prime Video
- Access exclusive student offers including 10% off textbooks from Amazon
- Listen to over 2 million songs on Prime Music
While this might be viewed as a luxury it’s a great free resource for students and can be a free alternative to Netflix (for 6 months at least).
Zoom/Skype
Free video calling software. Both have options for voice/audio recording interviews and meetings. When I was a student I had a job interview via Skype and I’ve used Zoom for digital work meetings.
Evernote
Evernote is great for qualitative and textual triage work. Its more than a database, it can suggest thematic linkages across your docs. Free and paid versions available.
Otter.ai
Free transcription software. Not only does this program facilitate transcription but it also allows you to correct words by sound and identifies common words in transcripts.
DROPBOX
I used Dropbox throughout my degree to back up university work and to access assignments from multiple computers! Dropbox lets you store all your files in one central place. They’re safely synced across all your devices meaning that you can access them anywhere from your PC/phone/tablet!
This was my favourite free resource as a student! I know many of my university peers wish they’d saved lots of their assignments to a cloud instead of a pen drive or university PC.
GRAMMARLY
Grammarly is a free writing app that automatically checks your content for grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice, and style mistakes and suggests ways for you to make your posts more clear and effective. I have the Chrome extension and check all my writing before I publish/send it.
WORDPRESS
WordPress is (in my opinion) the easiest blogging and website content management system there is. Blogging is a great way to sane through your studies and you could even earn money through your blog!
Open Science Framework
A free, public platform for documenting the research process and sharing data and analysis. Discover projects, data, materials, and collaborators on OSF that might be helpful to your own research.
R
Always free software for data analysis. Requires knowledge of coding, but there is a very supportive R community, and YouTube has various, free R tutorials.
More Free Resources for Students
Student Discount: Updated Guide
I hope that this list is going to help you ace your next exam or assignment! If you’ve found more free resources for students please do let me know in the comments below as I would love to keep adding to this list!
This post was featured by Twinkl in their Exams and Revision Blog