Winter 2017

Useful Apps for Students, Faculty, and Staff

Here to Make Your Life a Little Easier

Ethan Tam

Useful Apps for Students, Faculty, and Staff

Having the right applications on your phone can help enhance your professional development, if you’re a faculty or staff member, and your academic performance, if you’re a student. This article will cover a few applications that can be useful whether you are trying to get through your degree(s) or your professional career at the University of Waterloo.

For all

Sleep Time

Sleep Time is based on the idea that being woken up in a deep sleep phase leaves you feeling more tired. Sleep is vital for both physical and mental health, however it is sometimes hard to get a good night’s sleep. Sleep Time is an alarm app that will help you get the most from your sleep by making sure you wake up feeling refreshed.

Sleep Time:

records your movements (which enables it to graph your sleeping cycle),
estimates when it is best to start waking you up (the longer that you use the application, the more accurate the estimate becomes).

The built-in alarm in the application begins to wake you up within a half hour ahead of the time that you set to be woken up. Near the end of your sleep cycle, if the app detects that you’re in a light sleep phase, it will quietly ring the alarm so that you can subconsciously know that it’s almost the time to wake up. Sleep Time leaves you feeling energized and ready to take on the day.

The app is available in both a free and paid for version which can be downloaded from both the Google Play store and the App Store. The paid version costs $2.79 and features high-quality soundscapes to fall asleep to, no ads and more. Other activity tracking devices usually range from $50-$300 and do not include the fitness plan and meal plan programs you get with Sleep Time. Also there is something nice about having all of the tracking functionality on your phone and not having to acquire a new bedside or wearable piece of tech.

Sleep Time has the option of upgrading to a premium membership which is paid for on a monthly or yearly basis. The cost is $39.99 for a 12-month membership or $13.99 for a 1-month membership. With the premium subscription you will have access to Premium Programs and Playpen Freeplay workouts, HD videos, dynamic and motivational audio, workout email summaries with tips and advice on healthy living, priority support and more.

Foursquare

Do you:

Feel lost in your own city?
Want to explore need places around town, but have no idea where to go?
Crave new cool places to hang out?
Want to familiarize yourself with the Waterloo/Kitchener area?

Downloading Foursquare is the solution for you. Foursquare is an app designed to help you and your friends find the best places to eat, shop, drink or just explore. Simply enter what you’re looking for as well as your location, and the app will bring up a list of all the places near you that you might want to go check out. To limit your search results and to better your chances of being satisfied, you can filter Top Picks or trending places. Foursquare is a monetarily free service but comes at the cost of granting the company access to your personal information such as your name, email address, phone number, birthday, Twitter and/or Facebook usernames, and location. Your location is only shared with others when you proactively “check in” however certain information may be provided to third parties by license or otherwise.

Pingstreet is another location-based discovery tool which has the added features of being styled to reflect the municipality you are in and gives real-time access to a wide range of news and current events in the area. Pingstreet may be a better option for those who would rather their personal information stay private as their privacy statement reads “Under no circumstances will eSolutionsGroup provide collected information to any third party with the exception of the analytics noted above unless compelled by a court order or applicable law”.

easyGO

Getting to places on time is very important. Finding the easiest/fastest route will definitely enable you to be punctual. With all the construction that is happening in Waterloo and Kitchener, it is important to always be up-to-date on how to get around. will ensure that you:

Know how to get to your destination,
Take the fastest route to arrive to your destination,
Stay up-to-date with detours and delays, and
Know the location of construction zones.

Another great transit app (for Android but not Apple) for the Waterloo region is BusStop. Its simple design allows you to add and give personalized names to bus stops you regularly use and then displays them all on one home page. This way there’s no confusion in trying to find your bus stop and you can view the next expected arrival time at your stop as soon as you open the app.

Faculty and Staff members

Kahoot

Whether you’re in class teaching or conducting a training session, keeping your audience’s attention can be hard. It is also hard to determine whether or not the key points of your lesson were effectively communicated.

There’s a much more fun and effective way to get instant feedback. Kahoot is a fun application that allows you to get instant feedback on the spot.

How does Kahoot work? It’s simple, you:

Create an account on the web,
Follow the instructions to create your quiz (quizzes can only be created on the web),
Share the game PIN that you will receive with your audience.

This application is amazing because it allows you to connect with people that are at a great distance (unlike iClickers). Your audience doesn’t need an account to participate, they can access your quiz online or they can download the Kahoot on their smart device.

Students

Study Blue

Study Blue is a great app made for study review which lets you connect with other students in your university classes and share review questions.

This app lets you create your own flash cards with either pictures from your photo library or text and then share the review slides. The free version of this app is limited in the number of slides you can access but is still great at making an accessible review package for yourself.

You are able to choose what style of questions the flash cards are presented in (ex. Multiple choice, fill in the blank or true and false) and in what order.

Back to Winter 2017 Home