Whether you’re in K-12 or college, the Mac can be a great way to do your schoolwork and allow you to show your classmates and teachers who you are. This can be done through group projects, papers, slideshows and so much more.
With that said, here are some of the top apps that I believe every student with a Mac should have. Please note that some of these apps will cost money and are not all free.
- Pastebot ($9.99): This is an app that essentially saves everything that you copy. Every time you hit Command + C on your keyboard, whether that is text or a photo, this app will automatically save it. When you go into the app, it will have saved everything that you’ve copied. This makes it so that if you need information that you previously copied, you can still access it. Pastebot is also made by the same developers who made Tweetbot and Calcbot (Tapbots) for both Mac and iOS.
- Evernote (Free): Writing notes on your laptop is the quickest thing ever. You can create notebooks to help manage your classes and which notes go in which notebook like you do when it comes to actually writing out your notes. Evernote is available for both macOS and iOS.
- Citationsy (Free): For those who have to not only write, but properly source and cite a paper, this one is for you. The app does as it says; helps you cite your sources. Citationsy has styles such as APA, MLA and over 8,000 other citation styles. Again, the app is available on macOS and iOS.
- iWork and Microsoft Office (Free/$69.99-$119.99): I’m putting two in here since they are both the same thing but that iWork is Apple’s and Office is Microsoft’s. These apps will allow you to write papers, make slideshows and also make spreadsheets. With iWork, most teachers and professors will make you send items like Microsoft Word documents in Word format. Apple’s Pages equivalent can format it to the proper “.docx” file format right within the app. If you do prefer Microsoft Word, along with the rest of the Office suite, it is now available in the Mac App Store and college students should be able to get a free copy of it through their schools. Some high schools do the same too. iWork is available for free through the Mac App Store with the purchase of a new Mac.
- Spark (Free): Spark is a great third-party emailing app on the Mac. The design and UI of it are clean. Dark Mode is also a nice and new feature on the app too. Spark is additionally available on the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Apple Watch. All of them have the same design and clean UI as the Mac version too.
