As another semester approaches, many college students are turning to iPads as productivity tools. Beyond just taking notes, there’s a rich opportunity to build skills and projects that stand out. We’ve compiled a list of apps that are affordable, practical, and student-approved.
How we chose these apps
We focused on three key benefits:
- Affordable – suitable for budget-conscious students.
- Practical – effective tools for workflow, study, and skill building.
- Approved – good ratings, solid value.
Our picks
- Notion
Great for organizing all aspects of college life: class notes, assignments, research, group projects. You can create templates for each course and keep everything in one place.
- Grammarly
If you’ve got essays, reports or applications to write, this app helps with grammar, style, tone and clarity. A strong, polished writing skill is always résumé-worthy.
- Trello
Originally popular in corporate settings, but very useful for students who need to track tasks, deadlines, group work progress, and more. Learning task-management is a skill itself.
- Forest
A fun productivity timer app: you “plant a tree” when you focus for a set time. Using it builds good habits of focus and self‐discipline, another soft skill that looks good on your résumé.
- Mint
College may be your first time managing your own finances. Mint helps you budget, track spending, and build financial literacy, which is a skill many employers appreciate.
- Quizlet
An excellent study tool: create flashcards, fill-in-the-blank tests, even games. But beyond studying, you could use it to design your own quiz sets (for peer tutoring, group review sessions), building teaching or content-creation skills.
- GoodNotes
For handwritten or stylus notes, organization into notebooks, collaboration with classmates. Being able to take well-organized, visually appealing notes is a micro-skill that helps throughout a degree, and into your professional years.
- Apple Freeform
This app uses an infinite canvas, great for mind-mapping ideas, brainstorming, or rapid sketching of concepts. It encourages creativity and idea generation, which are valuable skills.
- Shortform
Provides concise summaries of books, helpful for literature-heavy courses. But you can also use it to learn how to summarise and synthesize information, a critical academic and professional skill.
- Studio
If you’re in a creative course (art, illustration, animation, 3D modeling), this app turns your iPad into a graphics tablet, letting you mirror desktop apps and build digital art workflows. Great for building a creative portfolio.
- hyperPad
hyperPad is a “no-code” development app on iPad. Why this matters for college students:
- You can build custom apps, quizzes, interactive tools or games without needing full coding experience.
- It gives you a strong project to showcase on your résumé: “Developed interactive quiz app for peer learning using hyperPad.”
- It helps you develop digital-design thinking, logic, UI/UX sensibility, even asset-creation skills (import graphics, sounds, animations).
- It encourages self-initiative: building something beyond just coursework shows potential employers or grad schools you’re proactive and tech-savvy.
- Even if you never release a full game, the process of creating something interactive gives you hands-on experience of app dev mindset.
Tip ideas for using hyperPad Starter, our free version:
- Create a custom quiz app for your next course: flashcards + mini-game.
- Build an app for a club or student-group: event tracker, member quiz, onboarding.
- Turn a semester project into an interactive tool: visualize research findings, create an interactive infographic.
- Add this to your résumé: “Designed and implemented interactive iPad app using hyperPad (visual logic, asset importation, user interface design)”.
hyperPad is more than a fun developer app. Build real skills and impactful projects that let you apply your skills meaningfully. Join the unlimited version when you are ready!
Next Steps
These are the best iPad apps that can help you grow your productivity and skill set, not just what you need now. Are you aiming to become more organized? Build better study habits? Develop a portfolio? Learn how to create interactive tools?
With this list, you’ve got tools for the basics and can help you take your skill-set to the next level.
