It can often be difficult to get study skills taken seriously. Students tend to battle on with their main course when adopting better study methods could make all the difference. I work in study support, trying to help and persuade students to do things more effectively. But still, planners and to-do lists get stuffed into bags and forgotten, notes make no sense, planning doesn’t happen, mind maps are old hat.

However, technology gives us a new line of attack. An array of apps and websites has revolutionised the ways students can organise, learn and revise. Many of these still feel new and exciting. The challenge is to find technologies that your students will really adopt and use every day. The following suggestions can be tried out in tutorials, class time or support sessions.

Tools at their fingertips

Remember that your students’ smartphones and tablets are powerful organisers that they carry with them at all times. The pre-installed tools are often the easiest to use: calendars, sticky notes and alarms are simple ways of organising upcoming work. Taking photos of timetables and assignment briefs is equally simple but brilliant. Lost scraps of paper should be history.

For students who are keen to be organised, a number of apps can help to synchronise their notes across all devices. Evernote, Any.do and Google Keep all operate in similar ways. To encourage frequent use, the login process must be simple - for example, via Facebook on phones.

Talking textbooks

Researching assignments has been transformed by text-to-voice technology, which is especially helpful for supporting students with special educational needs and disabilities.

If your college has ClaroRead or Dragon, this software is worth using, but free assistive technology exists in Word, PDF viewers and most browsers as add-on extensions. Voice type and speed can be adapted to your student’s reading/listening speed. The catch is that each one is slightly different to set up, so you may need some guidelines from IT.

Many students already learn more from video than text; a YouTube topic search can yield instant, transformative results.

Students often struggle to make good notes - but do they need to? Phones and organiser apps can rapidly take dictated notes (Word has the technology, but is clunky). Classes, especially practicals such as in hairdressing, sport or construction, can be videoed to watch again later. Pictures can be taken of smartboard notes or textbook pages. All this helps students who write slowly or reluctantly.

Padlet is an ideal platform for keeping notes and ideas in one place, whether its documents, weblinks or videos. Easy to set up and intuitive to use, it enables students to store their own notes and share with others if they wish.

Memorisation and recall have become a lot more fun with the advent of free apps and sites such as Quizlet and StudyStack. Dates, definitions, vocabulary, facts - students test themselves with a variety of games, and can share their lists or play against other students in a virtual classroom. Easy to set up, these apps are great for retention when used for regular revision, little and often.

Instant brainstorming

Planning and writing essays is the big one. Students at all levels and across the ability range need help with starting and structuring assignments. There’s nothing wrong with the traditional brainstorm on paper. But different versions - perhaps grouped on sticky notes - can be captured on camera for comparison.

I find my students often struggle to generate ideas from scratch, but help is at hand in the form of InstaGrok. Enter a key concept (“UK tourism”, say) and an instant brainstorm is conjured up, with topic facts, weblinks and even relevant videos embedded. MindMup is one of several mind-mapping tools that make this process more fun, with professional-looking results.

For structuring, ReadWriteThink has some good online essay maps that guide students through a structure to produce a finished digital or printed plan.

Finally, don’t overwhelm the student with technology. It’s there to help, not to make life more complicated - and it should be fun to use. So if it takes too much time or becomes frustrating in any way, ditch it. There’s always something else. Now, let’s see if there’s an app for working out what to ditch and how…

Garry Britton is a lecturer in study support and a digital learning champion at Bracknell and Wokingham College