Productivity Tools: Focus To-Do

Simply put, productivity tools use colors, graphs, illustrations, pictures, videos, activities, and stores to enhance the impression of a lesson on a student, which will make it easier for the student to remember, use, and apply the lesson to life and future assignments. I think that time management, meeting, google docs, email, and calendar apps can be particularly useful in education, especially for someone taking on a high workload in online education. I think that the effective way to use these tools in education, particularly for someone taking on a fully online workload, is to organize your time and studying all in one place with apps such as Focus To-Do (my personal favorite productivity tool).

 

Focus To-Do allows you to set up all of your courses for the semester and put all of the assignments and due dates into it. Moreover, you can assign each task a level of importance, and each class is color coded. But the special thing about this app is that when you go into an assignment, it will start timing you. You can set it, so your phone goes on do not disturb when you turn on an assignment if you want. At the end of the day, you can see how much you studied, what you were studying, and how many tasks you completed. At the end of the week and month, you can see exactly how many hours you spent on each subject and a pie chart of how much time you spent on one course in relation to the other courses. This helps with accountability and being able to meet your goals. Also, for each task completed and minute spent on studying, you get "sunlight" to nurture your tree, which with time, you see grow the more you study.

I do not think that these specific tools are effective in educating on a specific topic on their own, but some of them are great facilitators for connecting complicated concepts, such as mindmaps, google sheets, and google docs. I don't know if learning apps fall under the productivity tool category, but I would most certainly say that they are helpful in educating. I think that the advancement in tools/apps in education will just be within the trend that they have been following; people are going to create effective tools to address specific problems that they have identified students struggling within the classroom and finding up ways to address that through productivity tools.