For a long time I was a smartphone skeptic – happy with my dumbphone all the way up to 2010 and of course very judgmental of anyone I deemed to be “wasting time” with such a silly device. Well, here we are in 2015 and I have had my smartphone for more than a year and just like everyone said, it has become an indispensable tool.

Naturally I have a lot of cool apps right? (like neko atsume!) Sure – but there are a couple that actually help me day to day with my job.

#1 Wabbitemu

Wabbitemu will turn your phone into a TI83, TI84, or even the fancy pants TI84+. Writing an exam key and too lazy to go find your graphing calculator? Well this has you covered. I went old school and set it up as an 83. This is a screenshot straight off my phone (it sets it up so the phone menus only come up when you click).

 

Beautiful!

#2 Camscanner

Our online students take all of their exams on campus at our testing center. In the past, when I graded exams, the online students wouldn’t have the same experience of seeing all the feedback since they wouldn’t necessarily see the whole exam unless they picked it up. Camscanner has changed all of this. With a few clicks, you can create a really nice PDF using any picture or pictures (each picture can be set to be its own page).

 

So take a document, snap a pic of each page, and boom – nice PDF handout.

The screenshot above is from a time where I wrote the entire key to a practice exam on the board but hadn’t yet typed it up. Realizing that about 50% of my students were just taking pictures of the key instead of writing it down, I decided to test if the app would make a good PDF from something like this and it did. Really impressive (and now I don’t have to type up the key).

Honorable Mention: Panecal Plus

I can’t explain it, but when I want to just do a quick calculation, I tend to want to use a simpler calculator. That said, the default calculator on android is just TOO simple. Here is where Panecal Plus comes in. This is an awesome little scientific calculator.

 

There is a free version supported by ads, but I like to pay for an app when it’s good so that I can help support developers more directly.

The “I don’t know why I have this but it is still cool” app: R Console Premium

One other honorable mention goes to R Console for Android. You ever just want to code a quick simulation but you aren’t near a computer and don’t care if you can save your code. Yeaaah. Maybe I haven’t either but it doesn’t mean this app isn’t cool.

 

I swear that I really have used this a few times! How often was it NOT because it just looks cool? Well, I don’t know the answer to that lol.

 

And here you thought this post was going to talk about wolfram alpha right?