12 Best AI Tools for Students to Accelerate Learning Process

Students are among the prime beneficiaries of the AI revolution, along with creative professionals and businesses.

While AI tools can provide immense value depending on one’s work, concerns persist about students becoming too reliant on automation and losing critical thinking skills.

Banning AI tools (especially ChatGPT) in schools and universities for this reason alone seems unjustified, however.

Countless AI tools can complement student creativity and accelerate learning.

In this article, we bring you the best ones available right now.

1. Motion

Motion is an AI productivity app and a smart personal assistant that plans your day and keeps you on track with tasks, meetings, and projects.

The coolest feature is the intelligent calendar that auto-schedules your day based on your workload.

Additionally, a slick task manager allows you to organize assignments and projects.

Moreover, there is a meeting scheduler that books slots for you, and workload tracking so you don’t overcommit.

You can dedicate workspaces for each class to centralize all the related stuff—assignments, notes, and deadlines.

You can also set up recurring tasks for regular study sessions and let the AI plan the optimal routine.

Key Features

• Intelligent calendar
• Project and task manager
• Meeting scheduler
• Workload reporting
• Calendar syncing
• Integrations (Zapier, Zoom, Google, etc.)

Price

Motion has a 7-day free trial. The Individual paid plan starts at $34/month ($19/month on annual billing).

2. Grammarly

Grammarly’s AI writing assistance is a powerful tool that leverages generative AI to enhance your writing across various digital spaces.

It understands your context and preferred writing style, providing a tailored experience to meet your specific needs.

As a student trying to churn out essays, reports, and more, you require all the help you can get crafting solid drafts.

That’s where Grammarly comes in.

It works like your own personal editor, giving you real-time feedback and suggestions as you write in Google Docs or Microsoft Word (or in Grammarly’s editor itself).

I’m talking grammar fixes, better word choice, and tidier sentence structure.

But it goes way beyond basic spellcheck. Grammarly’s AI actually adapts to your personal writing style over time, helping you find your own voice.

My favorite part is the brainstorming features.

Shoot Grammarly a prompt and its generative AI will get those creative juices flowing with fresh suggestions. You can even ask it to rewrite entire sections if you want an alternate take.

Key Features

• Adapts to your personal writing style over time
• Provides real-time grammar fixes, word choice suggestions, etc
• Offers fresh ideation prompts when you’re stuck
• The Rewrite tool generates alternate versions of your writing
• Email replies summarize messages and prompt quick responses

Price

Grammarly’s free plan enables you to generate text with 100 AI prompts per month. Beyond that, you’ll need a paid Business plan that starts at $25 per month ($15 per month on annual billing) offering up to 2000 AI prompts per month.

3. Turnitin

Turnitin offers an awesome suite of tools that helps students uphold academic integrity. It uses advanced AI to check student work for plagiarism and ensure assignments are original.

I love how it seamlessly integrates into existing school workflows.

The AI writing detection is super reliable at spotting both AI-written and human-written plagiarized text, so you can feel confident submitting your essays and assignments through Turnitin.

It helps create an environment where academic misconduct is quickly addressed, making it easier for everyone to produce their best original work.

Turnitin also provides great feedback to boost your skills.

It points out any plagiarized passages in your writing and offers suggestions to improve original thinking.

Pretty sweet of it!

No matter your education level, Turnitin has customized tools—from higher ed all the way down to secondary school.

What sets Turnitin apart?

It has a comprehensive content database, awesome 24/7 tech support, and a people-first approach to AI.

Key Features

• Flexible assessment solutions for educators
• Actionable feedback to develop original thinking skills
• 24/7 tech support and customized training
• Integrations with over 100 educational systems
• Tools to check for various forms of plagiarism

Price

Turnitin does not offer individual license purchases or subscriptions. Many academic institutions offer plagiarism detection services from Turnitin (mine did).

Your job is to find out whether your school, college, or university uses Turnitin.

Pro Tip: Start by heading over to your library and asking the assigned librarian. Speaking from experience, the librarian at our university was assigned the use of Turnitin and to get access to it, we had to email him (from the university ID) attaching the Word/PDF file we wanted to get checked.

4. WolframAlpha

WolframAlpha is an AI-powered computational knowledge engine that students can harness to get expert-level answers to complex questions across a variety of subjects.

It goes beyond a standard search engine by doing dynamic computations based on its extensive Curated Data repository with over 10 trillion pieces of information.

For example, if you’re struggling with a math problem, WolframAlpha can provide step-by-step solutions to walk you through it, instead of just showing links to other sites.

It can also generate detailed reports, analyses, graphs, and tables to help visualize concepts from chemistry to finance using its advanced algorithms and equations.

Whether you’re working on a science experiment and need precise weather or location data, studying history and want details on past world leaders, or prepping for an econ test by analyzing stock performance, WolframAlpha has you covered.

It even has applications outside of schoolwork, like creating star charts or analyzing images.

Key Features

• New algorithms across 1,000+ domains with linguistic analysis
• Extensive database with over 10 trillion pieces of information
• 50,000+ algorithms and equations for problem-solving
• Computed Presentation via 5,000+ visual and tabular outputs
• Built using the powerful and versatile Wolfram Language

Price

WolframAlpha has a free plan. The premium plan for students starts at $7.25 per month, while the pro premium plan costs $12 per month when billed monthly.

5. Perplexity AI

Perplexity AI is an intelligent search engine and chatbot that leverages AI and NLP to provide complete and accurate responses to your inquiries.

It searches the internet using advanced technology to deliver real-time information on a wide range of topics.

The intuitive interface of Perplexity AI ensures a smooth user experience, empowering you to quickly and efficiently find the details you need.

You can simply ask questions in plain language to tap into Perplexity’s vast knowledge.

It gathers details from multitudes of trustworthy sources across the web to generate thoughtful replies.

Perplexity AI’s standout features include the ability to generate outputs from specific sources (like YouTube, Reddit, and Wikipedia) along with relevant citations.

It adapts to various use cases like helping students with homework, aiding professionals with industry research, answering everyday questions, and beyond.

You can even upload a PDF file to summarize it in seconds.

While ChatGPT focuses more on creative writing, Perplexity AI excels at research with its advanced analysis features.

Key Features

• User-friendly interface for quick and efficient navigation
• Intelligent search engine and chatbot leveraging AI and NLP
• Provides accurate and complete responses
• Allows natural language questioning to access vast knowledge
• Summarizes texts, assists with research and writing

Price

Perplexity has a free version available, along with a paid premium plan starting at $20/month.

6. Smart Sparrow

Smart Sparrow is an innovative ed-tech platform that is transforming online education. This Australian company has gained global recognition for its active learning approach and adaptive courseware technology.

Simply put, Smart Sparrow powers the creation of really engaging and effective digital lessons.

The key to Smart Sparrow’s magic lies in its intuitive cloud-based platform. This allows educators to build rich learning experiences for their students with ease.

We’re talking interactive simulations, personalized feedback, and even fun characters that guide the learning.

Students get hooked on the content, while educators gain better insights into their progress.

A standout tool is Aero, Smart Sparrow’s specialist design accelerator. Aero brings teams together to spark creativity for superior digital courses and assessments.

Beyond software, Smart Sparrow also offers specialized learning design services.

Global institutions like Arizona State University and Macmillan Education are already using Smart Sparrow to upgrade their online learning.

And these digital courses are yielding great student satisfaction and retention results.

Key Features

• Engaging and adaptive digital learning experiences
• Intuitive, user-friendly interface
• Collaborative course design capabilities
• Tools to build interactive simulations and personalized feedback
• AI-powered smart characters to guide learning

Price

Smart Sparrow is free to use for up to 5 learners. The paid plan starts at $15 per learner per month for up to 100 learners.

7. Gradescope

Gradescope is an online grading platform built to simplify the assessment process for teachers and professors.

When using Gradescope, you can grade everything in one place – assignments, quizzes, exams, etc.

It supports both paper-based and digital submissions across all sorts of subjects like math, sciences, computer science, and more.

Gradescope handles it all.

My favorite part is how much time Gradescope saves with its automatic answer grouping.

For certain question types, it groups together student responses so you can grade similar answers all at once.

Gradescope uses AI for assisted grading to speed up the process even more.

Beyond efficiency, Gradescope offers stellar analytics.

As an instructor, you get visualized statistics on student performance so you can pinpoint where they struggled with concepts.

These insights allow you to improve your teaching strategy targeted to their needs.

The students benefit too with immediate feedback and online regrade requests to promote communication.

Key Features

• Streamlined grading workflow to save instructors time
• Detailed analytics into student performance
• Quick, flexible grading with easy feedback tools
• Instant feedback delivery to students
• Answer groups and AI for efficient grading

Price

Gradescope by Turnitin has not mentioned their pricing. You can, however, contact them and get a free demo to get started.

8. Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor is a minimal online writing tool focused on making writing clear and bold by identifying complex sentences, unnecessary adverbs, and passive voice.

It’s really simple to use. In fact, I am writing and editing this article in Hemingway.

The key features include color-coded highlights to point out issues in the text, a summary panel with readability scores and statistics, and guidelines for aiming below a 10th-grade reading level.

Hemingway excels at spotting weaknesses and providing suggestions for improving style.

For zero distractions, it allows you to enable write mode when you do not see any color-coded writing suggestions.

The highlights and reading statistics are useful for numeric analysis.

The amazing stuff? Hemingway recently rolled out an AI assistant inside the editor that suggests real-time improvement on the phrases that are hard to read.

In conclusion, the Hemingway Editor enables writers to pinpoint areas needing improvement in their prose.

Key Features

• Color-coded highlights
• Points long sentences, confusing phrases, complex words, unnecessary adverbs, and passive voice
• Statistics on readability score, word count & estimated reading time
• Readability guidelines encouraging writing below 10th grade level

Price

There is a paid desktop Hemingway App available for $19.99 as well as a free online Hemingway Editor.

While they offer the same analysis, the desktop app adds usability options like saving, exporting, publishing, and offline use.

AI assistance is only available with Hemingway’s paid plan which costs $10 per month.

9. Zotero

Zotero is a personal research assistant tool that helps students take control of their academic literature review and citations.

As soon as you find an interesting journal article, book, or other publication, Zotero allows you to add it to your digital library with one click.

The best part?

Adding items to your Zotero library automatically extracts all the relevant metadata like title, author, publication date, and more.

This makes citing sources in APA, MLA, Chicago, or thousands of other citation styles a breeze. Simply select the item you want to cite and Zotero will format the citation instantly.

Who has time for that anyway when you have assignments to complete?

Zotero is there for you when you need to collaborate with classmates on group papers and projects.

You can create shared collections that sync in real-time, allowing multiple people to contribute sources.

Identifying who added, or edited, items is simple with the revision history.

You can even share back and forth with your professor to get feedback or guidance early in the writing process.

Key Features

• Seamless collection of research materials with one-click adding
• Flexible organization through collections, tags, keywords, and saved searches
• Automatic citation formatting in over 10,000 styles
• Cross-platform syncing across devices
• Collaboration through co-writing & sharing libraries

Price

Zotero is free and open-source software, and it works on just about any device including Mac, Windows PC, or Linux machine. There are even Zotero apps for iPhone and Android to capture sources on the go.

10. Elicit

Elicit is an artificial intelligence-powered tool to help researchers efficiently interact with and analyze academic papers.

Elicit is super easy to use.

It summarizes papers, extracts key data points, identifies themes across literature, and answers questions.

Elicit allows you to upload PDFs or search through a database of over 200 million papers by asking natural language questions.

It returns relevant results with one-sentence summaries to help quickly determine usefulness.

Once papers are identified, Elicit can data-mine details into structured tables or identify higher-level concepts.

Elicit provides transparency by showing the source for each generated response.

It also enables further questioning of the literature to facilitate an interactive, iterative research process.

Key Features

• Analyze research papers rapidly
• Access to the database of 200 million papers
• Mines details from papers into structured tables
• Identifies higher-level concepts and themes across multiple papers
• Upload your own PDFs for analysis
• Overview of papers with auto-generated summaries
• All answers are linked to sources

Price

Elicit works on credits. The Basic plan which is free provides you with a total of 5000 credits. Once you run out of those credits, the only way to continue using Elicit is to upgrade to the Plus plan which costs $12 per month (or $10 per month on annual billing). The Plus plan offers 12000 credits per month.

11. Nearpod

Nearpod is an engaging teaching platform that makes lessons interactive. With Nearpod, teachers can create presentations that allow students to respond to polls, quizzes, drawings, and more right from their devices.

I like how Nearpod boosts student participation.

Shy students who may not raise their hand in class can actively join in. And teachers receive instant insights into student understanding, so they can provide extra help if needed.

Plus, Nearpod works nicely whether students are in physical classrooms or learning remotely. Teachers can switch between environments without recreating lessons.

The platform also integrates easily with commonly used tools like Google Slides and PowerPoint.

For administrators, Nearpod offers helpful tracking features.

You can see which lessons teachers are using and how students perform. These insights help guide professional development and skill building.

Key Features

• Interactive lessons with polls, quizzes, drawings, and more
• Boosts student participation and engagement
• Provides real-time feedback and assessment
• Flexibility to switch between physical and remote environments
• Integrates with Google Slides, PowerPoint, and other tools

Price

For individual educators, Nearpod is free to get started with their Silver license. It opens up 100 MB of storage and up to 40 students per lesson. The Gold license offers 1 GB of storage with 75 students per lesson, starting at $10 per month. Finally, there is a Platinum plan with 5 GB storage and 90 students per lesson starting at $29 per month.

12. Canva

Canva is the ultimate creativity booster for students looking to take their school projects to the next level visually.

With an incredibly intuitive drag-and-drop interface, you don’t need any fancy design skills to create sleek presentations, eye-catching social posts, and more.

Canva has a massive library of fonts, images, graphics, and premade templates.

My favorite part is how quick and fun it is to use.

Just pick a template that matches what you want to make, drop in some photos or text, tweak the colors and fonts to match your style, and voilà!

You’ve got yourself a standout design in minutes.

And the best part for students?

Canva offers a free education plan that gives you access to everything you need to ace assignments and take your academic projects to new visual heights.

You also get access to Canva’s new Magic Write tool under the education plan, which uses AI to generate ideas and outline essays and other writing assignments in seconds.

Key Features

• Intuitive drag-and-drop interface
• Massive library of fonts, images, graphics, templates
• Magic Write AI writing assistance tool
• Real-time collaboration for group projects
• Vast collection of templates for every need

Price

Canva comes with a free plan. The premium plan (Canva Pro) starts at $12.99 per month and Canva for Teams starts at $14.99 per month (for up to 5 users).

One More Thing

With AI transforming education in profound ways, students now have access to powerful tools that accelerate learning, unlock creativity, and heighten academic success.

While concerns around over-reliance on technology co-exist, these tools aim not to replace critical thinking, but rather complement it.

They help students reach new heights in original thought and self-directed learning.

Which tools will you leverage to maximize your potential?

How will you harness AI’s gifts to make your academic mark?

The choice is yours to make.