Super Smart Back To School Phone Hacks

Dec 2, 2019

The smartphone is everyone's favorite back to school accessory. Here are seven hacks to help you work smarter, not harder as you head back to class this year.

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Charge Your Battery Faster

You've woken up late for school, and your phone is almost dead. Don't worry; plug it in and put it on "airplane mode." It's easy to do,  go to Settings on your iPhone or Android device and switch "airplane mode" to "on." This will help your phone charge faster so it will hopefully have enough juice to see you through your school day.

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Record Your Classes

If you are a high school or college student, this can be a handy trick. You can use it as a notetaking strategy if you are an auditory learner or you can record the class for a friend who had to miss it. You could also teach this trick to your friends and have them record a class for you the next time you're out sick.

The recording function is easy to use on both iPhones and Androids. If you have an iPhone open the "Voice Memos" app and tap the red button to start recording, then tap it again to stop. Android users will have different apps for voice recording, but they are all easy to use. If your Android device did not come pre-loaded with a voice recording app, they are available to download for free.

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Give Yourself Some Space

School days can use up phone memory fast. Pictures, texts, and school-related apps all add up. To free up some memory, go into your texting app's settings and set it to delete your old texts automatically. If you use iPhone, it will give you time-related options like "delete texts after one month." Some Android users will be able to choose how many regular and how many multimedia texts to keep. It is a good idea to set the multimedia number low because texts with pictures, gifs, etc. can eat up tons of storage space.

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Don't Get Your Phone Taken Away

You've set your phone to silent, but somehow buttons were accidentally pushed, and now it's going off in class. The best way to avoid this scenario is to use your phone's "do not disturb" function. Both iPhones and Android devices have this built-in. Just go to "settings" and find the section for "notifications" then tap on "do not disturb." It will let you set a time period and pick which types of notifications to silence during that time.

For instance, you could put in the times you are in school and then silence all calls and texts. This is also a great way to make sure that your phone doesn't keep you up too late at night. Just silence everything after your bedtime until the time you usually wake up. Alarms are not silenced by the "do not disturb" feature, so if you have something you need to remember, your alarm will still go off.

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Get your Lost Phone Back

Write down your name and an emergency phone number ( like a parent's phone or home phone) on a piece of paper and take a picture of it with your smartphone. Now set that picture as your lock screen. If your phone gets lost anyone who finds it will know who to return it to.

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Keep it clean

There's nothing worse than a smudgy phone screen. Luckily, you probably have the perfect cleaning tool in your backpack--an eraser. Just take a big square eraser and use it on your phone screen to banish greasy fingerprints.

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Keep Your Lunch Money Safe

You can keep cash and cards between your phone and your phone case. They can't fall out, and no one will even know you have them.