Apple Watch: Best Friend of College Students
Okay, it may be a bit frowned upon, but most of us have done it as desperate college students. We've written a cheat sheet of math formulas on the inside of our calculators, or watched the movie instead of read the book, or even devised a complicated Slacker Morse Code of taps to crowd source multiple choice answers. We go to extraordinary lengths to cheat, sometimes putting in more work to cheating than if we'd simply done the work from the start. College students are strange creatures like that.
Apple has graciously decided to lend a helping hand to its biggest demographic – millennials – as what I can only imagine is an underhanded sort of "thank you" for buying so many iPhones. They're helping us up the cheating game.
The Apple Watch or artificially intelligent assistant, is so easy to use and has so many helpful, crowd sourcing apps that it's almost like it wants you to use it cheat in class. It has all the benefits of carrying a cell phone around on your wrist, except that your professors don't see you bending over your desk to text your roommate about that one calc formula you forgot, or Googling how to write your essay online during your English final.
For example, there's an app called Slack that works basically as a small group text chat, except it only goes to your Apple Watch. So you, that girl you like, her unfortunate boyfriend, and your genius roommate can all communicate during your history exam without texting or whispering to each other. When was the Declaration of Independence written? Let's consult Harry across the lecture hall without even reaching for our phones. Freaking revolutionary.
Another fantastic app that probably has practical applications but seems tailor-made to help you cheat: Viki. Viki is an app that literally brings every student's last-minute savior – Wikipedia – straight to your fingertips. And your wrist. It's streamlined, fast, easy to navigate and doesn't even require your iPhone to be on (just in case your professor is one of those hard ones who requires you to turn in your phones before an exam). While a bigger screen would probably be helpful in navigating a site like Wikipedia, Viki helps prioritize information so that you can get the most popular search results to your watch right away. If that's not perfect for consulting the Internet about Henry VII's birthday, I don't know what is.
Yet another, personal favorite of mine: Instapaper. It lets you download articles, convert them to audio files, and then listen to them through Bluetooth headphones. This is some next level cheating. If you've always had problems writing essays on the spot and had a few ideas written down before hand, you could bring them with you and listen to them during your exam. You could have all those ideas that you thought of last night, when you were relaxing on your couch with a glass of wine feeling like a genius, being read in real time to you in your classroom, when you're stressed as hell about this final essay and too sweaty to even remember how to spell your name right.
Now, I'm not saying I condone cheating in any way. Students can and should use these apps the way they are meant to be used and succeed on their own merit, and Apple Watches have plenty of respectable, genuinely helpful and revolutionary ways to help teachers and students in and out of the classroom – but that's not nearly as much fun to talk about.
