49 best free websites and apps to learn something new

Once upon a time, if you wanted to learn something, you had to a) pay a bunch of money, and b) go to a school or classroom, a place specifically dedicated to learning. Those days are over.

Now, a profusion of apps, websites and institutions offer us a wider variety of (often superior) educational experiences than ever before- and we can access them from anywhere in the world, often for free. The apps and websites on this list can teach you practically anything- from coding and cooking, to surfing and negotiating.

In this day and age, there is simply no excuse to not know something you’d like to know. You can learn anything, for free, at your own pace, anywhere you can access the internet. We’re out of excuses not to educate ourselves- short of downloading knowledge directly into your head, this is as easy as it gets.

This time, I am going to share inspiring apps, websites and tools that you can use to ease your life and take full advantage of without paying a single penny. The era in which we are living is completely digital and full of knowledge that we must keep on learning in order to move forward. So take a look at the list below and don’t forget to share if you find it valuable J

Take free online courses on a variety of subjects

Khan Academy- High-quality free courses on a variety of subjects

Alison- Free online courses from the world’s top publishers.

CourseBuffet- Free online courses created by universities.

Edx.org – Free/Paid online courses from World top universities (Harvard, MIT, UCBerkeley, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia etc)

Udemy- Huge selection of free and premium courses- mostly on technical skills.

Highbrow- Free 10-day courses, divided into 5-minute daily lessons and delivered by email.

Academic Earth- Free online academic education for everyone.

Learnist- Print and video content, crowd sourced and curated by experts.

Degreed- Unlimited learning. Free forever.

Get healthier, be more productive, and learn faster

Memrise- Learn a variety of subjects via digital flashcards and crowd sourced mnemonics.

Greatist- Articles on becoming healthy and happy.

ZenHabits- Minimalist productivity advice, with a focus on psychology.

Anki- Free flashcard software.

Hello Healthy- Short, actionable health weight loss and fitness articles.

Fitocracy- Free workout, fitness tips and fitness tracking.

Learn coding and other technical skills

Codecademy- Learn Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python and more.

Free Code Camp- Learn to code, meet other coders, build projects that help non-profits.

Code.org- Introductory coding lessons, designed for k-12 students.

Data Camp- Free and freemium courses on R, Python and data visualisation.

CodeCombat- Introductory coding lessons, in the form of a fantasy RPG.

Lrn- Phone app with free interactive coding mini-quizzes.

Learn a new language

Duolingo — Learn over 20 different languages, including Klingon for some reason.

Babbel- Free language learning with integrated speech recognition.

Drops- Study a language on your phone for just 5 minutes a day.

Busuu- Community-base language learning. Interact with native speakers.

CoffeeStrap- Practice a new language by voice chatting with native speakers with whom you share common interests.

Lingvist- Learn a language in 200 hours.

Sharpen your social and career skills

Improve Your Social Skills- Free social skills guide from a guy who overcame Asperger’s.

Succeed Socially- Free social skills guide for awkward people.

Job-Hunt.org- Free articles on job hunting, getting promoted, freelancing, personal branding, and other career skills.

Mind Tools- Free tools and videos for improving career, management and communications skills.

Make something

Makezine- Online magazine for makers with guides, projects and news.

Snapguide- Free user-created guides for makers.

ChefSteps- Mix of free and premium cooking classes.

Instructables- User-created guides for making everything from cookies to buildings.

Allrecipes- The web’s largest collection of recipes.

Become a human encyclopedia

InstaNerd- Read a never-ending series of random factoids.

TED-Ed- Curated, high-quality educational videos.

Brain Pump- Watch a random educational video.

Now I Know- Fun facts delivered in a daily email newsletter.

Curiosity- 5 fun new facts, delivered to your phone every day.

Zidbits- Huge collection of articles on fun and unusual (mostly scientific) topics.

Big Think- In-depth videos by experts.

Curious- Sharpen your brain with daily “workouts”

Do something fun

Yousician- Learn your favorite guitar, bass, piano and ukelele songs.

Parkour & Freerunning World- Free Parkour and Freerunning video tutorials. Be careful!

Chesscademy- Learn chess from the masters, and solve chess puzzles.

Pianu- Learn to play piano online.

Surfedukators- Free surfing videos, tips and tutorials

Flowkey- Free piano training app.

Source:- medium.com

Back Up Your Android Apps (& Their Data) Without Root

One of the few areas where Android lags behind iOS is a comprehensive backup solution for apps. Root tools, such as the popular Titanium Backup, are capable of backing up all of your apps and their data, but not everyone wants to root their device and potentially run into issues with voided warranties.

But Koushik Dutta (or simply, Koush), one of the more prolific Android and ex-CyanogenMod developers, has recently updated his Helium Backup service to include support for the Chrome web browser. This means that non-rooted Android users can now have an all-encompassing backup solution—regardless of what operating system their computer runs.

Step 1: Install Helium on Your Device

Helium works by pairing your phone with your computer to send a few commands that enable proper backups on Android. As such, you'll need to install the app on both your computer and your Android device.

Helium can be installed from the Google Play Store at this link, or you can simply search it by name from your Play Store app.

Step 2: Set up Helium on Your Device

When you first launch Helium, the app will ask if you'd like to attach your Google account for use in cross-device backup sync. Tap "OK" on this message, then select your Google account and provide your login credentials.

From here, press "OK" one more time, then Helium will prompt you to connect your phone to your computer with a USB data cable.

Step 3: Install Helium for Chrome

Google's Chrome browser is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, so make sure you have it installed on your system before you proceed.

The Helium Chrome app can be found at this link. Once you arrive at the install page, hit the "+ Free" button, then click "Add" on the popup.

As with any Chrome app, Helium can be accessed by opening the Chrome Apps menu in your computer's task bar or Chrome's own bookmarks bar.

Step 4: Sync Your Device with Your Computer

With your Android device connected to your computer, open the Helium app on both devices.

After a few seconds, Helium will pair the two devices and enable comprehensive backup for Android. You can disconnect your phone or tablet from your computer at this point.

Note that, as Android resets the changes Helium has made each time it starts up, you will need to repeat this pairing process any time you reboot your phone or tablet.

Step 5: Back Up your Apps

Over on your Android device again, use the Helium app to select which apps you'd like to have backed up. When you tap the "Backup" button, Helium will ask where you'd like to save your backup files. If you want to sync backups between your Android devices, make sure to select the "Google Drive" option.

Restoring apps on this or other Android devices can be done through the Helium app as well. Simply tap the "Restore and Sync" tab, then select your storage location.

Source: Drippler

Apps, One Android user must have

With more than 20 million apps on Google Play Store available for the Android users to download but the question is which one to download because which one is best in category is hard to find. Most of you will find large number of apps related to a single category. For example, if you want to download anti-virus for your android, then you will see a large number of apps in the result. Same goes if you want to download File Explorer in Play Store then there will be many apps that can provide you this facility.

So here in this article, i will try to cover few applications that one Android user must have in his/her smartphone. It is a short compilation of the apps and it is totally my personal opinion. I will try to list down all the apps to the best of my knowledge excluding Social Network apps.

Adobe Reader 

Adobe products are one of best known products in the whole world and they have developed their application for the android users too. Adobe Reader is the free, trusted leader for reliably viewing and interacting with PDF documents across platforms and devices. Easily access, manage, and share a wide variety of PDF types. 
Download Here

AirDroid 

At times, you don't have access to your data cable, or you're out somewhere at friend's home but you need to transfer few files from computer and you don't have cable to connect to the PC then you came to know the advantage of handy application AirDroid. It lets you communicate from your PC/Laptop wirelessly. You just need to connect to the same network of the PC and then you can transfer large files even like movies, pictures or any stuff you want to. With AirDroid, you can remotely access your phone or tablet‘s files, notifications, messages, camera, location and many other things on a computer, from anywhere.
Download Here


Yahoo Aviate Launcher

The intelligent home screen that simplifies your phone. Yahoo Aviate is a launcher for your Android that will simplify how you use your phone. It removes clutter, automatically organises your apps and knows when to show you the information you need, at the time it’s useful for you. Intelligent calendar features at work, music apps and widgets when you plug in your headphones - plus your most-used apps on your center screen so you never have to hunt for them again.

Download Here

CamScanner 

The world’s No. 1 mobile document scanning and sharing app. CamScanner helps you scan, store, sync and collaborate on various contents across smartphones, tablets and computers. It uses your mobile camera to scan the document and then you can further add brightness ratio to shine your document like a real scanned doc.

Download Here

Clean Master Phone Boost 

Simple, fast and accurate, Clean Master is the world’s most downloaded Android cleaner, speed boost and antivirus app, designed to help you reclaim storage, boost memory, enhance speed, and secure your device against malicious apps and vulnerabilities. It has several features like Device Cooler, Junk File Clean, Memory Boost, CPU Boost, Antivirus, App Manager. It is like All in One app.
Download Here



Android Device Manager 

Android Device Manager locates lost devices and helps you keep your device, and the data inside it safe and secure. You need to setup your account after installing it and after then your device is secured. You also need to enable GPS and Internet on your mobile in order to find the device. You can locate your device wherever it would be. It has multiple features like Reset your device PIN lock, Erase all data on Mobile & Ring your mobile so that you can find it.

Download Here

Elevate - Brain Training

Elevate is a brain training program designed to improve focus, speaking skills, processing speed, memory, math skills, and more. Each person is provided with his or her own personalized training program that adjusts over time to maximize results. The more you train with Elevate, the more you’ll improve critical cognitive skills that are proven to boost productivity, earning power, and self-confidence. Users who train at least 4 times per week have reported dramatic gains and increased confidence. Elevate's games are designed in collaboration with experts in neuroscience and cognitive learning and are based on extensive scientific research. Elevate’s brain training algorithms further focus the learning experience by drawing from research in memory studies to develop a personalized training program for each user. By far the best Brain Training app I've found on Play Store. 
Download Here

English Dictionary Offline

The free offline English dictionary application explains the meaning of English words. Definitions are based on English Wiktionary. Ready to go, it works offline without any further file to download. You can even listen the pronunciation of any word with no internet connection required. 

Download Here

ES File Explorer

ES File Explorer is a free, full-featured file and application manager.  It functions as all of these apps in one: file manager, application manager, task killer, download manager, cloud storage client (compatible with Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Box.net, Sugarsync, Yandex, Amazon S3, and Ubuntu One...), FTP client, and LAN Samba client. It provides access to pictures, music, video, documents, and other files on both your Android devices and your computers. ES File Explorer allows Android users, no matter where they are, to manage their resources freely. You can access all of your files from your mobile device and share them with others. This app makes it easy to stay connected over 3G, 4G, EDGE, or Wi-Fi to share with friends, upload photos, and watch videos. 

Download Here

FlipBoard

Flipboard is your personal magazine. It is the most popular way to catch up on the news, read stories from around the world and browse the articles, videos and photos friends are sharing. To begin, pick a few interests and tap any of the tiles to begin flipping through your personal magazine. Add blogs and publications like The New York Times, PEOPLE magazine, Fast Company and many more by using the search bar or tapping the red ribbon to open the Content Guide. You can also connect your social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and Google+ to see what friends are posting and easily share articles with them. 

Download Here

LapseIt

Lapse It is an award-winning full featured app for capturing amazing time lapse and stop motion videos with your Android camera. It is simple, fast and intuitive. Make time lapses of your favorite events. Lapse It has a unique and powerful native render engine that allows you to creates spectacular videos, it is blazing fast, robust, support audio and has a fully featured range of settings to apply.

Download Here




Last App Switcher

Think about the last channel button on your TV remote, which makes switching between two channels as easy as pie. Now think about a button on your mobile/tablet which switches you to the last used application with a single tap. Imagine, you are browsing internet and a message arrives. Normally, you would minimize your browser, open the chatting application, and reply to the message. Then press the recent apps button, find your browser, tap on it, and then continue browsing, huh! Suddenly, another message arrives. With LAS (Last App Switcher), you will be like "tap", chatting, "tap", browsing. Envision the figure of precious minutes you are going to save in a day. 
Download Here

MX Player

Best Video player available on Play Store. It supports mostly all of the video formats like avi, mpg, mkv, mp4. Now get rid of converting your movies before playing in your smartphone. It has features like Hardware Acceleration, Subtitles, Pinch to Zoom & Pan, MultiCore Decoding etc. It also supports most of the subtitles formats too. 

Download Here

Contacts + 

Contacts+ is your everyday contacts dialer app, powered with text messaging, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and much more - all in one place. With Contacts+ you can send free and regular text messages without switching apps, auto-sync beautiful pics to your contacts from Facebook, and get birthday reminders so you’ll never forget a birthday again.

Download Here



Pocket

Use Pocket to easily save articles, videos, and other web content for later. With Pocket, all your items go to one place, so you can view, organize and share them anytime, on any device, even offline. Save as many articles, videos and links as you want. Pocket will highlight the best and most relevant items in your list, organized by topic, source, and length, so that you can always find something interesting to read or watch. Don’t lose track of the interesting things you find by emailing yourself links, keeping a long list of bookmarks, or simply letting tabs pile up in your browser for later. Just save them to Pocket, and they’ll be ready whenever you are. Download Here

QuickPic

QuickPic is certainly the best gallery app for android. It has unlimited features like lists thousands of pictures in a flash, Group photos by time and location, view and slide view your photos, include or exclude specific folders for efficient scanning, easily hide your private photos and videos from all gallery apps and even protect them with a password, Internal picture editor which allows you to rotate, shrink, crop pictures, set wallpaper with best quality freely.

Download Here


QuizUp

QuizUp is an award winning multiplayer trivia game and fan community. QuizUp has been ranked as the #1 Trivia app on Google Play in 14 countries, including USA, Canada and India. On QuizUp you can compete with friends and/or any of the 25 million QuizUp players from all over the world, in exciting real-time trivia matches. You can find over 400,000 questions in more than 550 topics, and new topics are added every week so you won’t have to worry about ever running out of trivia to test your knowledge on. Discover your specialities and take on opponents who share your interests, while learning new and interesting facts along the way. 
Download Here

Shazam

Shazam is the best way to identify music and TV. In seconds you’ll know the name of any song, or more about what you’re watching - touch to Shazam to start your journey. 
Download Here





Smart App Lock

Smart App Lock is an App Locker or App Protector that will protect your installed applications using a password or pattern(Facebook, WhatsApp, Line, Twitter, Snapchat, Skype, Gallery, Camera, Gmail and any app you choose). Smart App Lock is the best app locker or app protector that will secure your smartphone and protect your privacy. App Lock also can lock your data such as pictures, SMS messages, and videos. 
Download Here



Smart Voice Recorder

Smart Voice Recorder designed for high quality long-time sound recording with skipping relative silence on-the-fly. For example, you can use it for record night sleep talks or snoring, business meetings, a regular day of your babysitter, how you sing or play the guitar and so on. It's fantastic! And you may use it as regular voice recorder with simple and nice user interface. 
Download Here



Snapseed 

Snapseed is the only photo app you’ll want to use every day. It makes any photograph extraordinary with a fun, high-quality photo experience right at your fingertips. Anyone can enhance, transform, and share their photos with ease using incredibly advanced features from the leader in digital photography software. Built-in Google+ capabilities make it even more powerful to share your images with your friends and family. 
Download Here



SwiftKey Keyboard 

SwiftKey Keyboard is a free, award-winning keyboard app for Android that delivers the best next-word prediction, smarter autocorrect, support for over 800 emoji, emoji prediction and much more! SwiftKey is an alternative keyboard that gives you smart, fast typing on Android - free. It's the best keyboard for Android for fast SMS, chat, text and email, becoming the default across all your apps. It’s packed full of customization features including over 30 colorful themes, layouts for all screen sizes and devices. 
Download Here


Sygic 

Sygic: GPS Navigation & Maps is The World’s Most Installed Offline turn-by-turn GPS navigation App for Android powered by TomTom Maps. Navigation and Maps are installed on the SD card so there is no need for an Internet connection when navigating. Map and app updates are FREE every 3 months. You can enjoy free navigation, gps, offline TomTom maps, POIs, route planning & free map updates. To get the most of the navigation, upgrade to premium and enjoy high-end lifetime features: 3D maps, real-time turn-by-turn voice-guided navigation, lane guidance, speed limit warnings junction view with lane indicator arrows at complex intersections. 

Download Here 

Google Translate

Break through language barriers with Google Translate. Translate between 80 languages. Speak, type, write or take a picture to translate. Translate offline while travelling. No internet connection needed.
Download Here






Zedge

ZEDGE™ offers free wallpapers, ringtones and notification sounds to easily customize your device. In addition it also offers personalized game recommendations. 
Download Here

Android Screen Recording

Now its easy to create high quality video of your apps, directly from your Android device. Android 4.4 adds support for screen recording and provides a screen recording utility that lets you start and stop recording on a device that connected to your Android SDK environment over USB. It's a great new way to create walkthroughs and tutorials for your app, testing materials, marketing videos, and more.

With the screen recording utility, you can capture video of your device screen contents and store the videos as an MP4 file on the device. You can record at any device supported resolution and bitrate you want, and the output retains the aspect ratio of the display. By default, the utility selects a resolution equal or close to the device's display resolution in the current orientation. When you are done recording, you can share the video directly from your device.

Just like the desktop screen recording, it can be also helpful for many purposes. I want to share with you that how to use this feature. How can you start recording your screen on Android running KitKat 4.4 or above. So lets get started.

There are three ways to record your Android Screen.

1) Rooting Way

To record a video of your Android screen (or to screencast) is extremely easy if you have a device running on Android 4.4 KitKat that is rooted. All you need to do is to download a free app from the Google Play Store called Rec. (Screen Recorder). 

Rec. is a beautiful, modern app that captures video of up to 1 hour and can even record Android sound (not system sound, though, it only records from the microphone). It runs in the background and you can use it to record gameplay (and games and apps in general) on Android. After you use it to shoot video of your Android screen in action, you can enjoy 30fps video saved to your internal phone storage.

• Download Rec. (Screen Recorder) on Android

2) Non Rooting Way

Recordable is the one that is most versatile: it works without requiring you to root your phone, and it also theoretically works with any version of Android, 2.3 Gingerbread and after. It does not do miracles - it is still impossible to capture system audio (you only grab mic recordings), but video turns out smooth and perfectly usable, even for game videos.

• Download Recordable on Android ($1.99)

3) The sure way via Android SDK & ADB

Setting Up ADB:

To setup ADB on your computer, the first thing you’ll need to do is install the Android SDK, which you can download from the Android SDK site. Click the big “Download the SDK” button to begin the download. You’ll need to extract the file, and i recommend doing so directly to your C:\ drive since it will save you a lot of time navigating to subfolders to issue ADB commands. Once complete, double click the SDK Manager.exe file and install the default packages.

After installing all the necessary packages, Go in to the settings of your mobile & enable USB debugging from Developer Options. If you can't see Developer Options in your Settings, then go in About Phone and click Build Number 7 times and then Developer Options will become enable.

Now from PC, go to the location where you extracted the file, c->android-sdk->platform-tools and right click while holding shift button and choose open command prompt here.

Now connect your Android device to the computer.

Now in command prompt, type "adb devices" and see if your device recognized by the ADB.

If cmd shows like this then we are good to go.

Now type "adb shell screenrecord /sdcard/FILENAME.mp4. Here FILENAME will be the name of your recorded file. Recording will start immediately when you press enter, the limit for these videos is just 3 minutes but you can stop recording at any time by pressing ctrl+c in command prompt. After stopping the video you can find it in your device video player.

These unmodified videos look okay, but you can do better with a few ADB command modifiers. Using --bit-rate lets you specify a higher or lower quality in kilobits, so entering adb shell screenrecord /sdcard/movie.mp4 --bit-rate 8000000gets you a very crisp 8Mbps video. You can also use --size <width x height> to change the resolution of the video.