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Five web apps I found essential in 2011

Chris 0 Comments

There are a whole load of web apps that I use regularly to help me stay productive every day. Here’s just five of them, the apps at the top of my list from 2011.

Evernote

It’s been an essential part of my working day for a good couple of years now, and Evernote continues to shine. I’m not a power user, only occasionally subscribing to the Pro service when I need a bit more bandwidth. The thing with Evernote is that it just works. When I need to take a note, it’s there in an instant. I can throw a whole raft of written notes at it for days at a time and have everything immediately accessible on my laptop, iPad or phone. If I were more of a power user, I would perhaps include here things like multiple notebooks, shared notes, snapping notes with your webcam and more.

ToodleDo (with ToDo for Mac and iOS)

ToodleDo is a full on task manager that I’ve been subscribed to for about a year now, previously having tried a free service. My use of ToodleDo is entirely through third party application ToDo, so I don’t have more to say about the appication functions, except for some of the task characteristics that apply to both: due and focus lists, projects, tags, contexts and priority highlighting. The other important point is that in the time I have been subscribed, I have never know the ToodleDo service to be offline for any reason, so my tasks are always available and bang up to date whether I choose to work from my laptop, or iOS apps.

Dropbox

It’s been around for a while now, but my DropBox free subscription is both faultless and essential. I use the service every day to keep my files organised and highly accessible, flipping between platforms without the need to either manage any removable media, or ensure that I have connectivity to the right network.

Buffer

Despite only discovering Buffer a few months ago, I’ve really come to regard this as an essential accessory to Twitter. Buffer is simply a queue for your tweets, released according to a schedule that you define. What does this mean? Potentially, your tweets reach a wider audience through consistent timed delivery (as opposed to firing them all off together). Best thing about Buffer in my view is the email functionality. Just compile an email with the title in your subject and any link in the body. Buffer does the rest and adds this to your queue.

ifttt

If This Then That. Unusual but practical name that really does describe pretty well what’s going to happen when you use it. You start using ifttt by setting up some tasks, each of which looks for a specific event, and when this occurs, an action takes place. For example, when you mark an article in your Google Reader list with a star, you might like the article shared via Twitter. The interface is one of my favorites of all the applications I have used – clean, functional and free from un-necessary content.

How I use Twitter lists

Chris 3 Comments

I’ve been a follower of Phil Gerbyshak for some time now; earliest I can recall reading content from Phil was when he published to the fantastic SlackerManager blog – sadly no longer active. Phil always manages to seek out not just the easily discoverable content, the stuff that most are discussing in relation to the social media web, but also plenty of little gems that surprise you. I spotted this one today:

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/philgerb/status/146603072322408448″]

So I read this article. What I expected was a reminder that lists are useful and don’t get used enough. However, right in the middle of the post, there’s a great point about how a list can be used as a gathering point for users with a similar interest, enabling a disparate group to monitor a flow of communication:

While moderating a Facebook Group, I realized the importance of a Twitter list for the group to connect on the Twitter platform.  This list can then be followed by each new member who joins the group.

Being a member of this type of list is something I’ve experienced before as a member of Becta’s Exemplar Network. Having been listed a few times by some followers, I know that others are following me, but didn’t generally dip into the stream very often to catch up on conversations; I guess it just wasn’t that sort of group (and to be honest, most of the other Network participants weren’t really making much use of Twitter at the time).

My own use of lists is slightly different. Having built up quite a number of followers, I pick up those who typically post content on the periphery of my interests, and add them to an appropriate list. For example, @philgerbyshak often talks about leadership and management, so I might add Phil to my ‘leadership’ list. Once I’ve added a user to a list, I may decide to unfollow too.

In this way, I am able to dip in an out of content that is interesting to me, filtering down to a point where my Twitter stream is somewhat refined (in my case lots of real people, and less organisations and services). When I want to catch up with what latest functionality has been included in @bufferapp or @ifttt, I can just head over to the list and review a very focused stream of content. I suppose it’s a bit like organising your Google Reader feeds into folders, enabling you to read content in a single subject area, rather than a broad range of content that isn’t necessarily cohesive.

How do you use Twitter lists?

It’s like a shared drive

Chris 0 Comments

Back in 2005 our organisation didn’t share much. We worked in silo’s – and in many cases still do. When we weren’t communicating face to face or over the phone, information was typically making its way slowly around the business in paper form. What we did share was often transferred through shared folders – or mapped drives as they were more commonly referred to.

Shared folders were fine, but subject to improvisation. A shared folder will often contain many files, and sub-folders. Each sub-folder containing many more, each with a different content type, structure or naming convention – a sign of how many were contributing with little or no usage guidance.

We didn’t host many we services back in 2005, but curriculum technology was about to steam ahead. Emerging from a difficult time with Learnwise, we had identified Moodle as a VLE that would transform our curriculum delivery. It was around this time that we also became aware of SharePoint. Here was an opportunity to take some of those paper communications and documents, and transfer them to a digital medium.

We had some very clear objectives for SharePoint, and for Moodle too. It very quickly became clear that Moodle could do for us what Learnwise had not been able to. Curriculum staff were gaining enthusiasm for this new learning environment. We knew that Moodle was a great platform for curriculum delivery, but we also considered whether Moodle would be the right platform for our business support content. We realised that SharePoint was a great content management system, and we also considered whether SharePoint would be the right platform for our curricular materials. Our conclusion was that Moodle, our VLE, would be used purely to support curriculum delivery. SharePoint would be used purely for hosting content related to business support activities.

In education, shared drives have been popular. Simple, practical (crude even) methods of sharing content among users with varying roles. It’s easy with a shared drive to add your content. The idea of a shared drive has persisted from our distant past, and for the most part, is how we use the very capable SharePoint application. This is my experience of how SharePoint has most frequently been used – it’s like a shared drive. It’s been an interesting product to work with, but hasn’t continued to deliver continued opportunities for innovation that were evident when first adopted.

I don’t view the upgrading of any application to a newer version as being the solution to any intrinsic problems that may be associated with it. In this case, problems with a given version of SharePoint won’t be resolved by simply upgrading. Similarly, a new release of Moodle won’t suddenly generate increased learner participation. Instead, a new approach is needed. I regularly comment about the continuing prolific activity of uploading lots of files. It’s really not the sort of activity that represents the position that learning technology should be in today. We can create that very same content online with the right tools. We don’t all need to be using the same suite of Microsoft tools that have been dominant for so long. Admittedly this isn’t the case for everyone as some organisations have been very successfully in using open source alternatives for some time – and well done to them. For an organisation to be held to ransom by continual upgrades in order to achieve a certain degree of usability is surely far too restrictive for a modern and fast moving business – educational or otherwise.

It’s all too easy to place a high reliance upon new products to reveal solutions for long term problems. When (and if) the latest and greatest version arrives, it won’t provide all the answers.