Tag Archives: app

3 New Powerful Twitter Apps

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I have used all three of these Apps in one way or another in the past fortnight, and thought I would review them under one roof!

Summify – A very clever service which examines your follower’s tweets, then ‘curates’ an email summary of the most popular/retweeted posts or blogs. This is fantastic if you are the sort of Twitter user who dips in and out, rather than someone who tends to graze throughout the day. You can set it up to send you a daily email, and since doing this, I have found some real gold in every email.

Buffer – Again, perfect for those who dip into their twitter stream. Rather than swamping your followers with a bunch of responses and RT’s in a ten minute space (which I know I and others are guilty of) and risk annoying others of swamping their stream, this allows you to stack up marked posts or links, and then sends them out on your behalf throughout the day. I emailled the CEO of Buffer with some ideas and he emailled right back, pointing me toward

SocialBro – Based around a chrome Plug-in or the Adobe Air platform, this is an incredibly powerful Twitter Dashboard with some really advanced metrics. It gave me a really good insight into my followers and their habits – the best being that my weekly post reviewing business books was wasted on a Sunday evening for example, as it was one of the least-populated times for my Twitter stream.

All of these Apps are here to give Twitter more value as a tool, and in a way that I haven’t seen before. While to would theoretically be great if Twitter added these kinds of functionality, it might end up bulky and overwhelming. Far better that you can use plug-ins as appropriate.

The best 8 Apps I use for school

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I’ll start by admitting that I love my iPhone. It is brilliant for what I want to do at school ,both in a teaching and in a managing work sense. Here are some of what I would consider my best Apps for Education. I would add that they are teacher-led rather than child-led.

Calendar – This may sound an obvious one, but I have linked my school Gmail Apps account to my phone, which means that my school calendar seamlessly merges with my phone – reminders, agendas, the whole lot. I love it.

Notesy – A brilliant little notepad, which also syncs with Dropbox (see below). I have tried To Do programs in the past, and for me, a big old list works best. Worth every penny.

Dropbox – Something I could never live without. Dropbox is a fab little app on my phone, and my computer, which means that anything (image, doc, music file) on one device is automatically on everything else that Dropbox is installed on. If you have ever emailled yourself a document, or are poor at backing up, or carry your life in a USB pendrive, you need to get Dropbox, then nip back and thank me!

Clock – Great for the timer. If I could find a better stopwatch or timer, I’d use it. I can’t.

Bloom – This is an ethereal music generator. When I need the class to have ‘relaxed concentration,’ I put this on and leave it to play and generate music. Love it, and it also helps in getting me to sleep sometimes!

Dragon Dictation – Speech to type. Download this and try using it for those typing tasks you tend to put off. Works a charm, very little correcting needed and perfect for meeting minutes (I’ve found!).

Mobile Mouse – Laptop plugged into the data projector? You at the back of the class? Wifi enabled? Let Mobile mouse take control of your desktop. Great for making you a learning tool rather than a teacher at the front. Trello – A task organiser. I’m trialling the Beta at the moment, but it just isn’t as flexible as the website version, so I probably won’t use it much in the future. Worth a look though, especially for teams.

AirProjFree – This is a free little app which allows you to ‘throw’ any image in your picture library onto a browser, so very useful for the classroom, especially for those with projectors.

(Post inspired by Danny Nicholson‘s Ed Tech Carnival request)

The Classroom Agenda App on iPad

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Pandora's App

Seth Godin recently wrote a blogpost which was an open pitch really for someone to build an app that would make presentation no-linear, explaining he felt it would be the App to allow the Ipad market to flood.

More recently, he asked for an App that ran a meeting, like a universal Agenda.

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