Ian Richardson
Built hundreds of website and helped countless schools realise their potential online. Ian should be called upon for straight-talking advice and to make a difference to the way you present your school through every outlet.
We all have our favourite apps we use but we also have our own definition of app. In my mind, an app is anything I use to gain some additional level of productivity, information of just fun. I'm going to be a little strict this time though and stick to My Top 5 Apps on my iPhone. (some of these have a desktop version as well)
1/ Hootsuite
If you are looking to go a little further with your social media strategy than just whizzing off the odd tweet, it is likely that Hootsuite (or similar) will be of use to you.
Hootsuite empowers users to bring together a number of social media feeds into one easy to use dashboard, from where you can reply with a single click, schedule social messages, save time with archived responses to common engagements and bulk upload messages. Go right into the bones of Hootsuite and you can use conversation maps to compare trending keywords for more active engagement and geo-locate conversations to really speak to the people you want to.
If you have a team of people who have access to, for example, one twitter account, you can assign permission levels, assign tasks to team members and appoint team leaders so that you keep your brand message consistent.
2/ Droplr
Droplr is something we started really using more and more last year and is really useful for high levels of productivity, no matter what your role is. Droplr is a powerful little tool that sits on your computer and allows you to quickly grab and edit screenshots of anything on your computer.
You can grab images and annotate them, then share them really quickly so that anyone can access wherever they are. You have the option to brand to delivery as your own (paid option) and even go so far as to record your screen, upload any file and share those too. You have some extra options such as password protecting the files when you share them and Droplr is available for Mac, Linux, Windows, iOS and Windows phone.
3/ Google Drive
We love Google Drive. Put to one side that the sync function on computers can cause the hard drive to grind to a halt and you have something which is an unbelievably useful. The app specifically has some really nice features to make it easy to share, manage, edit and collaborate on a range of documents while you're on the go.
All users get 15Gb free but for a small charge of $1.99 per month you can get 100Gb. This goes all the way up to 1Tb for just $9.99 per month. Loopy.
You can keep any file, videos, images, documents, even Microsoft Office files. You have full control over who can access and edit any type of file as well which is a huge feature for collaborative work.
You can quickly save Gmail attachments, use Googles powerful search feature to find work very quickly, work with Google Apps seamlessly, scan documents and lots, lots more. We love it.
4/ Xero
We use Xero for all our financial services. The product is brilliant and while the app lets this down a little bit it is still very much worth a look at the whole package. If you need to add invoices / receipts, check reports on your financial status and get different people involved in looking after different parts of your organisation financially, this is a really great tool. It is difficult for me to say how this might be of use to a school, but academies may well find this incredibly useful.
5/ Adrian James Bootcamp
Ok, nothing to do with productivity but this is a BRILLIANT app if you are into keeping fit and don't really have time to go to the gym (or hate it like I do) you will find this app fantastic. The workouts are short and intense and you can put together your own or follow the set workouts included in the app. If you're looking to get started the app has different levels so you can progress through the workouts and there will always be something you can by way of a great workout.
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