Last month, members of the CB&A team attended Hack Education, the seventh all-day “unconference” held the day before ISTE in San Antonio. Huge thanks go out to Steve Hargadon for organizing this successful event focused on connecting and sharing. Always a crowd favorite, the 2013 App Smackdown was no exception. More educators than ever volunteered to share a favorite tool in two minutes or less with fellow participants. Here are five of the most popular apps presented at this year’s conference:
Buffer is designed to offer you a smarter way to share on social media. The free app makes your life easier with an automated way to schedule the great content you find. Simply fill up your Buffer at one time during the day, and Buffer “automagically” posts the content for you throughout the day. As along as you keep your Buffer full, you will have a consistent social media presence all day long.
Deemed the social media hub for hashtags, Tagboard is a new conversation medium where people can discuss the subjects they care about with others who share their interests. The app searches multiple social networks for posts with a hashtag to allow users to see the whole conversation surrounding a particular topic. To check out the Tagboard for #ISTE13, visit tagboard.com/ISTE13.
Thanks to Mightytext, you can send and receive texts from your computer or tablet using your Android phone number. With more than three million users, the free app makes life easier for people who frequently communicate via SMS and use lots of different devices. Plus, messages stay in sync with your phone’s SMS inbox. Mightytext also stores photos and videos taken from your phone to your computer or tablet.
Haiku Deck, a free iPad app, is a new kind of presentation software designed to make your slides stunning. Whether you are pitching an idea, teaching a lesson, delivering a keynote, or igniting a movement, Haiku Deck makes presentations simple, beautiful and fun. Haiku Deck is rooted in a few basic principles: keep it simple by limiting your text, make it beautiful by using full-bleed images, and most important of all, have fun.
Lastly, Pearltrees is a place to collect, organize and share everything you like on the web. The visual and collaborative library enables you to collect web pages, photos and notes about the topics you’re interested in, and then organize them as you please to keep the content at your fingertips. In addition, you can discover millions of pearls organized by other people who share your interests.
If you were attending the App Smackdown, what favorite online tool would you share?