Week Ten Blog Post

Gather Your Information and Share!

This past Tuesday, Scott Rocco, a superintendent and adjunct professor, showed the class some valuable apps that can be utilized as a professional. The apps shown were  Padlet, Buffer, Awesome Screenshot, Pocket, and Doodle. Padlet is an application that gives the user a collaborative environment to share files, text, and other media. It seems really resourceful for brainstorming with colleagues or classmates. The next app shown was Buffer. This application lets you schedule your tweets sporadically throughout the day. Next on the list was Awesome Screenshot. This application allows the user to take screenshots, similar to the snipping tool application within windows. The upside to this app is that it allows you to record audio and video, rather than only a single picture. The next application was called Pocket. This application allows you to save articles and other things you want to look at later. This seems invaluable for when you're in a rush and need to put procrastination on hold. Last but not least, Doodle was introduced. Scott gave us an interactive tutorial showing us how this scheduling application works. When a manager wants to host a meeting, every co-worker goes to a provided link and then specifies what times they are available for a meeting. When every co-worker has put in their availability, the application will provide an ideal time to meet, according to everyone's availability.

Following our guest speaker, Professor Calderwood introduced Diigo and IFTTT.  Diigo is a curation tool that keeps all of your important read material in one place. It allows you to search for content at a later time, as well as collaborate your data with others. Next, he introduced my favorite app presented on Tuesday, IFTTT. "If Then Then That" allows the internet to do alot of meticoulous work for you. You can link various online applications together, allowing you to create very neat "recipes." I now have it to when I post on Instagram, I automatically post on Facebook as well. I also set a recipe to change the background of my phone every time a new post on Reddit emerges.

On Thursday, Professor Calderwood presented some applications that really can help me with my current job. The application he displayed were canva, piethis, tweroid tchat,swayy,  everypost, piktochart,  storify, tagboard,compfight, , and paperli. Canva is an awesome application that allows you to create visual representations of data like never before. Various programs provided By Microsoft often become a headache to use. Thank to Canva, I can create charts for Stockton, without it being so time consuming. Piethis is a heaven-sent for the workplace. I have always wondered how we could utilize web-chat in the office, and Piethis offers a great interface for this. I plan to introduce this application to my operations manager to see what she thinks. Because I don't want to make this blog too wordy, I will only mention one last favorite of mine, Compfight. It has always been a struggle for me to find quality image files that weren't a legal issue for External Affairs. This site allows you to search for clip art that you can utilize without worry of using owned media. I plan to use this site as my go-to!

The article I chose to read  was"How To Become a Paper.li Publisher – Five Simple Steps." This article goes to explain how the service lets you combine news from several sources using keywords and hash tags to find content matching your theme. The first step to creating your first newspaper is creating an account. You can connect with your Twitter or Google account. Step two is to find your sources. You can search hash tags, RSS feeds, Facebook posts, and Twitter accounts. Step three is to fine-tune your paper. This includes setting the frequency of your posts, changing the theme and title. The final step is to curate. This means deleting any posts posts or articles that aren't relevant to your theme. You can blacklist sources as well. I personally think this is a great way to tune into specific areas of interest and gives you the ability to share those interests with others.