Which are the best apps for administrators?
This does presuppose that every university administrator is equipped with an iPad. Which is not necessarily the case. Anyway, if you are fortunate enough to be issued with an iPad in support of your administrative duties there are a number of key apps you will want to get hold of. Most of these are general productivity apps rather than higher education specific but nevertheless very useful in my view. So, these are my favourites:
Evernote
One of my most used and most useful apps. I use it for note taking in most meetings and for recording all sorts of notes and clippings from web pages. It synchronises across iPad, desktop and iPhone and I really find it thoroughly indispensible.
And it’s free.
Dropbox
The simplest way to share files. Just very straightforward.
Twitter
An essential, obviously, for the tweeting administrator (although not to be used in meetings).
Pages
A straightforward but also rather feature-rich word processing app which does cope with and enable export of Word documents. Transferring files does require a little effort but worth it.
iAnnotate PDF
A really useful app which I use for most meeting papers – enables you to scribble, highlight and add typed notes to pdfs. Very handy.
Reminders
Simple, straightforward to do list with no frills.
Kindle
Er, for reading books. Occasionally even higher education related ones.
Plus a couple of others:
UKHE stats
A very handy summary of some HESA data – total student numbers in the sector, by country and by institution broken down by student type.
Zite
A really lovely app which is effectively a personalised, custom-built on-line magazine.
iTunesU
Heaps of podcasts and videos from lots of different institutions and covering many disciplines.
Are there other apps you use which are useful for the university administrator with an iPad?
I agree about the HESA app. Invaluable for suddenly being able to demonstrate omniscience about the HE sector.
UniRank – THE world rankings. Really surprised that you don’t have this one on your iPad Paul 🙂 QS also had one, but I don’t think it’s being maintained.
Captio – to send e-mails to myself. Initially thought the idea was simplistic, but in practice it’s a fantastic way to take notes on the hoof. And if you are away from Wi-Fi connectivity, it automatically sends them when you reconnect. I use Outlook rules to route them into a separate folder. It’s then easy to drag them onto the Tasks button to create task reminders.
Google – kind of obvious, but nicely integrates all the various Google services.
THE – linked to a subscription account and now linked to Newsstand, Latest edition is waiting for me when I wake up every Thursday morning.
Guardian – like THE, but waiting for me every morning.
Wikipedia – and other related apps to access Wikipedia.
Wine Society – for winding down.
Kindle – handy for occassionally reading books on HE quality! I’ve got an Apple Script that exports notes and highlights from Kindle into Evernote. So now i have a searchable and tagged notebook for every Kindle book i’ve used in my research.
Geeat list. Evernote is awesome.
Upad also useful for scibbling ideas and notes. Keynote if you want to make shock and awe presentations.
Hardware worth trying – Apple Bluetooth keyboard, Apple TV to display ipad screen on HD tv, VGA connector for doing presentations on projector screen.
I love the new LinkedIn app. If you link to your diary it shows you the linkedIn profiles of the people who are attending the meeting you are at – excellent if you aren’t very good at remembering names.
Side by side allows you to view 2 or 4 web pages on a single screen. I’ve only used it for comparing holiday prices but I’m sure there is a work use.
I trust UniQPass with my passwords and love the way it syncs across iPad, iPhone and PC.
For cheap skates ‘goodreader’ at £2.99 allows you to annotate PDFs and saves £4 compared to iannotate. Goodreader is nicely integrated with Dropbox for saving meeting papers.
I use Office2 HD for creating and editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. At £5.49 it is a good value app but may not have all the features of the more expensive alternatives.
And finally, Mindjet is a free mind mapping app which has an in-built facility to e-mail you mindmap as a PDF, if you want to print out a copy