I recently conducted my first observation using TextExpander Touch for the iPad, and it worked great. TextExpander is primarily designed for integrating with other apps, but you can also write directly in it, then send the note via email.

What is TextExpander? It’s an app that allows you to type a few short letters – a key phrase – and have that replaced with whatever text you specify – even whole paragraphs. For example, I have our entire observation rubric in TextExpander, so when I type “DanielsonRubric” I instantly get the full rubric inserted into my note. This is a huge timesaver for commonly used phrases.

I’ve previously recommended doing observations in Evernote directly, or via the intermediary app FastEver, but here’s my updated advice:

• Write in TextExpander
• Email the note to your Evernote address, plus yourself and/or the teacher
• Don’t bother with typing into Evernote or FastEver – the former is slow, and the latter crashes sometimes.

TextExpander Touch is stable, and it doesn’t add any unnecessary formatting or ads when you send a note via email. If you need to access or edit a note, you can do so in Evernote, which is still where I recommend storing everything like this.

TextExpander touch is $4.99 in the App Store.

Subscribing
One way to get the right information onto everyone’s calendar is to publish shared calendars that others can subscribe to. The .iCal format has become a standard way of publishing calendar feeds, to which anyone with the link can subscribe. I won’t go into this now, but let me know if you’re interested and I can do a follow-up post.

If you’re trying to make it easy for people to schedule appointments with you, you probably don’t want to publish your entire calendar, since it may contain confidential information. However, you do want to communicate your availability with anyone who needs to set an appointment with you.

Delegation
One way to do this is via your secretary – most enterprise calendar applications such as Outlook/Exchange allow you to specify a “delegate” who can view and modify your calendar for you. As long as you trust this person to make decisions about what gets on your calendar and to keep any confidential information private, all scheduling can be routed through the secretary, and you can still update your own calendar yourself.

But talking to the secretary is often difficult for teachers who only have a few minutes of free time during the day.

Tungle
A few weeks ago, I found a service (offered by BlackBerry but compatible with every major calendar application and smartphone) called Tungle that solves this problem. Tungle syncs with your existing calendar, and publishes a blacked-out availability calendar to make it easy for people to book appointments with you. It’s different from just publishing your calendar because no one can see what your existing appointments are; they can only see the times you’re available.

It’s a very smart system: You can set standing rules for when you should be marked available (for example, I marked myself unavailable on Sunday mornings 9:30-12:30 and weekdays before 7AM) even if you don’t have appointments on your calendar at those times.

You can just provide a link to your Tungle profile (here’s mine) to anyone who needs to schedule an appointment with you. They go to your page, select a time or two, and enter their email address.

You click a link in the email you receive, confirm the time, and the event is added to your calendar, and both of you receive an email confirmation. Best of all, this requires absolutely no discussion – yet creates total agreement – on when to meet.

Solving the “When Should We Meet?” Puzzle Once and For All
If you’ve ever been included on a 30-message email thread attempting to schedule a 1-hour meeting, you’ve felt the frustration of trying to manually provide ever-changing information to a group of people all responding at different times. Tungle solves this problem perfectly for 1-on-1 meetings, but there’s an even better tool for scheduling group meetings.

Doodle is essentially a polling tool for scheduling meetings at mutually agreeable times. In schools, IEP and committee meetings are often the toughest to arrange, because they require the attendance of people with only limited overlap in their availability.

Rather than publish everyone’s availability, Doodle allows the meeting organizer to pick a few good times (say five or six, if you have a very large team) and send these to everyone via a link. Everyone then clicks the link, types in their name, and marks the checkboxes to indicate when they can meet. When everyone has responded, the meeting organizer can pick a time and let everyone know – no discussion.

This eliminates the endless discussion that otherwise invariably results from trying to set up a meeting over email.

Try Something
If you’re wondering where to start, try Tungle. It’s free, and you can get other people to use it with you without their having to register for an account.

If you need to schedule a meeting with a group, give Doodle a try and see how much time it saves you.

And if you’re feeling really ambitious, try switching your school over to Google Calendar, which allows delegation, publishing/subscribing, and more.

I will be leading another iPad Essentials workshop on Thursdays at 4pm Pacific, April 5-19

Click here for details and to register

1. Your email password is sacred.
Never re-use it on any other website, because if anyone gets their hands on your email password, they can reset all of your other accounts (including bank accounts) and lock you out of your online identities.

2. Longer is stronger.
Your password becomes more secure as it gains more digits and becomes more complicated than a dictionary word.
Bad password: thermos (short and easily guessed by a dictionary attack)
Better password: thermostat51 (longer and not just a word)
Much better password: therm0static (not a word, 12 digits, and easy for you to remember)
Note: Contrary to popular belief, capital letters, numbers, and special characters don’t help that much if your password is short. As long as your password isn’t a dictionary word, go for length and ease of memorization rather than odd punctuation. Here’s a visual explanation.

3. Never give out your password via email or over the phone.
Anyone who asks you to tell them your password is likely a scammer. Legitimate services don’t have access to your actual password, because passwords are always encrypted (this is why you’ll need to set a new password when we switch over to our new website system).

4. Check the URL before logging in.
If you click a link in an email to go to a login page, make sure to check the address of the website, but from right to left, not left to right. For example, if you’re trying to visit Hotmail:
hotmail.server1234.com – this would be a fake site, because the address should end in hotmail.com, not something else.
server1234.hotmail.com – though a fictitious example, this would be a valid page at Hotmail’s website since it ends in hotmail.com.

5. Know when you’ve been hacked.
If your friends say they are getting spam from your Twitter or email account, that’s a good sign that someone has hacked your account. Change your password immediately, and check your sent and deleted messages folders for more malicious activity, such as attempts to reset other passwords.

My presentation is “Using Apple’s iPad™ to Maximize Your Effectiveness as a Leader” – hope you can join me! If the iPad isn’t of interest, I hope you’ll check out the lineup of great speakers – Malachi Pancoast, Rick Stiggins, Michael Chirichello, Jawanza Kunjufu, Diane Ravitch, Rafe Esquith, and more.

You can also find me in the exhibit hall – I will also be in booth 1033 for The Principal Center. If you’re interested in what The Principal Center offers for school leaders, or you are considering providing online professional development with us, stop by and chat with me. During the convention, you can reach me on my cell at 1-800-861-5172.

Hope to see you there! You can register here.

Click here for details and to register

Tips & Articles on Productivity from Justin Baeder

If you participated in the webinar, you will receive an email from ERN containing the download links for the PowerPoint file and handouts. Feel free to email me directly at info@eduleadership.org with any additional questions about using the iPad to increase your productivity.

How to Increase Your Productivity Using the iPad
WHEN: Tuesday, January 17, 2012, 1-2:30 p.m. Eastern Time

SNAPSHOT: Every day you wonder how you could possibly do your job without email, search engines, your laptop, smartphone and many other technology tools. The next frontier in your quest for greater effectiveness is the iPad, rapidly becoming the new standard for mobile productivity.

Most educators are not sitting at their computers in their offices all day. They are on the move, interacting with administrators, educators students, parents and other professionals. A desktop and even a laptop cannot keep up with the pace you typically set. Many educators have found that the iPad is ideally suited to helping them manage the complexity of their work, expanding the possibilities and opportunities for improving their performance beyond those offered by paper- and desktop-based tools alone.

Webinar, link to recording and CD-ROM $197 – click here to register

You will be able to both hear the webinar and view the PowerPoint on the CD-ROM.

Justin received outstanding reviews for his last webinar, “The High-Performance administrator: How to Better Manage Time, Workflow & Communication to Maximize Your Impact on Student Learning”. Now he helps you go one step further by showing you how to maximize use of your iPad.

WEBINAR TOPICS:

• Selecting the right apps—finding high-quality tools for your essential work
• Developing a workflow—making your data move smoothly between apps
• Looking for learning—conducting classroom observations and walkthroughs with the iPad
• Beyond tapping—selecting a Bluetooth external keyboard for faster text input
• A thousand words—how to use photos and video to gather evidence of student learning and prompt professional learning conversations
• Show up and follow through—managing your time and tasks with iCal, OmniFocus, and other essential productivity apps
• Finding your files—managing and syncing documents using Dropbox and more

You can register on the ERN website.

First, Clearly is a new tool for reading articles, news stories, and blog posts from websites without all the cruft that typically surrounds them. Clearly is a browser extension, meaning it’s something that you install from within your web browser. The only downside is that your browser must be Google Chrome, which isn’t really a downside since Chrome is by far the fastest browser around. You can get Chrome here for Windows or Mac.

The second tool is Skitch for iPad, which is based on the popular Mac app for quickly snapping and editing screenshots and photos. I’ve been using Skitch for years (virtually all of the images on this site went through Skitch at some point), so I’m delighted to see it on the iPad app store.

You can use Skitch to quickly annotate photos of student work or classroom displays. A picture says a thousand words, but often adding a few words or an arrow to a picture can say even more.

Skitch and Clearly are both free, and allow you to save their respective data to your Evernote account, reinforcing its position as your virtual brain in the cloud.

The High-performance Administrator: How to Better Manage Time, Workflow & Communication to Maximize Your Impact on Student Learning

WHEN: Tuesday, December 13, 2011, 1-3 p.m. Eastern Time

SNAPSHOT: School leaders are second only to teachers in their impact on student learning, so increasing the productivity of administrators is one of the best investments we can make to improve our schools.

Administrators are overburdened with tasks, meetings, emails, and countless other responsibilities that can distract them from their true mission of maximizing student learning. High-leverage strategies for managing this workload can help reduce stress, prevent burnout, and increase administrator effectiveness.

Cost: $197 (purchase orders are OK!) Includes CD-ROM and 30-day access to an online recording of the webinar emailed to you the next day.

Questions? Call 207-632-1954. You can register here.

Join principal productivity expert Justin Baeder, author of The Essential iPad Guide for Principals, for a power-packed 2-hour webinar on high-performance workflow. You will learn how to handle the workload of leadership with greater efficiency and focus, increasing your responsiveness to the needs of your school and decreasing the time you spend on email and paperwork.

School leadership is challenging work, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With the right tools and processes, you can stay on top of your work and sustain the high level of performance your role demands.

WEBINAR TOPICS:

• The High-Performance Workflow Process — 5 steps that will enhance your capacity to manage the challenges of your workload
• Taming the Paper Tiger — strategies and systems for getting paperwork under control and out of the way
• Managing tasks in the digital era—yes, there’s an app for that
• Always have an agenda—leveraging meetings and conversations to maximize your influence
• Mastering email—high-powered strategies for clearing your inbox and using email as a tool to enhance your leadership
• Understanding impact—how leaders influence learning
• The flow state—higher performance with less stress

Click here to register