Module 4

EDUC81: Technology for Teaching and Learning 2
Module 4
Productivity Software Applications
Introduction
As more classrooms move toward one-to-one tech integration, students and teachers
are adopting new apps and software that enable them to become more productive. Often,
when we think about these productivity apps, many of us think about the plethora of great
note-taking and calendar apps available that help keep our students organized -- but have
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we thought about integrating apps that allow students to work more creatively?
Luckily for us, numerous apps encourage student creativity while helping them
accomplish important class projects and assignments. Whether you teach music, art, English,
or math (or any other subject, for that matter), using a productivity tool that allows your
students to be creative is sure to increase engagement and support their application of
content.
Intended Learning Outcomes
• Use open-ended tools (such as word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software,
and authoring tools) in subject-specific application.
• Identify uses of open-ended tools (productivity tools whether freeware or Microsoft
office in the teaching-learning of TLE.
• Create student outputs using computer application programs as evidence of
learning.
• Establish mechanisms to ensure child online safety and prevent cyberbullying.
What are Productivity Software?

Productivity software (also called personal productivity software or office productivity
software) is application software used for producing information (such as documents,
presentations, worksheets, databases, charts, graphs, digital paintings, electronic music and
digital video). Its names arose from the fact that it increases productivity, especially of
individual office workers, from typists to knowledge workers, although its scope is now wider
than that. Office suites, which brought word processing, spreadsheet, and relational
database programs to the desktop in the 1980s, are the core example of productivity
software. They revolutionized the office with the magnitude of the productivity increase they
brought as compared with the pre-1980s office environments of typewriters, paper filing,
and handwritten lists and ledgers. In the United States, some 78% of "middle-skill"
occupations (those that call for more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor's
degree) now require the use of productivity software.[3] In the 2010s, productivity software
has become even more consumerized than it already was, as computing becomes ever
more integrated into daily personal life.
The Top Productivity Tools, Apps and Software Programs of 2020
Categories
▪ Communication and Collaboration
▪ Time Tracking Tools
▪ Project Management Tools
▪ Design Tools
▪ Note-taking Tools
▪ Distractions and Focus Tools
▪ Documentation Tools
▪ Health Tools
▪ File Sharing Tools
▪ Screen recording and Presentation Tools
▪ Document and File-encoding Tools
Crafted by PABLO B. ATACADOR for USTP-Oroquieta.

▪ Spreadsheets Tools
▪ Video and Image Editing Tools
▪ Podcasting Tools
▪ Video Conferencing Tools
▪ Social Networking Sites
▪ Mobile Applications for Teaching and Learning
Communication and Collaboration

Slack
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Slack is a team collaboration tool which facilitates chat and message features. This can help in avoiding the
repetition of the same information to different team members over and over again. All the relevant
conversations can be found in the same place to save time.It is also compatible with applications that
facilitate sharing documents and files which can be really handy for sharing data quickly. Check out our
guide on how to use Slack if you want to go in-depth on the tool.
Troop Messenger
Troop Messenger is a messenger tool that can aid team communication with features that help share files and
keep the team informed and updated about the latest occurrences in a project. This application has a wide
range of chat supporting features such as Screen Sharing, Video call, Burnout, Workout, Recall, delete etc., to
enhance team communication and collaboration.
Troop Messenger’s user interface is quite intuitive and impressive that all its features are self-explanatory for
any novice user. Any business user can start the application’s free trial using their email.
Fleep

Fleep is a messenger application that combines with the email feature to be able to facilitate team
communication. It integrates emails, messages, and file sharing at one place for easy access. The
communication platform is truly flexible in every way. It is like an open network where users of different
teams can communicate. It keeps everything in one place.
Chanty
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Chanty is a collaboration tool that makes it easy to communicate with your team mates. You can chat or
exchange voice messages and have audio/video calls with your team. You can also manage tasks from the
chat – you can turn messages into tasks and assign them to your team members. Boost your productivity by
connecting Chanty with the integrations, including G Suite, Asana, Trello, Github, Dropbox, Zapier, and many
others.
Quip
Quip is a tool for effective communication across different platforms. It helps to ensure maximum productivity
with efficient features to keep you updated with your team at all times. Its key feature is getting everyone on
the same page. One can view the document and another can simultaneously edit it, thus, saving time and
facilitating efficiency.
GoToMeeting
GoToMeeting is a video conferencing tool. You can easily organize meetings and share screens in real time.
This helps to share and display both the individual and team’s progress. This is perfect to keep everyone

updated during scheduled meetings. It is an integration of an online meeting and video conferencing software
in one package.
Calendar
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Calendar is an AI-powered time management app that improves how you leverage a digital calendar to
schedule, track, and share your time each day, week, month and year. Highly integrative with other digital
calendars like Google Calendar, Outlook, and iCal, the Calendar app for desktop and mobile use (Android and
iOS) brings all those calendars into one view, offering new ways to see how you can use your time more
effectively. Decide who can see what and let the app contact meeting participants to schedule events for you.
The Calendar app offers free and paid versions for individuals and teams.
10to8
10to8 appointment scheduling software is a booking tool, that makes it easier for businesses to schedule both
internal meetings and appointments with clients seamlessly and skip date ping-pong.
The tool is quick and easy to set up, it syncs with iCal, Google and other popular calendars, and integrates
with thousands of apps via Zapier.
Time Tracking Tools

Time Doctor
Time Doctor is a team time tracking application. It helps to keep track of how each individual person is
keeping track of their time and hence makes them accountable for their working hours. You can even use
alerting and other features to avoid distraction for extra productivity. It includes a desktop software, mobile
version and even a chrome app. It even offers a free 14-day trial without the need of a credit card.

Hubstaff
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Hubstaff can be used to track time for several hundred teams working in distant locations. It has features like
randomized screenshots and tracking the mouse movements so that a check can be kept on the workers. You
can use the work-time tracker with additional screenshots and time sheets. This can help to analyze where
every minute was spent and hence create a sense of accountability. Our Hubstaff review shows all of these
features in detail. Go check it out.
Toggl
Toggl helps to track time along with other added features. With a history of working hours, it can deduce the
chargeable hours and track the availability of different employees all at once. This can further be used for
invoice generation with the pre-recorded chargeable hours. It is free and can be used to create detailed
reports of time spent on various activities.
Check out our Toggl review to have a better look at the tool.
Paymo
Paymo helps in tracking time along with planning and project management tasks. It also automatically
generates invoices according to the number of working hours and assist in carrying out the payments.
Additional features include resource planning, charts, reports, and invoices. The combination of these
features makes it an excellent overall productivity tool.

Harvest
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Harvest is a business-oriented time tracking software that can work on multiple devices. It helps in creating
time specific reports for the employees. This can also be used for generating and sending their due invoices
online. It has an efficient mechanism of starting and stopping time as you work. We also have a
comprehensive Harvest review so you can see more of its features.
actiTIME
actiTIME is a work management and time tracking solution for teams of any size. It offers a hassle-free way to
keep record of work and leave time, allows to track project progress, and provides managers and employees
with valuable insights on work results and productivity.
Its cost & billing module helps calculate billable amounts and process payroll, analyze profitability of specific
projects, and create professional invoices. The robust reporting module helps analyze the collected data and
get actionable results.
actiTIME also offers native mobile apps that simplify time tracking on the go and allow to implement the tool
for remote and field service teams.
WebWork Tracker
WebWork Tracker is a time management solution that can help you and your team become more organized,
efficient and more productive, accordingly.
WebWork not only tracks time but also automatically calculates your daily productivity and efficiency based
on programs and apps used at work time.
It also allows you to track billable and non-billable time, take random screenshots, monitor activity based on
mouse clicks and keystrokes, generate invoices and get powerful reports.

Kickidler
Kickidler is an innovative employee monitoring and time tracking software. The program has a powerful set of
tools that help enhance the commitment of each employee. Its features include time tracking, productivity
analysis, efficiency dynamics as well as real-time monitoring of an unlimited number of screens and video
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recording of activity history.

This year the developers released an update to make employee control even more democratic. This update
includes automatic notifications and self-monitoring interface. Now the program will notify the employee that
they’ve been reading the news for too long or had spent too much time watching their favorite vloggers. It
will also allow them to see their own productivity statistics.
Project Management Tools

ProProfs Project
ProProfs Project is a project management tool that aids in improving business productivity. With the help of
this tool, you can easily deal with all those challenges that occur during a project life cycle. Simply put, it
narrows the gap between you and project success.
For flawless team communication and collaboration, you can make use of features like internal notes,
threaded replies, etc. Plus, Gantt charts are there to give you accurate insights into the project progress. By
means of time tracking, you can keep a close eye on how much time each task is consuming to complete.
Celoxis
Celoxis is an award-winning, affordable, all-in-one project management & collaboration solution. Manage
projects, tasks, resources, timesheets, expenses, issues, risks & more from one place saving your team license
fees & the hassle of jumping through multiple tools. The reporting and dashboards are fantastic. It also has a
built-in workflow engine that enables you to automate things you never thought possible.

Monday
Monday helps to manage and organize work in a spreadsheet format. It distributes the workload, tracks
progress, and conducts project management for the team as a whole. It simplifies and organizes the work for
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easier and more efficient management. Additional features include the tracking of projects and
communication tools.
Trello
This is an extremely flexible project management tool. The Kanban Method it uses helps to keep track of the
project progress at different stages. It is also an efficient way of organization. Trello is great for businesses as
well as educational projects and task management.
Asana
Asana is helpful in organizing, tracking and managing projects. It aids the process of communication and
collaboration among team members. It also helps to formulate deadlines and create an efficient working
environment. Asana provides a free version for use that can accommodate up to 15 people. Other paid
versions can be accessed for the addition of more members.
Hive
Hive is used to manage the economics, business and collaboration aspects of different projects. It can be
helpful in dividing the project into current target lines and serves as a platform for the entire team to be
updated with the progress. It provides an SQL type of interface for storage of data in different databases.

Workzone
Workzone is a project management and collaboration software for teams. It can help to create reminders and
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prioritized task lists for added productivity. It allows one to access the employee portal from the convenience
of any location. The workplace documents can be viewed and updated by any member of the team according
to the requirements.
ProofHub
ProofHub is an online project management software that lets you stay in control of your projects, project
communications, and project delivery. The software provides scalable features such as Chats, Discussions,
Notes, Gantt Charts, Kanban Boards, Timesheets, Reports, etc to match the requirements of any business size
from small startups to large enterprise. It also integrates well with popular productivity tools such as Google
Drive, OneDrive, Box and Dropbox, thereby enhancing your overall project management experience.
Another key feature that grabs everyone’s attention is ProofHub’s compatibility with various devices and
popular operating systems, including iOS, Android, and Windows. Plus, it offers a free trial and exceptional
support services before you go for a paid version.
Ganttic
Ganttic is an online resource planning software, that you can use for managing project portfolios while
planning resources with maximum efficiency. You can create clear and comprehensive visual plans that give
you an instant overview of all your resources and projects.
Ganttic sets no limits to collaboration. Every user can sync resources that are important to them to their
Google Calendar. For having your plans always in your pocket, you can also download our iOS or Android app.

Design Tools
Canva
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Canva is a designing software apt for creating resumes and other documents in an extremely creative fashion.
It offers several templates and options to customize your creations. You can set a tone for how formal or
informal you want your document to be. You can get a list of predefined fields for ease in creating your
document. These fields can also be edited and customized according to one’s needs.
PicMonkey
PicMonkey is a photo editing and designing software. It can be used to edit and format pictures with a series
of options available. You can also create a collage and design it in any style. It is, essentially, a platform that
encourages visual and creative communication.
Crello
Crello is a graphics and animation software. It can be used to edit images as well as create animation designs.
There are several templates available for you to choose from, hence making it highly customizable. You can
create posts, covers, graphics and other documents.

Design bold
Design Bold is an online photo editing and design studio. It helps you create resumes, collections, posters, etc.
You can choose from the thousands of templates available in order to be able to give your creation a
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professional look.
Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark is a graphic designing application which incorporates the creation of videos and graphics. It is a
platform which can be used to effectively create and share content including graphics, animated videos, posts
for social media and other web stories.
Note-taking Tools
Evernote
Evernote is an efficient note-taking application which can help you to organize and share notes effectively.
The notes can be synced across various devices for ease of access. It also allows the attachment of audio
recordings and reference links. It even has a feature that allows you to read digital media like physical
documents.
Microsoft OneNote
Microsoft OneNote is a note-taking app which allows writing and drawing freely. The app allows audio and
video recording with facial recognition features. It also allows you to take side notes along with PDFs or other

documents just like you would in real life. Plus, you can use it free with just your email address.
Google Keep
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Google Keep is a note taking app for lists, reminders, and checklists. It is compatible with Google Docs. You
can sync your notes and even add audio and color codes to them. It is absolutely free of cost. You can attach
reminders even in the form of voice notes for future reference. It helps to capture notes together and
organize them efficiently.
Apple Notes
Apple Notes is the note-taking app for iOS and macOS devices. It allows adding text, photos, videos and other
forms of notes and finally synchronizes them with multiple devices. The Notes app is compatible with the
Apple Pencil. You can draw a line of varying thickness by pressing the pencil lighter or harder. These variations
provide a life-like feel.
Distractions and Focus Tools

Brain.fm
Brain.fm is a focus and productivity application based on music. It uses music to stimulate the brain and helps
to boost focus. It aims at unlocking the potential of music to assist our cognitive states. You can choose a
mental state to get music from that genre. Focus, relaxation, meditation, and sleep are some of the modes
that you can enhance. It is designed in a way that noticeable results can be observed in 15 minutes.

Hocus Focus
Hocus Focus is a focus application for Mac and iOS device which helps reduce the distraction and create an
aura of concentration. This can be very efficient in ensuring productivity as people tend to waste a
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considerable amount of time on their devices without even actively doing something. The tools provide
several creative features to encourage the user to concentrate and keep the desktop clutter-free.
FocusList
It is a focus-based app integrated with a daily planner which helps to enhance productivity and efficiency. It
acts as a planner with a focus timer based on the timeboxing technique. This includes boxing several hours of
the day to a certain activity. It is basically a way of visualizing the hours of the day.
RescueTime
RescueTime is a time management tool which gives you an analysis of how you are spending your day. It helps
minimize wasted time and formulate a strategy for productivity. Its motto is to find an ideal work-life balance.
It continuously tracks the time you spend on websites and in other apps to give you an accurate picture of
your workday.
f.lux
This is a focus tool that helps set the light of your computer to match the exact time of the day. When it is
night time, your computer screen will look like indoor lights. But, when it’s day time, it will look like sunlight.
These light changes will actually help you sleep better at night.

PomoDone App
PomoDone App is a productivity and time management ecosystem for all your devices, integrated and
synchronized (Windows/Linux/macOS/web, iOS and Android).
Boost, hack and track your workflow using the Pomodoro technique, on top of your current task management
system (Asana, Trello, JIRA, Basecamp, Evernote, Slack, etc).
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Sharpen your focus by using an interruption shield: block certain websites while you are working, notify your
distributed team via Slack and switch it to silent mode by managing its Do Not Disturb. Use your work history
log to analyze, report and invoice.
Free version for everyone, paid plans for advanced and team users.
Documentation Tools
Google Docs
Google Docs is a Google-based word processor. It also makes available other variants like spreadsheets and
presentation. You can edit and update the documents in real time. This avoids the trouble of loss of content
due to unsaved data. One can access the document from various platforms with the use of the shareable link.
Bit.ai: Smartest Interactive Documents
It is a documentation tool that is integrated with an iterative interface which proves to be helpful in creating
and sharing professional documents. Real-time uploading and updating can help team members and co-
workers to access information as and when it is made available.
Zoho Docs
Zoho Docs is an online documentation software which enables one to centrally access documents,
spreadsheets, presentations, images, etc. You can also share these by a mere link, thus avoiding the hassle of
a lot of system space being consumed.

Confluence
Confluence is a collaboration software which assists in organizing your work and creating professional
documents. Its features include being able to update documents online without having to save it separately.
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Dropbox Paper
It is a document creation and editing software to design creative work. You can efficiently edit, format and
design professional looking documents with absolute ease. It also has features for tasks and to-do lists. It is
collaborative and team friendly. You can create, review, revise, manage and organize all project documents.
You can even work in offline mode when required. One can read, comment and edit without any Internet
connection.
Health Tools
MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal is a trusted calorie counting app which helps to lose weight and encourages healthy eating.
There are features which can also help to provide tips and ideas on health benefits and fitness techniques.
The calorie counting in daily activities can be an interesting way of keeping score and being motivated to lose
more weight.
StrongLifts 5×5
StrongLifts 5×5 is a strength and muscle building application which focuses on primarily five exercises, namely
squat, bench press, deadlift, overhead press, and barbell row. The app encourages a three-time workout
weekly while focusing on weightlifting techniques. It emphasizes proper sleeping and eating schedules to
maintain health along with fitness.

Yoga Studio
It is a fitness app based on Yoga by Rodney Yee. It provides HD video classes from experts. Videos for different
purposes including treatment of posture oriented diseases and other bodily problems are available. You can
focus your yoga routine on the results you want to obtain.
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Jefit
It is a gym workout application for training and keeping track of your progress. It helps to focus on different
gym sessions for building fitness. You can focus on arm strength, legs or lower body according to your
preference. The tool helps you to keep track of previous progress in gym routines to effectively improve
performance.
Strava
Strava.com is a health application for athletes with features to track and organize their activities. It mainly
focuses on a range of athletic activities to enhance the physical features of the body. An organized routine of
activities for stipulated periods of time can help to develop the body into an athletic form.
File Sharing Tools

Google Drive
Google Drive is a cloud-based real-time file creation and sharing tool. It makes different types of file styles like
documents, spreadsheets, and presentations available. One can directly share the link to the file for easy
access without the consumption of any extra space for the storage of the shared file.

Wimi
Wimi helps to manage and formulate documents and share them on a platform for easy access of all team
members. It helps in project management and collaboration as well.
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Dropbox
Dropbox is a file hosting and sharing service used to share files by syncing them online directly. Dropbox also
offers cloud storage and file synchronization which can be essential in being efficient and productive.
OneDrive
OneDrive is a cloud-based file hosting and synchronization service which helps to share files and documents
online. It helps to save the system space and effectively update documents immediately. Team members can
access the updated documents from different locations at their ease.
SugarSync
SugarSync is a cloud service platform for the synchronization of files. It provides features for the access,
backup, synchronization, and sharing of files and documents across various operating systems. Contrary to
other popular file sharing tools, it enables you to generate a backup for the shared documents which can be
helpful and beneficial for future references. It is, therefore, an efficient file management and productivity
tool.
Screen Recording Software
Screen capture software simplifies everyday tasks such as submitting or responding to support tickets,
announcing product updates, onboarding new employees, or creating software tutorials.
In our research, we tested options ranging from minimalistic three-button windows to complex apps
overflowing with tools, priced from free all the way up to several hundreds of dollars. Each of our picks offers
a unique feature, but they all meet some basic criteria:
• The ability to record your whole screen, one window, or a specific area
• The option to superimpose a webcam feed over the screen capture
• Simultaneous microphone and system audio recording
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• Built-in video sharing and/or convenient exporting tools

• A friendly user interface
Of course, the process doesn't end with the screen recording. The quality of the final product can make or
break user engagement, so we also considered the post-capture editing features as we selected the best
video recording software.
Camtasia (Windows, Mac)
The Camtasia video capture interface is straightforward and no-nonsense. You choose your capture area,
whether or not to include webcam and microphone inputs, and click Record.
Its built-in video editor is a different story. There's an exhaustive list of editing options that manage not to feel
overwhelming. Click-and-drag effects and a decent selection of stock media are located along the left-hand
side of the app, with detailed properties and customizations appearing on the right-hand side whenever you
select an element from the timeline.
Screencastify (Chrome)
If you need to share lots of short screen recordings but don't need a bunch of editing bells and whistles, you
can't go wrong with Screencastify. For example, if you provide customer support, you're probably less
interested in polished videos with long production turnarounds than you are in quick and easy screen
captures. Screencastify trades in the editing options for an uncluttered desktop recording and video sharing
interface.
Since it's a Chrome extension, you can set everything up in one to two minutes. Install it, choose what you
want to capture (Screencastify can capture video outside of your browser window), enable or disable webcam
and microphone capture, and click Record.
During a recording, Screencastify positions a toolbox in the lower left corner of your browser that includes
cursor settings (toggling the focus bubble, adding click animations, and auto-hiding the cursor when it's
inactive) as well as a paintbrush to annotate content within a Chrome window.
When you stop the recording, Screencastify opens the video in its web player and uploads the file to your
Google Drive (or saves it locally on your computer, if you've changed the settings). You can upload to YouTube
or Google Classroom, if you want, or download the video. There are also some simple editing tools: trim, split,
and merge.

OBS Studio (Windows, Mac, Linux)
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What OBS Studio lacks in editing features, it makes up for with streaming and recording options. For starters,
the open-source app lets you create customizable "studios," preset audio and video configurations that you
can cycle through during a recording.
We created three studios during our test (shown above): one for just the primary display and webcam,
another for the secondary display and webcam, and a third for both displays and the webcam. Sizing and
positioning elements within each studio is a simple click-and-drag affair, and cycling through them during a
recording session is controlled with a hotkey.
With enough preparation, these audio and video presets eliminate the need to fuss with any settings while
streaming live video via OBS's robust integrations. There are 44 (!) platforms in the live streaming menu,
ranging from big-name sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch, to obscure streaming platforms like
watchpeoplecode.com and Sermon Audio. Opening the Settings menu and pasting your stream key into the
text box is all it takes to set up the one-click Start Streaming button on the main dashboard. Changes you
make to a studio, such as sound mixing or webcam placement, are broadcasted live, so make sure you're
ready.
Apowersoft Unlimited (Windows, Mac, Android, iOS)
Any up-to-date Android device or iPhone has a built-in screen recorder and some basic video editing tools. But
for those who need more functionality, Apowersoft's Unlimited package has a lot to offer.
It includes subscriptions to all 17 Apowersoft apps (eight of which handle some sort of video capture or
editing) that can be launched from a single dashboard. There's one app for recording an Android screen and
another for iPhones, both of which include settings we didn't see in any other apps, like resolution control,
bit-rate throttling, framerate selection, and camera configurations.
If you have Apowersoft's Unlimited suite, you can wirelessly cast a mobile device to your computer screen and
use the desktop recorder to capture your computer's webcam, microphone, PC audio, and mobile device
simultaneously. This is especially convenient if you want to show someone how to use an app that has a
desktop and a mobile version. If there are similar features with dissimilar interfaces, showing them side-by-
side would clear up any confusion.
The suite's video editor is pretty basic, but it will let you trim segments, add text overlays, and adjust contrast,
brightness, and saturation.

ScreenFlow (Mac)
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Telestream's ScreenFlow adds a wow factor to your screen recordings, but it does have a steeper learning
curve than other options on this list. Although its editor looks minimalistic at first, there's an overwhelming
number of features to sift through.
By far the most valuable of these tools is Telestream's stock media library, which includes more than 500,000
images, audio clips, and videos (some in 4k) to put a professional sheen on your screen recording. Open the
in-app library from the Features pane, search by keyword, then click and drag the media to your timeline.
Access to the stock media library is $60 per year, which is well worth it if customers or large audiences are
watching your videos.
Other standout features include the ability to record your desktop at retina resolution (i.e., very high
resolution) as well as some impressive templating options for cutting down on production time.
The Styles and Templates tools allow you to group settings and video components so they can be applied with
a couple clicks. With Styles, you can save audio/visual settings for individual elements like color filters or drop
shadows for a video segment. Templates lets you insert, arrange, and configure groups of elements in
advance, such as branded intro and outro segments, text placeholders, and background music.
Movavi Screen Recorder Studio (Windows, Mac)
Movavi Screen Recorder Studio is a great mid-level screen recording app, complete with a built-in editor that
gets the job done. But there is one feature it does exceptionally well: scheduled captures.
This tool lets you record webinars or live streams while you're away from your desk. You'll find this feature in
the Preferences, under Scheduler. You can set a time limit for the next recording, or you could specify a time
for a recording to begin and end. You can even set it up so your computer shuts down or goes to sleep after
the capture is finished.
It's convenient and unambiguous, further improved by Movavi's above-average resolution settings. If you
need to record an inconveniently-timed webinar to share with others, you'll want it to look good.
Movavi Pricing: A lifetime $59.95 for a one-computer lifetime license. There's a free version, but it adds a
large hideous watermark to the center of every video, so it's really only useful for getting a feel for the
software.

Bandicam (Windows)
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With the rise in popularity of eSports, most of today's screen capture software programs include gamecasting
features. That's not useful for productivity-minded workers, but high-resolution video capture—like that
available with Bandicam—works wonders for those in creative fields.
If you're putting together a Photoshop tutorial or a webinar on web design, 144 frames per second in 4k
resolution will ensure your content stands out from the rest. Bandicam requires top-notch hardware to
process recordings at such a high quality, but most people in the creative field shouldn't run into any
problems.
Although you might expect a complex interface from an app that focuses so much on video quality, this app
has a sparse configuration window. It's a dead-simple app, and the only thing it's missing is a built-in editor.
FlashBack Pro (Windows)
The FlashBack Pro screen recording interface looks a bit dated, and the editor is only a couple steps above
average, but it comes with invaluable sound editing tools.
Recording your voice during a desktop capture creates lots of tiny issues. The proximity of keystrokes to your
mic makes them sound like a jackhammer, unwanted noises from across the room are hard to prevent, and
system audio is often at a totally different volume than your mic. Most editors help you minimize these
problems, but none are as detailed or easy to navigate as Flashback Pro.
For example, turning down the volume on a system audio track is as simple as highlighting it on the timeline,
right-clicking it, and choosing Change Volume of Selection. You can also remove background noises by
applying a filter, or normalize microphone and PC audio so their volumes match.
The app also has a couple of novel video editing features, such as automatically highlighting sections of screen
inactivity for removal and re-recording your mouse cursor without changing anything else in the video.
CloudApp (Windows, Mac, Chrome, iOS)
CloudApp, as the name suggests, automatically uploads every recording you make to the cloud. This makes it
a convenient tool for quickly recording and sharing things. It also offers a Zapier integration, meaning you can
automatically send those recordings to other apps if you want.
You can start recordings using the tray or menu bar icon, or using a custom keyboard shortcut. Record your
entire display, or choose which section of the screen you want to record. There are some basic image editing
features—trims and cuts—but overall the focus is on getting your recording to the cloud quickly.
There are a few limitations. You can't record system audio, for example, and there's no way to add
annotations to your recordings. But that doesn't matter if you just need to quickly demonstrate something,
which is where CloudApp thrives.
The main reason we chose this app is because of its integration power. By connecting it with Zapier, you can
create automated workflows that do things like send recordings to Trello, Google Sheets, or Slack for easy
reference.
Zappy (Mac)
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Sometimes you just want to quickly make a recording and send it to someone, without having to edit anything
or mess around with a bunch of settings. Zappy is perfect for this. This app is triggered using a keyboard
shortcut, or using the menu bar icon. Select which portion of the screen you want to record, hit the video
camera button, then hit stop when you're done. You can record a voiceover using your microphone, if you
want.
If you're a paid Zapier user, the recording will be uploaded to the cloud and a link copied to your clipboard. If
not, you can grab the video file locally and share it however you like. You won't find a lot in the way of
settings, and there's no editing capability, but you can add arrows, boxes, basic text, and obfuscation while
you're recording (or after the fact for a screenshot). It's just a fast way to share something.
Cards on the table: this is our app. We built Zappy for internal use, basically because we couldn't find a tool
that worked quite the way we wanted. We thought people might find it useful, so we released it to the public.
Active Presenter (Windows)
ActivePresenter is a free screen recorder and screencast video editor with all the necessary editing tools for
recording screen & creating engaging screencast videos on Windows and macOS.
With ActivePresenter, making a professional screencast or a training video is as easy as 1 – 2 – 3: Record, Edit
and Export!
Best free screen recorder for Windows/macOS

• Record everything on your computer screen with crystal-clear video quality.
• Select any area on your screen and start recording.
• Record system audio and audio from microphone simultaneously.
• Automatic mouse-click effects and annotation generation.

Best screencast video editor: Give your screencast videos a professional look and feel!
• Editing screencast video is super easy with all the necessary editing tools built-in.
• Advanced audio/video editing: Cut, Crop, Join, Change Volume, Speed Up, Slow Down, Blur.
• Multi-track audio/video editing.
• Adding animation and animation effects to your videos.
• Annotate your videos with: auto-shapes, images, zoom-n-pan, video overlays, gesture effects.
• Change cursor path and mouse-click effects easily
Export to popular video formats (MP4, AVI, WMV, WebM, MKV)

• Choose between various video formats to optimize the quality or output size.
• Support lossless codecs in MKV format for further processing.
• Export your screencasts to MP4 or WebM for uploading to Youtube.
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Presentation Tools
What makes a great presentation app?
When looking for the best presentation apps, we wanted utility players since slideshows are used for just
about everything, from pitch decks and product launches to class lectures and church sermons. With that in
mind, here's what we were looking for:
• Pre-built-templates: The best apps should have attractive, professional-looking templates to build
presentations in a hurry.
• Sharing and collaboration options: More people are working remotely. Whether you plan to share
your webinar slides later, or you just want to collaborate with a coworker on a presentation, it should
be easy to share files and collaborate in real-time.
• Media support: Do you need to record a narration for your presentation, or insert a YouTube clip? The
best presentation apps should support a wide variety of media types, like audio, video, images, and
yes, animated GIFs. (C'mon, it's time.)
• Graphical assets: If you need to build a presentation quickly, you don't have time to scour the internet
for images or make custom animations to make your presentation interesting. You need an app baked
with graphical assets, like stock images, graphics, charts, and animations.
• Presentation options: Some kind of presenter mode should be standard on a great presentation app.
If we were awarding points, we'd also give bonus points for other presentation options, like live
polling or analytics.
Google Slides (Web, iOS, Android)
Google Slides—part of the G Suite family of apps—is a traditional presentation app designed around
collaboration. It works much like PowerPoint and other presentation apps you've used in the past, only
Google Slides runs in your browser, for free. Select a theme for the slideshow, then add standard slide layouts
and insert text, graphics, and slide transitions from the menus.
Within its presenter view, Google Slides has a great Q&A tool to make your presentation more interactive.
Turn it on, and it'll add a banner with a link to the top of your presentation. People can visit that link to ask
questions in a separate window and upvote other people's questions. Hosts will see incoming questions
through a separate tab within the presenter view.
Google Slides really shines when it comes to collaboration. Share a link to your presentation, and anyone you
want can add details to your slides, write presentation notes, and anything else you want in your
presentation. Add comments, similar to Google Docs, to share feedback. You can track changes with Google
Slides' detailed revision log, so you don't have to worry about a coworker messing with that chart you
painstakingly created. It's one of the best ways to collaborate on a presentation.
An added bonus: Google Slides integrates with Zapier, so you can do things like update charts based on form
responses or new spreadsheet rows, or even customize a template when you win a new deal in your CMS.
Refresh charts on a Google Slides presentation when rows are updated on Google Sheets
Visme (Web)
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Visme is a great presentation app if you're building a slideshow from scratch. It has a variety of clean, sleek
templates for different kinds of presentations. You can pick from color palettes for each theme as well, or
create your own color palette. There are also different slide types within each template. For example, if you
choose to add a testimonial slide template to your slideshow, you can choose from several different styles
depending on your theme.
Visme features a large selection of icons, graphics, and royalty-free images to spruce up your presentation. If
text or chart formatting annoys you, Visme's pre-built text boxes and graphs have a wide variety of formatting
styles to suit your taste.
Under a paid plan, you can share your slideshow via a private link, collaborate with team members, download
your presentation to a number of different file formats, and even get pageview analytics when you make your
presentation public.
Ludus (Web)
On the other end of the spectrum, Ludus is for creative folks who find presentation apps to be limiting and
want their slideshow to be a work of art.
Ludus really shines with its third-party integrations. You name it, they've got it: from YouTube and GIPHY to
Google Fonts and Figma, so you can pull content from other sources to create a stunning presentation.
Graphic designers will especially love Ludus. You can edit and break apart SVG files, upload your own font
files, or even copy and paste files from Sketch and Adobe Illustrator. There are also some pretty advanced
features that any web designer or illustrator would be familiar with, like gradients and code blocks, making
this a good choice for graphic designers, art directors, UX designers, and the like. But you don't have to be a
Photoshop pro to use these features; Ludus starts new users off with a guided tutorial, which gently
introduces some of its more complex features.
Paid plans allow you to password-protect your presentations, use a remote control, share and collaborate as a
team, and even embed on Medium and Notion.

FlowVella (Web, macOS, iOS)
If your presentation is going to be at a booth for a conference or other exhibit, you have a whole new set of
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potential issues: bad WiFi, a device sleeping after a few minutes of inactivity, you name it.
FlowVella solves that problem with its Kiosk Mode: it turns your slideshow into a portable version of a digital
billboard. Your presentation is protected with a PIN, so you don't have to worry about a stalled slideshow or,
worse, an attendee accidentally closing it.
Like the other presentation apps in this roundup, it has a large selection of templates to choose from, but
unlike other apps, it also notes when a template is optimized for mobile devices or widescreens. That's
because FlowVella was made to be portable, so you don't have to worry about a photo gallery showcasing
your product getting cut off by your iPad.
Slidebean (Web)
If you want a beautiful presentation but don't have an eye for design, or you just want to skip the tedium of
formatting slides, Slidebean is for you.
You have two options to build your presentation: either pick a template to start building, or start by writing an
outline of your presentation. If you start with an outline, you'll select your theme after the fact, and Slidebean
will create a presentation for you, complete with formatting. In our testing, the slideshow they created for us
was pretty on-point to what we would have wanted to make. Use any of the pre-existing color palettes, or if
color isn't your thing, Slidebean will generate a color palette from a URL.
The best part about Slidebean is how it uses artificial intelligence throughout the product. You can choose to
have it rearrange your slide order, or individual elements within a slide, to bring the most compelling parts
front and center. It's an effective way to make professional presentations quicker than you could in most
other presentation apps.
Apple Keynote (Web, macOS, iOS)
Sometimes we may not like the standard software that's baked into computers, but Keynote is an exception.
Apple's presentation app comes free with every new Apple device and is similar to a simplified PowerPoint
packed with beautiful templates and typography.
You can use it online at iCloud.com to make presentations in Keynote even on a PC. Or, move your Keynote to

iCloud to share with others to view or edit. You can also save presentations to a PowerPoint file if needed.
Keynote's best known for its smooth animations, with enough customization options that you could mock up
a new app in Keynote and make it almost feel like you're actually using the app, instead of looking at a demo
in a presentation. When you're ready to present, you can use an iPhone to remote control your presentation
from your Mac, or present online for free with Keynote Live's presentation streaming.
MS PowerPoint (Windows)
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How to Make a PowerPoint Presentation
A presentation is made up of multiple slides, and now that you know how to make one, you can delve deeper
into PowerPoint's capabilities.
1. Open a blank presentation again or start from one you've already created.
If you've already created a presentation, double click the icon to open the existing file. Otherwise, open
Microsoft PowerPoint, click "File" in the top left corner, and click "New Presentation." From there, you can
follow the prompts to set up a new presentation.
2. Choose a "theme" or create your own.

Microsoft offers built-in themes and color variations to help you design your slides with a cohesive look. To
choose from these pre-built themes, choose the "File" tab again, select "New", choose one of the options, and
click "Create."
Otherwise, you can use PowerPoint elements, your design sense, and your brand's color palette to make your
own "theme."
3. Create a variety of slides for different purposes.

You don't want to present the same exact slide, just with different content on it. This would bore your
audience. Ensure that you create multiple variations, accommodating some of the common uses for slides. At
minimum, you'll need:
A title slide
An agenda or table of contents slide
A slide that introduces the speaker
Various content slides (create different layouts considering what kind of multimedia you'll use)
4. Use the Duplicate Slides feature to save you time.
There's no reason to create these designs over and over again. Now that you have a few to draw from, you
can simply duplicate them before inputting your content. Here's how to do that:
On the left pane, right click the thumbnail of the slide you want to duplicate.
Choose "Duplicate Slide" from the pop-up menu.
This will automatically add a copy of this slide to the presentation. From there, you can customize it for your
needs.
5. Add transitions to your slides (optional).

Done well, transitions can add a little bit of movement and showmanship to your presentation. PowerPoint
has several transitions built in for you to choose from.
To access them, select the "Transitions" tab from the top ribbon. From there, you can select a transition for it

to preview on your screen. To customize it further, click "Effect Options" and play with the features to find
something that suits your liking. To remove a transition, select "Transitions" and click "None."
6. Add animations to your slides (optional).

Like transitions, animations can add movement, reveal information, and help you underscore the points you
want to hit during your speech. To animate an element, follow these steps:
Select the element you want animated by clicking on it.

Choose "Animations" from the top ribbon.
You'll have the option to choose from several effects displayed in the ribbon.
Clicking on one will give you a preview.
To customize the animation, select "Effect Options."
To remove an animation, click "None" in the ribbon.
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Some of the ways to customize animations include:
On Click
With Previous
After Previous
Duration
Delay
These describe how you want the effect to behave, so play around with them until you find an effect that
suits your liking.
You'll also have the option to move animations around as you edit your slides with the "Reorder Animation"
function in the top ribbon.
7. Save your presentation.

Click "File" and "Save", making sure to specify which folder or destination you want your PowerPoint to be
stored.
8. Run your presentation.

It's always good to do a trial run to ensure that your slides are set up properly and your animations fire they
way you expect them to.
To present your PowerPoint, go to the "Slide Show" tab and click "Play from Start". The slide will cover your
whole screen, blocking out your desktop and PowerPoint software. This is so your audience (in this case, you
for the trial run) is solely focused on the visual elements of your presentation.
9. Advance the slides.

When you're done with one slide and want to show the next in your sequence, click your mouse in
presentation mode. This will advance the slide.
PowerPoint Style
1. Don’t let PowerPoint decide how you use PowerPoint.
Microsoft wanted to provide PowerPoint users with a lot of tools. But this does not mean you should use
them all. Here are some key things to look out for:
• Make sure that preset PPT themes complement your needs before you adopt them.
• Try to get away from using Microsoft Office’s default fonts, Calibri and Cambria. Using these two
typefaces can make the presentation seem underwhelming.
• Professionals should never use PPT’s action sounds. (Please consider your audience above personal
preference).
• PowerPoint makes bulleting automatic, but ask yourself: Are bullets actually appropriate for what you
need to do? Sometimes they are, but not always.
• Recent PPT defaults include a small shadow on all shapes. Remove this shadow if it's not actually
needed. Also, don’t leave shapes in their default blue.
2. Create custom slide sizes.
While you usually can get away with the default slide size for most presentations, you may need to adjust it
for larger presentations on weirdly sized displays. If you need to do that, here's how.
• In the top-left corner, choose "File."
• Select "Page Setup."

• Type the height and width of the background you'd like, and click "OK."
• A dialogue box will appear. Click "OK" again.
• Your background is resized!
Tip: Resize your slides before you add any objects to them or the dimensions of your objects will become
skewed.
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3. Edit your slide template design.

Often, it's much easier to edit your PowerPoint template before you start -- this way, you don't have design
each slide by hand. Here's how you do that.
• Select "Themes" in the top navigation.
• In the far right, click "Edit Master," then "Slide Master."
• Make any changes you like, then click "Close Master." All current and future slides in that
presentation will use that template.
4. Write text with your audience in mind.

A significant part of a PowerPoint's content is text. Great copy can make or break your presentation, so
evaluating your written work from a few different angles could make you seem more persuasive. Thinking
about how your text is received differentiates good presenters from the best.
Typography:
Many people underestimate the influence of typeface, but choosing the right font is important -- the
perception of your font type could influence your audience's impression of you. The right font is an
opportunity to convey consistent brand personality and professionalism.
Some fonts are seen as clean and professional, but this doesn't mean they're boring. A common mistake is
thinking your font isn't "exciting" enough, which could lead you to choose a font that distracts from your
overall message.
Source: Workfront
That said, you can still use fun and eccentric fonts -- in moderation. Offsetting a fun font or large letters with
something more professional can create an engaging presentation. Above all, be sure you're consistent so
your presentation looks the same throughout each slide, so your audience doesn't become distracted by too
many disparate fonts.
5. Make sure all of your objects are properly aligned.
Having properly aligned objects on your slide is the key to making it look polished and professional.
You can manually try to line up your images ... but we all know how that typically works out. You're trying to
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make sure all of your objects hang out in the middle of your slide, but when you drag them there, it still
doesn't look quite right. Get rid of your guessing game and let PowerPoint work its magic with this trick.
How to align multiple objects:
• Select all objects by holding down "Shift" and clicking on all of them.
• Select "Arrange" in the top options bar, then choose "Align or Distribute."
• Choose the type of alignment you'd like.
How to align objects to the slide:

• Select all objects by holding down "Shift" and clicking on all of them.
• Select "Arrange" in the top options bar, then choose "Align or Distribute."
• Select "Align to Slide."
• Select "Arrange" in the top options bar again, then choose "Align or Distribute."
• Choose the type of alignment you'd like.
PowerPoint Design
6. Use "Format Menus" to better control your objects' designs.
Format menus allow you to do fine adjustments that otherwise seem impossible. To do this, right click on an
object and select the "Format" option. Here, you can fine-tune shadows, adjust shape measurements, create
reflections, and much more. The menu that will pop up looks like this:
Although the main options can be found on PowerPoint’s format toolbars, look for complete control in the
format window menu. Other examples of options available include:
• Adjusting text inside a shape.
• Creating a natural perspective shadow behind an object.
• Recoloring photos manually and with automatic options.
7. Take advantage of PowerPoint's shapes.
Many users don’t realize how flexible PowerPoint’s shape tools have become. In combination with the
expanded format options released by Microsoft in 2010, the potential for good design with shapes is readily
available. PowerPoint provides the user with a bunch of great shape options beyond the traditional rectangle,
oval, and rounded rectangle patterns, unlike even professional design programs like Adobe Creative Suite or
Quark.
Today’s shapes include a highly functional Smart Shapes function, which enables you to create diagrams and
flow charts in no time. These tools are especially valuable when you consider that PowerPoint is a visual
medium. Paragraphing and bullet lists are boring -- you can use shapes to help express your message more
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clearly.
8. Create custom shapes.
When you create a shape, right click and press "Edit Points." By editing points, you can create custom shapes
that fit your specific need. For instance, you can reshape arrows to fit the dimensions you like.
Another option is to combine two shapes together. When selecting two shapes, right-click and go to the
"Grouping" sub-menu to see a variety of options.
• Combine creates a custom shape that has overlapping portions of the two previous shapes cut out.
• Union makes one completely merged shape.
• Intersect builds a shape of only the overlapping sections of the two previous shapes.
• Subtract cuts out the overlapping portion of one shape from the other.
By using these tools rather than trying to edit points precisely, you can create accurately measured custom
shapes.
9. Crop images into custom shapes.

Besides creating custom shapes in your presentation, you can also use PowerPoint to crop existing images
into new shapes. Here's how you do that:
• Click on the image and select "Format" in the options bar.
• Choose "Crop," then "Mask to Shape," and then choose your desired shape. Ta-da! Custom-shaped
photos.
Learn more about creating images for your marketing channels in the video below.
10. Present websites within PowerPoint.
Tradition says that if you want to show a website in a PowerPoint, you should just create link to the page and
prompt a browser to open. For PC users, there’s a better option.
Third party software that integrates fully into PowerPoint’s developer tab can be used to embed a website
directly into your PowerPoint using a normal HTML iframe. One of the best tools is LiveWeb, a third-party
software developed independently.

By using LiveWeb, you don’t have to interrupt your PowerPoint, and your presentation will remain fluid and
natural. Whether you embed a whole webpage or just a YouTube video, this can be a high-quality third party
improvement.
Unfortunately, Mac users don’t have a similar option. Agood second choice is to take screen shots of the
website, link in through a browser, or embed media (such as a YouTube video) by downloading it directly to
your computer.
11. Try Using GIFs.
GIFs are looped animated images used to communicate a mood, idea, information, and much more.
Users add GIFs to Powerpoints to be funny or quickly demo a process. It's easy to add GIFs to your slides. To
do so, simply follow these steps:
• Download and save the GIF you want.
• Go to the slide you want the GIF on.
• Go to the "Home" tab, and click either "Insert" or "Picture".
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• From the "Picture" drop-down menu, choose "Picture from File".

• Navigate to where you saved your GIF and select it. Then, choose "Insert".
• To play the animated GIF, click the "Slide Show" tab and then "Play from Current Slide".
PowerPoint Process
12. Keep it simple.
PowerPoint is an excellent tool to support your presentation with visual information, graphics, and
supplemental points. This means that your powerpoint should not be your entire presentation. Your slides --
no matter how creative and beautiful -- shouldn't be the star of the show. Keep your text and images clear
and concise, using them only to supplement your message and authority.
If your slides have dense and cluttered information, it will both distract your audience and make it much more
likely that you will lose their attention. Nothing in your slides should be superfluous! Keep your presentation
persuasive by keeping it clean. There are a few ways to do this:
• Limit bullet points and text.
• Avoid paragraphs and long quotes.
• Maintain "white space" or "negative space".
• Keep percentages, graphs, and data super basic.
13. Embed your font files.
One constant problem presenters have with PowerPoint is that fonts seem to change when presenters move
from one computer to another. In reality, the fonts are not changing -- the presentation computer just doesn’t
have the same font files installed. If you’re using a PC and presenting on a PC, then there is a smooth work
around for this issue. (When you involve Mac systems, the solution is a bit rougher. See Tip #11.)
Here’s the trick: When you save your PowerPoint file (only on a PC), you should click Save Options in the "Save
As …" dialog window. Then, select the "Embed TrueType fonts" check box and press "OK." Now, your
presentation will keep the font file and your fonts will not change when you move computers (unless you give
your presentation on a Mac).
14. Save your slides as JPEGs.
In PowerPoint for Mac 2011, there is no option to embed fonts within the presentation. So unless you use
ubiquitous typefaces like Arial or Tahoma, your PPT is likely going to encounter font changeson different
computers.
The most certain way of avoiding this is by saving your final presentation as JPEGs, and then inserting these
JPEGs onto your slides. On a Mac, users can easily drag and drop the JPEGs into PPT with fast load time. If you
do not use actions in your presentation, then this option works especially well.
If you want your presentation to appear "animated," you'll need to do a little tinkering. All you need to do is
save JPEGs of each "frame" of the animation. Then, in your final presentation, you'll just display those JPEGs in
the order you'd like the animation to appear. While you'll technically have several new slides in place of one
original one, your audience won't know the difference.
An important consideration: If your PPT includes a lot of JPEGs, then the file size will increase.
15. Embed multimedia.
PowerPoint allows you to either link to video/audio files externally or to embed the media directly in your
presentation. You should embed these files if you can, but if you use a Mac, you cannot actually embed the
video (see note below). For PCs, two great reasons for embedding are:
• Embedding allows you to play media directly in your presentation. It will look much more professional
than switching between windows.
• Embedding also means that the file stays within the PowerPoint presentation, so it should play
normally without extra work (except on a Mac).
Note: Mac OS users of PowerPoint should be extra careful about using multimedia files.

If you use PowerPoint for Mac, then you will always need to bring the video and/or audio file with you in the
same folder as the PowerPoint presentation. It’s best to only insert video or audio files once the presentation
and the containing folder have been saved on a portable drive in their permanent folder. Also, if the
presentation will be played on a Windows computer, then Mac users need to make sure their multimedia files
are in WMV format. This tip gets a bit complicated, so if you want to use PowerPoint effectively, consider
using the same operating system for designing andpresenting, no matter what.
16. Bring your own hardware.
Between operating systems, PowerPoint is still a bit jumpy. Even between differing PPT versions, things can
change. One way to fix these problems is to make sure that you have the right hardware -- so just bring along
your own laptop when you're presenting.
17. Use "Presenter View."
In most presentation situations, there will be both a presenter’s screen and the main projected display for
your presentation. PowerPoint has a great tool called Presenter View, which can be found in the "Slide Show"
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tab of PowerPoint 2010 (or 2011 for Mac). Included in the Presenter View is an area for notes, a timer/clock,
and a presentation display.
For many presenters, this tool can help unify their spoken presentation and their visual aid. You never want to
make the PowerPoint seem like a stack of notes that you use a crutch. Use the Presenter View option to help
create a more natural presentation.
Pro Tip: At the start of the presentation, you should also hit CTRL + H to make the cursor disappear. Hitting
the "A" key will bring it back if you need it!
With style, design, and presentation processes under your belt, you can do a lot more with PowerPoint than
just presentations for your clients. PowerPoint and similar slide applications are flexible tools that should not
be forgotten. With a great template, you can be on your way to creating presentations that wow your
audience.
Prezi (Web)
Most types of presentation software use a slide-based approach, where you move back and forth between
individual slides, kind of like pages in a book. Prezi, however, uses a canvas-based approach. Instead of using
slides, Prezi has one very large canvas that your presentation moves around on, zooming in and out to view
various frames.
You might be wondering what makes Prezi different from other presentation software, like PowerPoint or
Keynote. For one thing, Prezi is completely free to use. There are upgrades you can pay for to unlock
additional features, but everything you need to create and share a dynamic prezi is available free of cost.
Another great reason to use Prezi is that it is run entirely through your web browser, meaning there will be
fewer compatibility issues than with other programs like PowerPoint. Your prezi will always look the same, no
matter what computer you're viewing it on.

Document Encoding Tools
MS Word (Windows)
Microsoft Word is the most ubiquitous word-processing program on the market; it's intuitive even for the
most technologically illiterate computer users and is backed by the powerful Microsoft Office suite.
Nudged by cloud-based programs like Google Docs, Word has evolved over the years with online subscriptions
that offer access on multiple devices, as well as a free, cloud-based version of Word. But despite the
competition, Microsoft's software remains the go-to tool for producing important docs. And why not? It's
dependable, customizable, and has lots of baked-in functionality you may not have tried yet. Read on for
some semi-hidden treats only power users know.
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Determine Your Readability Statistics
Word has the power to not only judge your grammar and spelling, but also your writing's complexity. For
example, does your writing meet the comprehension level of someone pursuing a post-grad degree, or
someone still learning their shapes and colors?
Word uses lingual tests such as the Flesch Reading Ease test, which calculates a score on a 100-point scale.
The higher a number, the easier it is to understand. Office's own documentation suggests you want a score
between 60 and 70.
Additionally, Word will run a similar lingual test, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test, which will tell you what
US grade level a text is written for; most docs should aim for between 7.0 and 8.0, Microsoft says.
In order to use this feature, you will first have to turn it on by navigating to File > Options > Proofing. Then
select Show readability statistics under spelling and grammar. Now when you ask Word to run a spellcheck, it
will also generate your document's readability statistics.
Highlight a Square Field of Text

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Here's a feature that will only be usable in very specific cases. If you hold down the Alt key in Windows, or the
Option key on a Mac, while you click and drag your mouse, you will be able to draw a box within the
document that will highlight all the characters in that box. If you ever wanted to create a perfect square of
purple text in the middle of a chunk of text, that's how you'd go about it.
Generate Random Text
If you need to add Lorem Ipsum into your document as a placeholder, Word has you covered. Just type:
=lorem(p,l) and replace the "p" with the number of paragraphs you want, and replace the "l" with the number
of sentences you need. You can also just include one number in the parentheses and it will create that many
paragraphs. When ready, place the cursor at the end of the equation and hit Enter to generate your text.
You can also use random Office documentation gobbledygook as the source material for your place filler. Use
the equation =rand(p,l) instead.
Add a Calculator to Word

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Word has a built-in calculator that can help you solve equations right in your document. First, add it to the
Word menu by navigating to File > Options > Quick Access Toolbar and selecting All Commands from the
drop-down menu. Locate Calculate, and click Add to move it to the Quick Access Toolbar column. Click OK to
return to your document.
You will notice that a small gray circle has been added to the top of your Word document. Now you can type
math equations, and if you highlight them, that icon will change color. Press the icon and Word will calculate
the answer.
Highlight a Sentence With a Click
To quickly highlight an entire sentence, hold down the Ctrl key in Windows, or Command key on a Mac, and
click the beginning of the sentence. Word will take care of the rest.
Hop Around to Editing Hotspots

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Hitting Shift-F5 will allow you to cycle through the parts of your document you've recently edited. This trick
will even remember where you were editing last after you re-open a document.
Write Text Anywhere
You can use Word as a whiteboard of sorts and easily place text anywhere on the page. Just click twice on any
place on the page and Word will allow you to start typing there. Word automatically inserts hard returns and
tabs to allow you to enter text. Avant garde poets, this function is for you.
Auto-Update Date & Time

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Sometimes you have a document you use again and again, updating only a few key details. If this happens to
be a document like a letter that includes the date and/or time, one nifty little trick is to allow Word to update
the date automatically.
Under the Insert tab, click the Date & Time button and a pop-up window will appear. Click the date format
you want and then be sure to click the "update automatically" box in the bottom-right corner. Now the date
will automatically be updated every time you open (or print) the document.
Convert to a PDF and HTML Doc
Word makes it easy to convert your doc to a PDF or HTML file. When you "save as" a file, you'll see a "Save as
type" pull-down menu, which will provide a bevy of options including PDF and Web Page.
Note that the Web Page function can include a lot of extra code. This won't necessarily affect the page, but
can make things a little messy if you need to change anything. Another option is to use a free conversion site
like Word to Clean HTML, which—as the name implies—will create HTML code from text that is directly
copied and pasted from a Word doc.
Change Capitalizations the Easy Way

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You can easily change the capitalization of any text with a click of a button. Highlight a selection and click on
the "Aa" pull-down menu to alter your text between sentence case, all uppercase, or all lowercase. You can
also make every word start with a capital letter and toggle between cases.
Show Hidden Characters
If you are working on a complex document with different styles, columns, and formats, editing can quickly
become a tedious exercise. The best way to see what's going on with your document's formatting is to make
all the invisible marks (hard returns, soft returns, tabs, spaces) visible. Press Ctrl-Shift-8 in Windows or
Command-8 on a Mac.
Replace Invisible Characters and Formatting

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The Find and Replace tool in Microsoft Word is a lifesaver. You can quickly and easily make mass changes
without having to hunt and peck for every instance of something you need changed. But you can also do a
Find and Replace for the hidden characters in your document.
Click on the Find and Replace button in Word, then click More in the dialogue box. Click on Format to search
for formatting in your document—the pull-down menu includes margins, font, styles, and line spacing. So you
could, for example, search and replace a green font with purple font. Click Special to search for special
characters (em dash, white space, etc.).
You can also insert commands into the text field to search formatting and characters directly. Use ^p^p to
search/replace double spaces, and replace them with ^p for single space. You can also use ^t to search for
tabs, ^# to search digits, ^$ for letters, and ^w for any white spaces.
Insert Objects into Word
If you ever feel like your document could use a little something added to the body copy, Word allows you to
insert objects directly onto the page. Click Insert > Object to open a dialogue box that shows you what you

can add. This is how you would add a chart to your doc, but you can also embed a PDF or an Excel
spreadsheet as well.
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You can add complex math equations into Word by click Insert > Equation, and then selecting the equation
you wish to add. Once it has been inserted into your doc, you are free to change formatting or replace letters
with numbers.
Protect Your Document
Word has a fair amount of built-in protection that will encrypt your writing. Click File > Info to manage
viewing and editing permissions, enable password encryption, and create a password for the doc.
The Search Box Is Your Friend

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Spreadsheets
A spreadsheet is a software program you use to easily perform mathematical calculations on statistical data
and totaling long columns of numbers or determining percentages and averages.
And if any of the raw numbers you put into your spreadsheet should change – like if you obtain final figures to
substitute for preliminary ones for example – the spreadsheet will update all the calculations you’ve
performed based on the new numbers.
You also can use a spreadsheet to generate data visualizations like charts to display the statistical information
you’ve compiled on a website.
This tutorial will focus on the use of the free application Google Spreadsheets. To use Google Spreadsheets,
you will need to sign up for a free Google account. There are other spreadsheet software you can purchase,
like Microsoft Excel. While this tutorial will focus primarily on Google Spreadsheet, most of its lessons will be
applicable to any spreadsheet software, including Excel.
Spreadsheet Layout
To create a new spreadsheet in Google Spreadsheet, sign into your Google Drive account. Then click on
the New button on the top left and select Google Sheets.
On your screen will appear a basic spreadsheet, divided into numbered rows and lettered columns.

The rows and columns intersect to create small boxes, which are called cells.
Each cell is identified by its column letter and row number.
Thus the very first cell in the upper left-hand corner is called A1.
Just below A1 is A2. Just to the right of A1 is B1. Just below B1 is B2, and so on.
In the image below, for example, cell D9 is highlighted.
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Setting the View Options

You can select some settings to change the view of the spreadsheet or display toolbars you frequently use,
such as the one for entering formulas to make calculations.
To do this, in the menu at the top click on View and make sure there’s a check mark next to Show Formula
Bar (to display a box to enter formulas).
Entering Information in a Cell
You enter information into a spreadsheet program by typing it into each of the cells.
You can enter three different types of information into a cell:
• Numbers – so you then can perform mathematical calculations on them.
• Text – to identify what the numbers in the columns and rows represent, usually by typing headings
across the top of the columns or on the left edge of the rows
• Formulas – to perform calculations on the numbers in a column or a row of cells.
To enter information into a cell, simply click on the cell and type in the information.
When you’re done, you can either press the enter/return key, which will take you down to the next cell, or
the tab key, which will advanced to the cell to the right.
Each time you type information into a cell, you’ll notice the information also appears in the Formula bar, the
box just above the columns and rows.
For example, if you click on cell:
B3
And type in the number:
100
You’ll see the number 100 displayed in the formula bar above.

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Text Headings
To enter text headings for the various columns and rows to identify them, follow the same procedure as you
would with entering numbers. Click on the cell, type in the name of a heading and press the enter/return key.
You can also “freeze” this header row, so it stays in the same place, even if you scroll down a long
spreadsheet. To do this, grab the small bar in the corner of the spreadsheet area, and drag it down one row.
Importing Data Into a Spreadsheet

Many government agencies and private organizations provide data on their websites in a spreadsheet or
other format that you can download onto your computer.
To import a spreadsheet, .csv or other file you’ve downloaded on your computer into a Google Spreadsheets,
first create a new spreadsheet in Google Docs. Then in the menu at the top click on File … Import and
then Browse and select the downloaded file.

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Importing Sample Data

Let’s download some data to demonstrate how to import it into a Google Docs spreadsheet, and also to give
us some sample data to use to show how to do calculations and use other features of a spreadsheet.
The FBI compiles national crime statistics, including data on the types of weapons used in homicides.
This data is in an Excel spreadsheet (.xls) file that can be downloaded from the FBI website and then imported
into a Google Doc spreadsheet.
To download the file go to this FBI web page:
Expanded Homicide Data Table 8 (2010-2014)
Click on the link at the top for:

Download Excel
The file will be downloaded onto your computer.
(if for some reason you have trouble downloading this file, you can click here to download the file from our

website)
To import the file into a Google Docs spreadsheet, create a new spreadsheet and in the menu at the top click
on:
File…Import
Click on the Browse button and navigate to the downloaded FBI file which is
named expanded_homicide_data_table_8_murder_victims_by_weapon_2010-2014.xls. Google Spreadsheet
also allows you to import data from your Google Drive. It may give you an option to replace existing data, or
to create a new sheet. Choose the best option for your situation.
After a few seconds you should see a Google Docs spreadsheet that looks like this:
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This spreadsheet shows the number of murder victims in each year from 2004 to 2008 in five columns, with
the columns labeled by year in cells B4 to F4.
Below that the spreadsheet shows the weapon used in the murders in 18 rows of data, with the rows labeled
by type of weapon in cells A5 (which is the overall total for all weapons) to A22.
Resizing Columns or Rows
You can improve the display of the data in a spreadsheet by increasing or decreasing the width of a column or
the height of a row.
To change a column’s width, in the gray bar at the top of the spreadsheet where the letters of the columns
are displayed, move your mouse cursor to the border between any two columns.

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Note for Excel: if you narrow the width of a column displaying a number too much, you will see a series of
pound signs displayed in the cell:
###
This doesn’t mean you’ve lost any data – you just made the column width too narrow to fit some of the
numbers in the cells in that column.
You can also speed up the resizing of columns and avoid making them too narrow by moving your mouse
cursor to the border separating two columns in the gray bar at the top and double-clicking on the border. This
will automatically resize the column to the left, making it just wide enough to fit the longest entry on any row
in that column.
Deleting or Adding Columns or Rows
You can get rid of unwanted data or other information by deleting rows or columns.
For example, in our sample spreadsheet of weapons used in homicides, we might want to get rid of row 23,
which is just a footnote stating that one murder in which the victim was pushed to his/her death has been
included in the “Personal weapons” listing in row 14.
To delete a row, hover your mouse cursor over a row number in the gray area to the left, in this case row 23.
Right click and in the pop-up menu select Delete row.
Use the same procedure for deleting a column.
Hover your mouse cursor over a column letter in the gray area at the top, right click and in the pop-up menu
select Delete column (you also can click on the tiny downward-pointing arrow to get this pop-up menu).
If you want to add a column or row, again hover your mouse cursor over the appropriate column or row in the
gray area above or to the left, right click and in the pop-up menu select one of the Insert options.
Learn to work with data in a spreadsheet and to create engaging charts, maps and graphs in the Berkeley
Advanced Media Institute Data Visualization for Storytellers Workshop.

Formulas – Adding, Subtracting, Multiplying and Dividing
With a spreadsheet you can insert a formula that will instantly add, subtract, multiply or divide numbers in
columns or rows.
To do this you select a cell in a new column or row and then type in a formula.
A formula starts with an equals sign (=) that tells the spreadsheet you want to do a calculation.
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A formula then has a symbol for what kind of calculation you want to perform (add, subtract, multiply, divide,
etc.). The symbols a spreadsheet uses for calculations are:
• plus sign (+) for adding one number to another
• minus sign (-) for subtracting one number from another
• asterisk (*) for multiplying one number by another
• backslash (/) for dividing one number by another
Then you type in the letters/numbers for the cells (A1, A2, B1, B2, etc.) to which you want to apply the
calculation, separated by the symbol for the type of calculation.
Adding Numbers in Columns

Let’s write a formula for adding together a series of numbers.
In the spreadsheet for types of weapons used in murders that we downloaded from the FBI website, the
spreadsheet already included the total number of homicides in which any kind of firearm was used each year
from 2004 to 2008. Those numbers are in row 6.
But what if these totals hadn’t been included in the original data and you needed to calculate them yourself
using the spreadsheet (or if you wanted to use the spreadsheet to double-check the FBI’s calculations).
This would require totaling up for each year the column of numbers for the five weapon types in the
spreadsheet:
• Handguns – row 7
• Rifles – row 8
• Shotguns – row 9
• Other guns – row 10
• Firearms, type not stated – row 11

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To do this we need to insert a formula for adding a series of numbers in a column.

Let’s start by doing this for the year 2004. Click on cell:
B23
Which is in the column that shows the numbers for weapons used in 2004.
In that cell, type:
=B7+B8+B9+B10+B11
(note: the letters are not case sensitive. So for example so you could type in either B7 or b7)
This tells the spreadsheet to add up the number of murders committed with handguns (B7), rifles (B8),
shotguns (B9), other guns (B10), and firearms, type not stated (B11) for the year 2004.
You should type

cell letters/numbers into a formula rather than the actual numbers.
That way if the numbers ever change (for example, if the FBI released updated murder weapon statistics for
2008), you won’t have to re-enter the new numbers in the formula. Instead you’d just type the updated
numbers into the appropriate cells and the spreadsheet will apply the existing formula to the new numbers in

those cells.
Applying a Formula to Multiple Cells
If we now wanted to calculate the total number of gun related homicides for the other four years, we could
repeat the process of typing an addition formula into each cell in the rest of row 23. But a spreadsheet has a
much faster way of accomplishing this – by letting you simply copy the formula to one or more of the other
cells in the same row.
To do this, click on cell:
B23
Where we typed in our addition formula
=B7+B8+B9+B10+B11
Pass your mouse cursor over the bottom right corner of cell B23 and notice your cursor changes from an
arrow pointer to a thin crosshairs.
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Click on that crosshairs, hold down your mouse button and drag your mouse to the right over the rest of the
cells in row 23.
An outline will appear around the cells you’ve selected.

Continue dragging your mouse until you get to cell:
F23
Release your mouse button and the total number of homicides involving firearms for each year from 2010 to
2014 will appear in row 23.
Which again confirms the totals in the original FBI spreadsheet in row 6.
The spreadsheet has calculated these totals for you by applying the formula you first typed in cell B23 to the
rest of the cells in row 23.
The spreadsheet keeps the formula (addition) the same, but shifts the cell numbers as it applies the formula
to the other cells to the right (so the formula in cell C23 is =C7+C8+C9+C10+C11, the formula in
cell D23 is =D7+D8+D9+D10+D11, and so on).
Editing a Formula
When you type a formula into a cell and then hit the enter/return key, the formula will disappear, replaced by
a number that’s the result of the calculation.
So how can you edit the formula?
There are two ways:
You can double click on the cell to display the formula in the cell and then edit or retype it there.
Or you can click once on a cell and use the Formula barabove to edit it.
If you click once on a cell that has a formula hidden in it (replaced by a number that’s the result of the

calculation), the formula you originally typed will appear in the Formula bar above the columns and rows.
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To edit the formula you can click in the formula bar where the formula for this cell is displayed. Then change
the existing formula or type a new one into the Formula bar, press the enter/return key and the new formula
will be applied and the numbers will be recalculated in the cell.
Understanding Cell Formats
Cells can display their data in many different ways. For example, you can format a cell to display data as
currency, as a date, scientific notation, or several other formats. You can adjust this by highlighting a cell, and
changing its format under the Format -> Number menu.
This can sometimes be counter-intuitive because the cell can appear differently than the data that’s actually
in the cell. For example, in the case of currency format, the cell data could have several decimal places. But
when formatting for currency, a dollar symbol will display and the cell will only show the hundredths place (2
decimal points), even if the actual data in the cell has is more exact and has more decimal points.

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The way to understand what the actual data is in a cell is to look at the formula bar. This will sometimes show
you the raw data. The cell format is generally used to make thing more human-readable. But sometimes this
can be the cause of consternation, especially when using formulas. This could especially be tricky when using
dates.
Percent Changes and Multiplying and Dividing
This next section will describe how to calculate a percent change between two numbers. A percent change is
calculated by finding the difference between the two numbers, and comparing that difference by the first
number.
In our spreadsheet on murder weapons, we can calculate how much each weapon increased or decreased
between 2010 to 2014.
First click on cell G5 to the right of our existing data.
Type in the following formula:
+(F5-B5)/B5
Now let’s do the percent calculation, starting with the percent change in the total number of homicides (row
5).
First click on cell H5 to the right.
And type in the following formula:
=(F5-B5)/B5*100
This is the formula for calculating the percent change between two numbers.
This formula tells the spreadsheet to find the difference of homicides by subtracting the total homicides in
2014 from 2010. After that, divides the results to the original value.
The backslash ( / ) is the symbol for dividing, while the asterisk ( * ) is the symbol for multiplying.
(Note: The parentheses in this formula are also important to define the correct order of operations.)
Now hit the enter/return key to see the final result of the percent formula in cell G5:
-0.09138559708
The total number of homicides by all types of weapons declined by 9.1 percent from 2010 to 2014. But to
make it into a more human-readable format, we can change the data format of the cell to a percentage.

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Now it will display as:

-9.14%
Apply to the rest of the cells
Now let’s apply this percent change formula to the rest of the murder-by-weapon numbers. Click on cell:
G5
Pass your mouse over the bottom right corner of the cell until the cursor changes to thin crosshairs.
Click and drag the mouse cursor down over the rest of the cells in the H column. Release your mouse button
when you get to cell:
G22
The percent changes for all the different types of weapons used in homicides will appear on your screen.
Parentheses in a Formula
In the formula for percent change we used in the previous section, parentheses ( ) were included in the
formula:
=(F5-B5)/B5
The parentheses in this formula are very important. These tell the spreadsheet to subtract the number of
homicides in 2010 (B5) from the number of homicides in 2014 (F5) first, and then divide that amount by the
number of homicides in 2010 (B5).
If you didn’t include the parentheses and had just typed in =F5-B5/B5, the spreadsheet first would divide B5
by B5 (yielding 1). Finally it would subtract the result from F5, resulting in an incorrect number.
So if you are doing a calculation involving several steps, it is important to include parentheses so you can
group the numbers properly and the spreadsheet thus knows the order in which to do the calculations.
Using Formulas with a Fixed Cell
Another feature you can do with a spreadsheet is building a formula with a fixed cell, so that when you drag
your formula to apply them to other cells, it doesn’t automatically switch its reference to a new cell.
In our spreadsheet, for example, we might want to know what percentage of homicides involved each
different type of weapon compared to a specific year. We would compare each cell to the total number of
homicides for only that year, so we don’t want the reference to that year’s total to change.
Let’s start with 2014. To create our percent formula click on cell:
H6
And type in this formula:
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=F6/F5
This formula tells the spreadsheet to divide the number of homicides involving firearms in 2010 (F6) by the
total number of homicides that year (F5).
Press the enter/return key and swith the cell format to percentage. You’ll see the total is:
67.92%
So firearm related homicides were about two thirds of the total number of homicides in 2014. Good… so far.
But, you might then try to apply this same formula to the cells for the other types of weapons by dragging the
crosshairs, as we did in the previous example. But if you tried this, it would produce bizarre numbers in the G
column, including that some weapons-related homicides are more than 100% of the total.

What went wrong?
The problem is that when the spreadsheet copies a formula using this method, it shifts the letters for both
cells in the original formula (F6 and F5) as it applies that formula to other cells (resulting in F7 divided by F6 in
the next cell down).
To fix this, we need to force the spreadsheet to always divide the numbers for each type of weapon used by a
constant number – the total number of homicides in cell F5. This is called anchoring the cell in our formula,
and force the spreadsheet always to use one cell each time.
You accomplish this by adding some $ signs to the formula that instruct the spreadsheet not to change cell F5
when applying the formula to other cells.
So go back and click on cell:
F6
Delete that formula (press delete key), and instead type in this:
=F6/$F$5
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The dollar signs tell Excel to always keep anchored on cell F5 and the data in it when applying this formula to
other cells.
Now we can drag the formula down through the column of cells and get the correct results.
So hover your mouse over cell:
F6
Then click on the crosshairs in the bottom right corner of the cell and drag down to cell:
F22
And release your mouse.

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The correct percentage figure for each weapon type will now appear in the spreadsheet.
Adding Numbers Using the SUM Formula
If you want to add a large group of numbers in a row or column, there’s another way to do that quickly in a
spreadsheet by using the SUM formula.
For example, in our example spreadsheet on weapons used in homicides, what if you wanted to know the
total number of homicides in which did not include a firearm?
To calculate that, you could add up the numbers in rows 12 to 21 for each year using the SUM formula
(Note: row 22 – “Other weapons or weapons not stated” – may or may not involve a non-firearm-related
homicide, so we’re leaving that out of this calculation)
To use the SUM formula to calculate the number of non-firearm-related homicides in rows 12 to 21, first click
on cell:
B23
In that cell type this formula
=SUM(B12:B21)

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You’ll see there were 3,418 non-firearm-related homicides in 2014. In our formula, =SUM() is shorthand for
telling a spreadsheet to add up a series of numbers.
After typing =SUM, you type a set of parentheses, and inside the parenthesis you will include something
called a range.
A range has two cell references separated by a colon. B12:B21. Ranges can even span multiple row or multiple
columns, and can be used in numerous formulas.
Adding selected cells with the SUM formula instead of a range
You also can add up select numbers in a column, rather than a span of them, using the SUM formula.
To do that, in the SUM formula you replace the colon with commas to separate the specific cells you want to
total up.
Thus if you wanted to total up only the number of homicides in 2014 in which either poison (cell B15) or
narcotics (cell B18) was involved, you would type this formula.
=SUM(B15,B18)
Shortcuts to Writing Formulas
There are a number of shortcuts for writing formulas in a spreadsheet.
To illustrate these, in our spreadsheet on types of weapons used in homicides, let’s add up the total number
of firearm-related homicides from 2010 to 2014. This would mean adding cells B6 through F6. We could
manually type in the =SUM(B6:F6) formula, but there is a more user-friendly tool for doing this without having
to remember formulas.
To do this, first click on cell:
I6
Then use the spreadsheet’s Formulas tool that will shorten what you have to type.
Click on it and you’ll see a series of formulas you can select to insert into your spreadsheet.

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In this case pick SUM and the formula =SUM() will be inserted into cell G6.
Now you can click the cells you want to be referenced, and they will be auto-populated into the formula. You
can click-and-drag to specify a range, or click and hold down the shift key and click another cell. To specify
specific cells to add without making it a range, you should hold down the command key (Mac) or Control key
(PC) and click all the cells you want.
Averaging Numbers
Another common calculation is averaging a series of numbers.
In our spreadsheet on the types of weapons used in homicides, for example, what if we wanted to know the
average number of firearm-related homicides each year between 2010 and 2014 (cells B6 to F6).
To do this, click on cell:
J6
And in that cell type:
=AVERAGE(B6:F6)
This same process can be used to also calculate the MEDIAN(), MODE(), STDEV() (standard deviation) and
other statistical functions for a series of data points.
Using Functions to Import Website Data
One advantage to Google spreadsheets is that it is designed to work with the Web. Specific functions allow
you to load data dynamically directly from a website.
Import a data file published on the Web into your spreadsheet
CSV files (comma separated values) can be imported directly into a spreadsheet from anywhere on the Web.
CSV is one of the most common data formats and can be found with a simple Google search.
For sample data, we will use a piece of crime data from UC Berkeley in 2015 hosted on Github. The url
is https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jrue/ucpd-crime/master/data/ucpd/ucpd_data_6.csv.
Let’s import this data into a new sheet. Click the small plus button at the bottom of our workbook document:

Click in cell A1 and type (or copy-and-paste) the following:
=ImportData("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jrue/ucpd-crime/master/data/ucpd/ucpd_data_6.csv")
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After a moment the data will load and should look like this:
Many files will not be this clean and may require cleanup. But if you can use the file as is, it’s especially useful.
Governments regularly update CSV files on their servers. This may happen frequently with certain files such as
election results.
Adjusting Data Display by Changing Cell Formats
In the previous example, you might have noticed the date and time columns display these strange numbers
which should be dates and times of each crime. Raw cell data for a time value is the number of days since Jan
1, 1900 (and may even be different when using Microsoft Excel).

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We can easily adjust this by changing the cell format. Click on the column’s heading, then under
the Formatmenu, select Date for the first column, and a Time for the second column.
Import a table or list directly from a Web page

Tables can frequently be imported directly from a Web page into a spreadsheet. Let’s import the same data
from the Wikipedia’s page on Gun Violence by State.
Note: This example will tie into the next section on charts, so we use it for convenience. However, we do not
advocate using data from Wikipedia in any production sense. Always vet and corroborate data directly from
the source when used in journalism.
Open a new sheet and click in cell A1. Type:
=IMPORTHTML("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States_by_state", "table", 1)
The first parameter is the webpage Google will scan (make sure it’s in quotes). The second parameter is the
HTML element it’s looking for. In our case, we want it to find a <table> element. The third parameter is which

table element we should find, in case there are multiple. You may need to change the third parameter
through trial-and-error, or look at the source code of the webpage you’re scrapping.
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The “table” parameter can be replaced with “list” so that it will look for the contents of <ul> <ol> and <dl>
tags.
Load Dynamic Financial Data
Live data from Google finance can be imported into your spreadsheet. The data updates automatically every
time the spreadsheet is loaded. Quotes can have up to a 20 minute delay, which is common for financial data.
Create a new spreadsheet that looks like this:
Type =GoogleFinance(".DJI", "price") in cell B2

Type =GoogleFinance(".INX", "price") in cell B3
Type =GoogleFinance(".IXIC", "price") in cell B4
The initials at the beginning of the parentheses are stock ticker symbols. You can find the symbol for any stock
at Google Finance.
The cells should update in a few moments and your spreadsheet should look like this:
Load historic financial data

The same function can be used to load historic data. Let’s pull in the daily closing price of Google stock for
2009.
Create a new spreadsheet.
In cell A1, type:
=GoogleFinance("GOOG", "close", "01/01/2009" , "12/31/2009", "DAILY")
Hit enter and the daily closes for 2009 should load into your spreadsheet.
The full documentation on all of the different parameters for the GoogleFinance function are listed on
Google’s help pages.
Sorting Results
After you’ve entered numbers or done calculations in a spreadsheet, you may want to sort the results from
highest to lowest or lowest to highest.
With the spreadsheet on types of weapons used in homicides, for example, you could more easily see which
weapons are most frequently used by ranking them from the highest number to the lowest number for any
given year.
To do this, you first need to highlight the area of the spreadsheet that you want to sort.
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Don’t just highlight a whole column of numbers to sort because the spreadsheet then will sort only the cells
in that column and not change the order of the corresponding cells in other columns (such as the headings
that tell you which type of weapon corresponds with the numbers of homicides).
The highlighted area now includes the headings for the types of weapons used and then the numbers for each
type of weapon for each year.
To sort the data, in the menu at the top, click on Data … Sort Range

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In the box that appears, you’ll see the range of selected cells displayed at the top (in this case, cells A5 to F22).
You now can select the column by which you want to sort the data.
You also can select whether to sort that data in ascending order (A – Z) so the smallest number appears at the
top of the sorted data, or descending order (Z – A) so the largest number appears at the top.
Formatting Cells
A spreadsheet provides a lot of options for re-formatting the information being displayed. These are similar to
the options in a word processing program like Microsoft Word or many other applications. They include:
• Changing the font size or style
• Defining the format for the kind of data in a cell, such as dates, times, currency or percents
• Changing the number of decimal places displayed in a number
• Changing the text color or the background color
• Adding borders around the cells
Some of these options are available by selecting Format in the menu at the top and then picking one of the
choices in the drop-down menu.
Or you can click on the icons in the middle of the toolbar for other options.

VIDEO EDITING TOOLS
COURSE MODULE 1. Apple iMovie
Ok—so to those of you working with PCs, this one won’t really apply; but we’d remiss to leave it off the list. If
you’re looking for simplicity and elegance, it doesn’t get much better than Apple iMovie. iMovie’s ten high-
fidelity filters are some of the classiest in the video editing game; and if you’re shooting on your iPhone, or
have been editing a project on your iPad, you can use AirDrop to wirelessly and seamlessly transfer your
project over to your Mac.
One of iMovie’s most coveted features is its green-screen, or “chroma-key” tool, which allows you to place
your characters in exotic locations—Hawaii, say—at a moment’s notice. Want to overlay the scene with
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”? iMovie ties directly in with iTunes and GarageBand, so you can easily
implement custom tracks and sounds. When your movie’s finally ready to ship, release it into the wild using
iMessage, Facebook, YouTube, or any other of iMovie’s succinctly connected platforms.
Standout Features: Seamless Apple product integration; green-screen; audio and social platform integration
2. Lumen5: How to Edit Videos Without Much Technical Ability
We’ll put this more in the category of a video editing “tool” than video editing software, but for social media
marketers who want to create fun, flashy social promos in the blink of an eye, Lumen5 is a no brainer. Here’s
a short little feature we made for a recent blog post, 14 Fun & Festive Holiday Marketing Ideas for 2017:
Lumen5 markets itself as a tool that turns blog posts into social promos. While the process isn’t perfect, and
you’ll likely have to do some tinkering to get your blog content looking just the way you want it, the rest of
the video creation process is a cinch. Merely refine some copy that teases your blog post; drag and drop some
gifs, screengrabs, or video clips; add some music; and your engaging social video will be ripe for Facebook and
Twitter.
Standout Features: Blog-to-social-promo creation; drag-and-drop interface

3. Nero Video
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One of the cheaper options around ($49.99), Nero Video holds its own on this list—it comes well-stocked with
a lot of the tricks and effects you’ll find among other products vying for video editing supremacy, and as far as
software for beginners, you can certainly do worse. If you’re going to spend money learning how to edit
videos, however, you might want to steer clear. Nero just doesn’t have the speed and functionality of some of
the other products listed here, and if it’s value proposition is its price, $50 is still not all that cheap.
Standout Features: Low pricing
4. Corel VideoStudio
Corel VideoStudio has all the characteristics of the other top-of-the-line products on this list, including 360-
degree VR and 4k support, but it also has the distinction of being the first piece of consumer video editing
software to offer motion tracking—which, if you’re not already familiar, is a feature that allows you to track
specific objects throughout your cut (if you wanted, say, to point an arrow at one of your characters, blur out
his face, or bestow him with a funny hat). Most of the products on this list come equipped with motion
tracking, but VideoStudio still boasts one of the best motion tracking systems around.
One of the knocks on VideoStudio is its speed, which lags notably behind some of the faster systems on this
list, like CyberLink PowerDirector and Pinnacle Studio. Still: for a one-time payment of $51.99? You can do
much worse.
Standout Features: Motion tracking

5. Filmora from Wondershare
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When it comes to video editing software, Filmora is about as multi-faceted as they come. Filmora is
Wondershare’s standard, simple, high-quality video editing offering; but Wondershare also offers FilmoraGo
(for mobile editing) and Filmora Scrn (for screen recording and editing). The design is intuitive and easy to use,
and comes replete with filters, overlays, motion elements, transitions, and a small selection of royalty-free
music. Here are a few more of the “basics” Filmora offers:
4k and gif support are boilerplate features for most video editing products today, but one thing Filmora
does particularly well is titles. Title tools are trending in video software, and while Filmora’s doesn’t have the
functionality of say, an Apple Final Cut Pro X, which can superimpose 3D titles over your videos and rotate
them on three axes, it nonetheless has some snazzy titling features for the money you’re spending.
Another Filmora feature beginners to video editing will find attractive is “Easy Mode,” which allows you to
create fun, polished edits by merely dragging and dropping clips, choosing a theme, and selecting music.
Standout features: Title tool; mobile and screen editing; “Easy Mode”
6. CyberLink PowerDirector
So—we stretched the meaning of “software” a bit earlier; now, we’re going to stretch the meaning of
“beginner.” We included CyberLink PowerDirector on this list because its interface is, at the end of the day,
pretty straightforward. Head to the product page, run through the tutorials, and you’ll be alright. There is
within the interface, however, an embarrassment of options and effects. If you’re not willing to invest the

time in learning all of them, it can get a bit overwhelming.
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Don’t be scared of CyberLink’s extra features; just be wary of your commitment level!
In terms of rendering, PowerDirector is regarded as one of the fastest video editing systems around. It also
operates consistently in the sphere of the innovative and cutting edge. PowerDirector led the charge in the
switch to 4k, and today, it’s one of the first systems to support 360-degree virtual reality footage.
Price: you get what you pay for! $79.99 gets you unlimited access to one of the most capable pieces of video
editing software around.
Standout Features: Lightning-fast rendering; comprehensive suite of effects
7. Adobe Premiere Elements
We include Premiere Elements on the list mostly because it’s been an industry leader in the video editing
game for some time. And $79.99 is not egregious, but we’re here to say that at that price, you’re mostly
paying for the name. In the time since Premiere Elements’ inception, too many other products have surpassed
it in speed and capability for us to place it among the cream of the crop. That’s to take nothing away from
Premiere Elements’ usability, though—specifically for beginners.
The Guided Edits feature makes Adobe Premiere a particularly attractive option for beginners, as it allows
them to take on both quick edits and advanced projects with substantial assistance from the software.

If you’re not entirely sure what you’re doing, don’t sleep on Guided Edits!
So while Premiere Elements lags behind the competition in terms of speed, 3D editing, multi-cam, and some
other advanced features, it’s still a great choice for the beginner looking for a comprehensive suite of effects,
and some guidance on how to implement them.
Standout Features: Guided Edits; simple interface
8. Pinnacle Studio
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At the higher end of the Corel product line is Pinnacle Studio—which, at $129.95 (the amount you’ll need to
pay to edit 360-degree and 4k content with the “Ultimate” version), costs more than twice as much as
VideoStudio. What do you get for the extra money? Well, not only does Pinnacle come readily equipped with
all the features you’d expect from an upper-echelon product—motion tracking, 360-degree VR support, 4k
support, multi-cam, etc.—but you’d be hard-pressed to find a faster product on the market in terms of
rendering.
For all of its features, Pinnacle’s interface is still as user-friendly and intuitive as anything on this list. Thus, is
you have the need for speed, and you don’t mind shelling out a few extra bucks for it, Pinnacle might be the
product for you.
Standout Features: Top-of-the-line rendering speeds; full range of features and support
9. Adobe Premiere Pro
With a virtually unmatched suite of features, 360 VR and 4k support, and a newly implemented ability to
store, organize, and share assets online with a team, Adobe Premiere Pro is perhaps the most complete piece
of video editing software around. Here’s a recent video promo for our free AdWords account structure
guide we cut using Premiere Pro.
One of the more dazzling of Premiere Pro’s tools is the Lumetri Color tool, which offers color adjustment and
manipulation on par with that of a Photoshop. The multi-cam feature is also a winner—whereas most systems
allow you to work with a limited number of camera angles, Premiere Pro’s latest iteration allows for an
unlimited amount.
Throw in a wealth of titling options, readily connected ancillary apps (like Photoshop and After Effects), and a
flexible, easy-to-use interface, and Premiere Pro is a no brainer.
Standout Features: Multi-cam and coloring options; title tool; easy integration with Adobe Products;
straightforward interface

10. Apple Final Cut Pro X
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For the most advanced, least fiscally prudent of beginners, there’s Apple Final Cut Pro X. $299.99 might be a
little steep for a product you may well have a difficult time understanding; but for those among you who
enjoy a challenge, and who aspire to some level of professionalism in video editing, why not go for it? Apple
has made the transition from iMovie to Final Cut Pro more painless than ever—so if you’re the kind of guy or
gal who enjoys him/herself an Apple product, and has worked with iMovie to the point of mastery, it might be
time to splurge on Final Cut Pro. The power is still daunting; the interface, significantly less so.
Standout Features: Magnetic Timeline; Touch Bar support
IMAGE EDITING TOOLS

1. CorelDRAW
Corel Corporation developed and released a software program called CorelDRAW, a vector graphics editor.
The software is a robust graphics suite, providing many features for users to edit graphics. These features
include contrast adjustment, color balancing, adding special effects like borders to images, and it is capable of
working with multiple layers and multiple pages.
CorelDRAW was originally released in January 1989, running on the Windows 2.x operating system. Today, the
software is still used by many people, with the latest version, X8, being released on March 15, 2016.
CorelDRAW is primarily designed for the Windows operating system. There were several releases for macOS
and macOS X, but poor sales resulted in the discontinuation of those versions. There was also a port to Linux
in 2000, requiring a modified version of Wine to run the software.
If you want to learn step-by-step tutorials on different graphic editing tasks, just go to this website:
https://www.coreldraw.com/en/learn/tutorials/

2. Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a software application for image editing and photo retouching for use on Windows or
MacOS computers. Photoshop offers users the ability to create, enhance, or otherwise edit images, artwork,
and illustrations. Changing backgrounds, simulating a real-life painting, or creating an alternative view of the
universe are all possible with Adobe Photoshop. It is the most widely used software tool for photo editing,
image manipulation, and retouching for numerous image and video file formats. The tools within Photoshop
make it possible to edit both individual images as well as large batches of photos. There are several versions
of Photoshop, including Photoshop CC, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop Express, a
version of Photoshop for iOS with reduced features. Adobe Photoshop is available on its own as a subscription
that includes Photoshop Lightroom, and as part of the larger Creative Cloud subscription.
How is Photoshop Used?

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Adobe Photoshop is a critical tool for designers, web developers, graphic artists, photographers, and creative
professionals. It is widely used for image editing, retouching, creating image compositions, website mockups,
and adding affects. Digital or scanned images can be edited for use online or in-print. Website layouts can be
created within Photoshop; their designs can be finalized before developers move on to the coding stage.
Stand-alone graphics can be created and exported for use within other programs.
What is Photoshop CC?

Adobe Photoshop CC is the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, available by subscription. It is considered to
be the professional-level version of the Photoshop family of products. Photoshop CC is available together with
Photoshop Lightroom, or as part of a larger Creative Cloud subscription. Photoshop CC is an advanced imaging
software used by designers, web professionals, video editors, and photographers to alter or manipulate digital
images. Photoshop is primarily used to edit 2D images, although it does offer some 3D image editing
functionality. Photoshop includes image analysis functionality, and can be used to prepare images for use
online or in-print.
What is Photoshop Elements?

Adobe Photoshop Elements is the consumer-level version of the Photoshop family of products. Photoshop
Elements contains many of the professional capabilities that are found in Adobe Photoshop CC, yet they are
provided with more simplistic options designed with an entry-level user in mind. More specifically, it is
designed for amateur photographers and digital photography hobbyists. Photoshop Elements is built using the
same core digital imaging technology as Photoshop CC. Commonly used capabilities of Photoshop Elements
include:
• Manipulating the color of an image.

• Cropping images.
• Repairing flaws, such as dust on the lens or red eyes.
• Drawing on an image with a pen or pencil.
• Adding text to images.
• Removing people or objects within an image.
• Organizing photos for quick access.
• Publishing images online or send via email.
What is Photoshop Lightroom?

Photoshop Lightroom is part of the Photoshop family of products and is primarily used by photographers for
batch processing of large volumes of images. Lightroom does have the ability to create and save image
presets that can be applied to a large batch of photos at one time. It also features non-destructive imaging
tools; so that the original files remain intact. Lightroom has the ability to edit RAW files. The light balance and
white exposure can be manipulated or adjusted within a RAW file. However, Photoshop Lightroom does not
have many of the operating features or functions of Adobe Photoshop CC or Adobe Photoshop Elements, and
uses a different interface.
If you want to learn photoshop, browse on this website: https://www.photoshoptutorials.ws/

PODCASTING TOOLS
A podcast is an episodic series of spoken word digital audio files that a user can download to a personal device
for easy listening. Streaming applications and podcasting services provide a convenient and integrated way to
manage a personal consumption queue across many podcast sources and playback devices.
eLearning is much more than simple text online. To accommodate for the different learning preferences of
your online learners, you must create supplementary online training content in a variety of formats. In the
case of podcasts, you may fear that this will significantly increase your costs. But what if you could find free
podcast tools online that are easy to use and will enable you to produce, broadcast and distribute quality
podcasts? Below you can find a list with the Top 20 Free Podcast tools available online (2018 Update). A
useful list for every eLearning pro.
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1. Ardour
Ardour is a free, fully-featured digital audio workstation, similar to other software like ProTools, Nuendo,
Sonar and Logic, and capable of replacing analog or digital tape systems. Available for Mac OS X, and Linux.
Multi-Track, Multi-Format, Multi-Plugin.

It works with any number of tracks and busses for non-linear editing and non-destructive recording in dozens
of file formats. Available plug-ins with full sample accurate automation.
Synced Transport, External Control Surfaces

Touted as best-in-industry sync to MIDI timecode and LTC. MIDI Machine Control in sending and receiving.
JACK transport and MIDI clock to sync with. In addition, you get Dedicated Mackie Control protocol support,
pre-defined mappings for many MIDI controllers plus dynamic MIDI learn, and you can use OSC, for almost
every operation in Ardour.
Powerful Signal Routing

Ardour has simple and elegant complex signal flows. The inputs and outputs connect to your hardware and
other applications. You can use sends, inserts and returns freely, and the connections can be one-to-many,
many-to-one or many-to-many, as tap signal flows at any point.
2. Audacity
Audacity is free, easy-to-use, cross-platform software for multi-track recording and editing sounds. Audacity is
available for Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. Developed as open source by a group of
volunteers.
High-Quality Sound To Record, Export/Import

Audacity supports 16-bit, 24-bit, and 32-bit. Convert sample rates and formats using high-quality resampling
and dithering. You can record with microphone or mixer, even digitize recordings from other media. Import,
edit and combine sound files. Many file formats to export your recordings, including multiple files at once.
Effect Plug-Ins, And Editing

You can use a number of plugins or write one yourself. Audacity supports LADSPA, LV2, Nyquist, VST, and
Audio Unit. You can even preview these effect plug-ins real-time. Especially for Nyquist effects, you can
modify them through a text editor. The plugin manager is here to make the installation, addition and/or
removal of effects and generators from the menus. As for editing, it is done simply and easily with basic
commands, plus unlimited steps of undo and redo.
Accessibility And Analysis

Tracks and selections are fully accessible for manipulation, by using the keyboard. For this reason, there is a
large range of keyboard shortcuts. A spectrogram view mode visualizes frequencies for selection, and the plot
spectrum window offers detailed frequency analysis.
3. Easypodcast
Easypodcast is a GUI tool for easy podcast publication. Easypodcast is cross-platform, with English and Spanish
as working languages, providing the users with the means for easy interaction. It is tested on Windows and
Linux (KDE). This is possible thanks to wxPython. You use it following a three-step process.
Automatic id3 Tag Generator

You start the procedure by using Easypodcast’s creation wizard, which will automatically create an id3 tag
when you select a working MP3 file.
Automatic RSS Creator Based On Selected MP3 Files

You then go to locating the MP3 files in the directory and selecting the ones to be included in RSS. You let the
automatic RSS creator do the rest.
FTP Uploader For Needed Files

After the creation is over, you get to the step of the FTP uploader for both MP3 and RSS files. You simply
choose the files and add them, and then you’re on the full configuration screen, with macro support.
4. Huffduffer
A tool for you to create your own podcast, the Huffduffer way. This is done by finding links to audio files on
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the web and adding them to your podcast. You can even subscribe to podcasts of other found sounds. To put
it simply, if you ever wanted to put together a podcast of audio files that you’ve discovered on the web, the
easiest way to do it is by using Huffduffer. As they like to call it, they take the pain out of podcasting found
sounds.
Huffduffing: Pin-Pointing By Triangulating

If you don’t know what Huffduffer means and where it derives from, there is a technology called huff-duff. Its
use is to triangulate the position of radio transmissions. So primarily, this is a way of pinpointing interesting
MP3 files on the web. Once you find it, you huffduff it directly on the site, and it is added to your podcast.
Tag With Key Words

This is a very helpful function for marking your targets. Once you huffduff an audio file, you can then tag it
multiply. This way it is easier to find related files, huffduffed by others.
A Page For Every Podcast, For Every Tag

Note that with every tag you use, a separate podcast is created. Using tags you can always discover
interesting podcasts by other people. Pretty much every page on huffduffer.com has a corresponding podcast,
and anyone can subscribe to the ones they find interesting.
5. Mp3myMp3 Recorder
Touted as the best free recording software you can get for Windows. It saves straight to MP3 or WAV any
audio you hear on your computer: Streaming, Skype calls, microphone, analog or digital media to name a few.
There’s a wide range of sound qualities also, and you can add your own custom skins as well.
Interface For Recording, And Converting From CD-ROMs

Allowing recording from your sound card, you can capture audio from any source, fine-tune depending on it,
even have silence detection. For the conversion, either of individual tracks or an entire CD, Mp3myMp3 will
automatically attempt to grab the CD's track data and album cover image from an online CD-ROM database,
when connected.
Schedule Your Recordings And Batch Rename Files

All you have to do is specify a day and time, plus URL of internet radio station or podcast, and add to your
recording events list. You can also batch rename sound files easily and efficiently. You get to use features such
as automatic numbering, adding custom text before or after filenames, or search and replace options.
Playlist Interface And Options Screen

Create podcast playlists by adding MP3, WAV, AU or AIF files. Thanks to its user-friendly interface, you can
reorder audio tracks just by dragging and dropping. Extra on-screen options for saving in WAV or MP3 file
formats, from 16 to 320 Kbit.
6. PodBean
If you are starting with podcasting, PodBean will prove of great use, as it makes publishing easy, in three
steps. It spares you from having to learn tech stuff and offers promotional tools that empower you, along with
iTunes preview and statistics. Described as a state-of-the-art podcast hosting solution for internal
communications and training, radio networks, and media organizations.
Advertising And Statistics For Podcasts

Efficient PodAds, with opportunities for all types and sizes. Brands are matched with targeted podcasts, in an
effort to assist the maximization of revenue. You can get additional help for this task from the extensive
statistics available.
Unlimited Podcast Hosting

The hosting plans for podcasts are affordable and unlimited, meaning they hold no caps on storage or
bandwidth. You won’t have to deal with increasing costs, should the number of your published podcasts rise
significantly.
Podcast Distribution And Promotion

What is evenly great with no limitations is that you’ll enjoy a reliable hosting network with full distribution.
Distribute your podcast freely among podcast listeners, to iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Amazon Alexa, and all
the podcast apps. You are at once listed in PodBean’s directory, and your podcast is shared to social networks,
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especially integrated with Facebook and Twitter.
7. Podomatic
If you have recorded the episodes of your podcast series, you can upload and store them with Podomatic. It
gives you the chance to use promotional tools that will bring you the popularity you are after. There is also
the availability for receiving in-line calls from listeners. Geographical data of all interactions is here to help,
track and analyze the growth of your podcast.
Create Your Own Site

Through a partnership with Weebly, Podomatic gives all premium level members the chance to have their
very own website. Its features include eCommerce, blogging, responsive web layouts, podcast exclusive
themes, social media integration, and integrated podcast feed.
Free Podcast Hosting, And App For iOS And Android

This great app lets you in on one of the world's largest communities of podcasters and DJs with the Podomatic
podcast player. If you check the features that come with the free accounts for podcast hosting, you’ll see that
you’ll have all you need to get started with our free accounts.
Promote Your Podcast

More tools are at your disposal when it comes to promoting your podcast. For instance, direct display on
Facebook and Twitter feeds, as well as embedment of your episodes on your site, and social media networks.
Advertising and crowdsourcing are also supported.
8. SoundCloud
If you are in the podcasting business, or about to step in, you should know that this popular platform serves
for a lot more than sharing, discovering and listening to great music. As a podcaster, you can be a part of a
community, uploading 12 hours of audio every minute, consisting of 175 million unique monthly listeners,
spread around 200 countries.
Solid Podcasting, Accessible 24/7

Rely on SoundCloud for building on the same infrastructure that serves audio to million listeners. You just
upload, and your podcast will play anywhere on the web, as well as in podcast apps.
Embedded Players, Smart Stats

Though your podcast will play literally everywhere, it won’t get chaotic. You’ll have control and insight into
play activity, at all times. Plus, intuitive, detailed stats help you understand and grow your audience.
Timed Comments And Twitter Cards

As far as your aforementioned audience is concerned, you can keep them close, read their comments on your
episodes and respond. A big extra is sharing your episodes in people’s Twitter streams. So easy. In fact,
seamless integrations are available with all major social networks.
9. StudioRack
If you consider yourself a demanding podcaster who wouldn’t be satisfied with a free solution, then you
should give StudioRack a chance. This modular live audio and video production system lets you run up to 8
plugins on just one insert, save chain presets, open them on any DAW, or monitor in low latency via a
SoundGrid server. It is compatible with the most popular hosts, has a dedicated component for Pro Tools TDM

and HDX systems, and gives you access to both Avid and Waves offload capabilities.
Integration In Three Ways

You can integrate it with your system by using the Waves SoundGrid ASIO/Core Audio driver, or the HD/HDX
or HD Native Avid playback engine, or by local processing – using any ASIO/Core Audio driver.
Local CPU Or SoundGrid DSP Server Processing

Choose between these two options for processing your StudioRack plugin chains. Either directly to your host
computer's CPU or to a SoundGrid DSP server. There is a processing mode switch for that. The second option
enables you to use hundreds of plugins simultaneously.
System Compatibility That Is Interchangeable

You can use the same plugins and settings for your session, no matter if you created it with or without
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SoundGrid processing. You get to maintain your workflow and chain presets to make your job even easier.
10. TalkShoe
Create, schedule and run your live interactive podcasts, οr Community Calls as they are called in TalkShoe.
This website encourages people to participate, by live or recorded listening, calling, or texting in. You can even
integrate the recording of your podcast on your website, which can be downloaded either way.
Easy Creation
You name it and you are good to go. Simple as that, you either start your community call right away or
schedule it for any future time.
Promotion And Invitations

Invitations can be sent on the spot from TalkShoe, but this is not the only way you can promote your podcast.
You are enabled to use a widget, placed on your blog or social network pages.
Multiple-Device Interaction
Your audience can join your Community Call either by listening to the stream, chatting on the website or
calling in via phone or PC. In fact, they do not even need to be TalkShoe members. Anyone can participate.
11. VozMe
Sooner or later, most podcasters face the modest results of converting text to MP3. While there’s still no app
to give a human feel to the speech coming out, you describe what you get from VozMe "as good as it gets”. It
follows a simple procedure and lets you hear it as an audio stream, or download it as an MP3. Embedded to
your website or used through an iGoogle gadget, are also options.
Instant Conversion From Two Languages

VozMe is available for English or Spanish text. All you have to do is type or paste the text for your podcast and
it will be available for you in both languages as an MP3 file.
Ready-Made Podcasts
As soon as the conversion is completed, you can download and save the converted text as an MP3 file. Your
audience can download it, too.
No Registration
VozMe doesn’t require from you to get registered to the website. It is all a simple process.
12. YAKiToMe!
Touted as the voice of the web, YAKiToMe! has made its name as the world's leading text-to-speech (TTS)
website. There you can find a large stable of free readers and an unrestricted usage model. First and foremost
a cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) TTS provider, it allows you to convert text to speech automatically. User
experience and support guaranteed.
Manage Your Podcasts

Along with the conversion app comes software for managing, publishing, and sharing. Reading
comprehension and retention are stimulated by providing simultaneous input to auditory and reading/writing
learners.

Compliant With Special Needs Of Learners
YAKiToMe! helps readers with visual impairments, dyslexia, and other learning and reading disabilities. The
free usage model makes YAKiToMe! TTS technologies available to users of all economic demographics, as
well.
Speed Read, Anywhere, Anytime

If your audience lacks the time, they can take advantage of the high-quality voice fonts reading fast combined
with text display. Great solution for high retention and comprehension. It can also be done while driving,
exercising, doing household chores. Anywhere, anytime.
13. Google Hangouts On Air

Conducting a live online interview brings a new element to your podcasts. You have people watching,
commenting and asking questions in real time. Undoubtedly, this is a much more valuable and interesting
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experience for your audience. Furthermore, the solution of Google Hangouts On Air is a simple three-step
procedure, by which you create more dynamic podcasts using the available built-in features.
SEO And Photo Editor

Here, your podcasts will become more than basic audio files, and you can create better SEO for them. Surely
you can make a video podcast, but if you don’t deem it necessary, you are provided with useful tools to edit
the photos you will use.
Progressive Content Marketing

Google Hangouts On Air are considered to be a progressive form of content marketing. This is due to the fact
that they're live events, hosted on Google+. They stream to and record on YouTube simultaneously.
Live Audience
It is important to point out that the result of this is not a pre-recorded call, but a live event with an audience.
This feature boasts a series of other characteristics, too.
14. Skype
Everyone has used it for calls and chat. Using Skype for podcasting is a simple as taking the next step when
strolling along. Its a great tool for collaboration, as everybody knows how to work with it, and it is pretty
reliable as well. The upside is that you are familiar with it. The downside is that you’ll be needing additional
software and hardware to complete the task.
Combine With Recording Software

There are many apps and programs that’ll do the work for you. As long as they are compatible with Skype.
Choose one, and upgrade your activity and your audience’s experience.
Skype And Digital Recorder

Many consider this as a part of the podcaster's toolbox. There are many options out there, so you have to do
your search to find the one suitable for your needs. This will definitely upgrade your ability to record audio.
Mixer For Recording A Skype Podcast

Mixers will throw in that professional touch, sure to make a difference for your audience. Every sound setting
will be adjusted more easily, so your powers will focus more on the creative rather than the technical part.
15. Zencastr
If you are searching for something that you can become familiar with in no time, try Zencastr. Recording two
or more people on independent channels, from inside your browser, is what it delivers. You won’t even have
to download or install anything, and you still can achieve studio quality. Post-production is also in the
package.
Live Editing
You can use the soundboard to insert any audio, such as an ad or an intro, instantly on recording, so that you
can save time and effort.
Built-In VoIP (Voice over IP)

Zencastr gives you and your audience the option to voice chat directly through it. No need for integration or a
combination of other apps.

Cloud Drive Integration
Your Dropbox account is synced, and everything you record is instantly there as well. Available for you to
share or edit.
16. Total Recorder

As the name states, this tool allows you to capture any sound played by a computer, instantly or with the
time-shift feature, as well as video from the PC screen or from hardware video devices. Additionally, you can
merge video with audio tracks, split tracks, and more. You can also process digital audio with the use of add-
ons, such as equalizer, audio cleaning, noise cancellation, and automatic gain control.
Conversion In Many Types

Conversion between different audio and video formats (AVI, WMV, FLV, MPEG-4, 3GP, compressed and
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uncompressed WAV, MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, APE) is available. Convert and edit without losing quality.
Enhanced Audio Process

You get to normalize, split, cut, or join compressed audio files. Try editing tags or chunking a long broadcast.
Also, perform audio process tasks by the group.
Free Technical Support

Technical support is here for the free-hobbyist edition, as well. Not only free but fast as well, makes the
choice of Total Recorder a privileged one.
17. PowerPress
Very popular podcasting plugin for WordPress. It will suit both beginners and experienced podcasters, as it
displays more than one modes, players, and subscribe tools, among others. Note that it fully supports iTunes,
Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn, and Blubrry Podcasting directories.
SEO And Subscribe Tools

It is an easy task to create a subscribe page, thanks to the shortcode embed and sidebar widget that is
optimized for responsive websites. Make it easy for audiences to discover your podcast through search
engines.
Podcast Importing And Migration Tools

Migrate your podcast from a series of other podcast platforms without losing a single episode. You can also
import your podcast from SoundCloud, LibSyn, PodBean, Squarespace, or other podcast RSS feed.
Multi-Podcast Support
PowerPress supports you in creating and separating your podcasts either by category or by media format.
18. Spreaker
Spreaker is a solution that is very helping for a podcaster that starts from scratch, offering a vast variety of
tools. Every part of the podcasting path is covered, as you’ll get support when recording and broadcasting.
You even have apps for analytics at your disposal. All these are multi device-friendly, and they promote the
upload of files and the migration of content using the RSS Importer.
Host, Distribute And Measure

Hours of audio storage space and unlimited bandwidth for you. Social networks, Apple Podcasts, YouTube,
and other spaces where you can distribute your podcast. Embedding widgets and scheduling episodes are
other cool features.
Upload, Connect And Interact

Uploading and publishing new episodes from any device is an easy task. More tools like mixers and
broadcasting software can be simply connected. Spreaker also covers you for live interaction, chatting and
getting comments on your episode's page while you broadcast.
Desktop, Mobile, And Web-Based Console

Manage your episodes and drafts for mobile or desktop devices. You can also record and upload the podcast
whenever, wherever through Spreaker's web-based console.

19. BlogΤalkRadio
This studio is based on the idea that things don’t have to be harder than they need to be. So, the concept of
effortless broadcasting, promoted by BlogΤalkRadio, makes the simultaneous managing of multiple elements
a child's play. It's a solution that will publish your broadcasting, host and update your RSS feed, as well as sync
it to iTunes and other host sites.
Dissemination And Visibility

Use it to get exposure for your broadcasts from its popular website. Furthermore, your show can be shared
and embedded via social networks, and the web.
Connectivity And Accessibility

Sharing new content with your audience can be automated by linking your social accounts. Once you share, it
will be accessible to all listeners. Post it or embed it so that anyone interested can tune in.
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Analytics
BlogTalkRadio tracks all listeners, from every distribution channel, giving you valuable insight as to the
demographics of your listeners.
20. Express Scribe Free

Transcribing your podcasts is a basic function, and Express Scribe Free is here to help you do just that. Give
those search engines the essential info that is included in your audio, in a format that can be crawled, and
found. What is more, having transcripts gives you more options for disseminating your material. Transcribe
audio files at their customizable playback speed, “Hotkeys”, and speech recognition software.
Hyperlinks
Add them to your transcript and post it on your blog or site to get the attention of those who prefer reading
over listening or watching.
Transcribe Audio Recordings

With its professional audio player software, it will assist you in transcribing audio recordings directly.
Label Milestones
Use transcription as a way of keeping track of important moments. This is common practice among many
podcasters, and can be found in their show notes.
VIDEO CONFERENCING TOOLS

Video conferencing meetings can change the way students work when they're remote or studying from home.
Face-to-face communication is important, even if you can't meet in-person. With a video conferencing
solution, your class can work together or with each other effectively, no matter where they're located.
Since video conferencing performs 30% better than audio-only setups for communication, it's worth investing
in a great video conferencing setup for your team. Luckily, there are many great, free options for video
conferencing software that can be paired with reasonably priced audiovisual products like video conferencing
cameras. A simple but high-quality web camera is a must-have to be inclusive to remote teammates and
provide a collaborative atmosphere between students in multiple locations.
01. Zoom
Zoom use has exploded around the world since lockdown began (Image credit: Zoom)
• Pros: Up to 100 people free; customisable backgrounds
• Cons: Free meeting only 40 minutes; security issues
Downloads and use of Zoom have exploded since lockdown began, from everyone to friends catching up to
governments holding cabinet meetings. It’s not entirely obvious why, because most of its features are
matched or exceeded by other apps, including those on this list. But anecdotal evidence suggests that people
simply find Zoom easy to use, robust and dependable. That’s difficult to measure scientifically right now, with
broadband speeds and connectivity being such a postcode lottery from day to day, but there’s something to
be said for the wisdom of crowds.
The free version of Zoom allows you to invite up to 100 people to your meeting, and up to 49 can appear on
screen, which is not to be sniffed at. Attendees can join via the app, their web browser or a traditional phone
call. You can hold unlimited meetings, with video up to 720p quality; you can record your meetings locally;
and there’s 24/7 online support. If you want to add a touch of colour and fun to your meetings, you can also
add Zoom backgrounds, which are becoming something of a cultural trend right now.
There are, however, two big issues with Zoom. The first is that under the free plan, meetings can only last a
maximum of 40 minutes. (That, of course, might be seen as a benefit rather than a drawback, preventing
lengthy meetings eating into your day). The second is the number of security issues associated with Zoom,
most notably the problem of ‘Zoom bombing’, where uninvited trolls disrupt meetings, often using obscenity
and racist language.
In recent weeks, Zoom has been scrambling to tighten up these security issues, and introduced new
measures such as introducing password-protect entry to meetings. However, their efforts haven’t come soon
enough to prevent many governments and large companies from banning its use.
02. Skype Meet Now

Skype Meet Now lets you videoconference with up to 50 people, for free (Image credit: Skype)
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• Pros: Unlimited meeting time; blur backgrounds

• Cons: Only 50 people under free plan
One of the original video chat apps, Microsoft’s Skype is still going strong, and the main benefit of using the
platform for videoconferencing, to be frank, is that most invitees will be familiar with it. But that’s not all it
has going for it.
Skype Meet Now offers some excellent video conferencing features, even in its free tier. These include group
calls to up to 50 people, screen sharing options, and most notably, the ability to automatically blur
backgrounds. You can also record calls, and add live subtitles to conversations. Attendees can access Skype via
the web browser, or the dedicated desktop and mobile apps.
Also note that if you’re an Office 365 user, then you’ll also get access to Skype for Business, which allows you
to invite up to 250 people, includes 24/7 phone support, and has some nice integrations with the Office 365
suite.
03. Google Hangouts

Google Hangouts makes video chatting super-easy (Image credit: Google Hangouts)
• Pros: Easy to use; free
• Cons: Light on features; only 10 people
One of the companies to recently ban Zoom use internally has been Google, and that’s not hugely surprising,
because it has its own platforms for videoconferencing already. For starters, you can conduct video calls with
up to 10 people via it's own free IM platform, Google Hangouts.
Nicely integrated into all the other main Google apps, such as Gmail and Google Calendar, Hangouts is very
easy and intuitive to use, which means you can set up a meeting and start chatting to people with just a few
clicks, either in your web browser or via the Android, iOS or Chrome apps. It doesn’t have many advanced
features, but on the plus side, this keeps the interface really simple and easy to use.
04. Google Meet

Google Meet is Google's premium videoconferencing service (Image credit: Google Hangouts Meet)
• Pros: Up to 100 people; invitees can phone in or Skype
• Cons: Lacks some advanced features
If you like Google Hangouts but want some more advanced videoconferencing features, then Google also
offers Google Meet for users of G Suite for Business. The latter is a paid-for service, starting at $5/£3.30 per
user per month.
With Google Hangouts Meet, you can invite up to 100 people, record meetings, share your screen and stream
HD video. Enterprise customers can record meetings to Google Drive and enable live-stream viewing to up to
100,000 viewers. Attendees can access your meeting via the web app, a special phone number, or even via
rival services such as Skype for Business.
If you want try Google Hangouts Meet before committing, there's a free 14-day trial for G Suite for Business.
And depending on the features you’re looking for, you may find it a cheaper option than the other paid-for
tools on this list.
Update: In late April, Google announced that you no longer need to be a G Suite for Business to use Meet.
Currently, anybody with a Google account can now use Meet, to create free meetings of up to 100 people
that can last any amount of time. In October, however, it may restrict meeting length to 60 minutes.
05. GoToMeeting
GoToMeeting is packed with professional videoconferencing features (Image credit: GoToMeeting)
• Pros: Business-oriented; advanced features
• Cons: Not cheap; can’t record on Starter Plan

While some apps, such as Skype and Google Hangouts, are broadly aimed at anyone wanting to organise a
group chat, GoToMeeting is laser-focused on being a ‘serious’ tool for business. Supporting between 150 and
3,000 invitees, depending on your pricing plan, this service is packed with features to make your meetings
organised and professional.
These include HD video, screen sharing, automatic transcription, unlimited cloud recording, whiteboard
capabilities, support for note taking and 24/7 phone support. Hosts can launch meetings via their
smartphones, and can even hand over control to another participant. Participants can join meetings via their
browser, apps for Android, iOS or Windows Phone, or a phone call. Starting at £9.50 a month, there’s no free
version of GoToMeeting, but there is a free trial.
06. Bluejeans
Bluejeans has some advanced features around audio and meeting organisation (Image credit: Bluejeans)
• Pros: Unique Dolby feature; annotation features
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• Cons: Can’t blur out backgrounds; not cheap

Starting at $9.99 a month, Bluejeans is another high-end videoconferencing service aimed squarely at
business users. It’s both easy to set up meetings, and to scale them with the level of complexity that meets
your needs. For example, hosts can create up to 20 breakout sessions, to arrange collaborations on subtasks,
and meeting recordings can be divided into chapters, with segment highlights and task assignment attached
accordingly.
Also, you can not only share your screen but annotate it like a whiteboard. Uniquely, the service supports
directional audio for Dolby Sound-enabled rooms. Ecryption-only access is available for improved security,
and phone support is available 24/7. Meetings can be accessed via web browsers, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS
and Android, and you can host from 50-100 participants, depending on your pricing plan. There’s no free
version of Bluejeans, but it is easy to set up a seven-day free trial.
07. Cisco Webex Meetings

Cisco Webex is surprisingly powerful, even in its free tier (Image credit: Cisco Webex)
• Pros: Professional feel; 100 people free
• Cons: Less well known than other platforms
Cisco is a major name in enterprise software, and its tools are usually very expensive. So it’s perhaps
surprising that its premium quality video conferencing software, Cisco Webex, comes with a free tier.
Especially as it’s one that will suit most people’s needs, enabling you to hold video meetings in HD with up to
100 people, share your screen, and even set up private chat rooms.
Meetings can be accessed via the desktop apps or the iOS and Android apps, there’s no limit to meeting
length, and you can make MP4 recordings of your meetings (1GB of cloud storage is provided with the free
plan). You can access meetings via your web browser, desktop apps, iOS and Android apps, or via a phone call.
In short, there’s not really anything we don’t like about Cisco Webex Meetings. The only thing that might
potentially count against it is that many will be unfamiliar with it.
08. Discord
Discord is a voice, video and text communication service to talk and hang out with your friends and
communities. Discord was originally created for people who loved to play games, but these passionate people
realized it could be enjoyed for more purposes.
Discord is the latest in a long line of apps designed to solve that problem. The free platform, which blends the
approachable chat UI found in apps like Slack with video and voice chat, a la Skype, has quickly become one of
the most popular, reporting 250 million users, with 14 million people logging on every day. Discord is great to
use to talk to your friends while playing games, but it’s also useful for creating places where people can
congregate, meet up to find other players, and socialize.
Here’s everything you need to know about Discord, including where to get it, what it costs, and why you
might want to check it out — especially before firing up your next multiplayer game.

Social Networking Sites
Connecting with each other comes to us more easily now that we can just tap away on a keyboard and chat
with a person who lives over 3000 miles away. Finding information knows no boundaries with Google on
every computer in the world.
As educators, this means access to more, faster, which is thrilling and mindboggling. However, it can also be
frustrating and confusing with so much to choose from.
How do you know which platform is the best for your goals? Which social media organization has the best
resources and community? Which one would help you communicate better with your students?
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All of these questions flutter through our minds as our eyes wander through the gallons of information we
search through. So, to simplify this daunting task for teachers, the following list consists of the best social
media for teachers.
1. The Connected Educator
A great site for connecting with other educators is edConnectr. It gives educators several avenues with which
to find other like-minded educators. A Visual Mapping Engine narrows down certain criteria allowing
educators to save valuable time and energy.
2. Edmodo
Edmodo acts as a playground for teaching and learning with a place for posts, calendars, and general
communication for teachers and students. Linking to students becomes simpler and more efficient as well as
more effective when students enjoy the presentation of it. It makes it easy to share valuable apps with
students.
3. TedEd
TedEd offers a variation of TED Talks with shorter, often-animated clips of subjects such as science,
technology, social studies, literature, language, art, health, psychology, and business and economics. With
communities and clubs, the site also makes it effortless for collaboration.
4. Google+
Besides great graphics and themes, Google+ takes teachers to their students with circles that make managing
virtual communication an art. Students might need to know more about a particular lesson because they
didn’t quite get it the first time. Pull them into a circle of their own with just the right tools to connect them to
their path to understanding and learning.
5. Facebook
The great part about Facebook is that everyone is on it. Students love connecting with their friends and family
with Facebook so telling them to check out the page where you post only makes sense. However, it’s very
important to stay professional and have a separate personal account.
6. Twitter
The best way to use Twitter for teaching is as a reminder to students that they need to complete an
assignment for a particular due date or that they have an exam coming up soon so study this or that.
Sometimes teachers even use it for inspiration by sending a famous quote.
7. Instagram
Students love Instagram for so many reasons but mainly for the photos and effects available to them.
Teachers can create assignments that tap into the need to Instagram such as photo essays where students
take photos, upload, and add captions or students can even create campaigns for certain organizations or just
for a lesson.
8. Vimeo
If you want to share videos on Facebook or Twitter, use Vimeo. But, there’s a whole lot more teachers can use
it for such as uploading and storing video then utilizing it as a tool to teach students more about creating
video. Vimeo teaches for you at Vimeo Video School with lessons and tutorials.
9. WordPress
With so many themes to choose from, WordPress has become a popular way for teachers to set up a web of
communication and lessons with their students. Chalkboard is an educational theme that prepares students
for learning and helps teachers outline goals and objectives while still providing great visuals. Teachers can
also use it to inspire students to write more by having them create their own blogs and meet the WordPress
Challenges.
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10. Blogger
Like WordPress, Blogger connects teachers to students using unique themes as well as diary-style writing.
With access to teachers’ posted links, lessons, and thoughts students become more successful and
comfortable with the teacher when learning online.
11. Skype
Using Skype means connecting with anyone, anywhere, at any time. This means students not only connect
with teachers but teachers encourage students to broaden their view of the world. Set up virtual connections
by contacting other teachers then connect the students to each other. Also, Skype has a whole portal
dedicated to educators who can use it to teach various lessons already set up by the Skype team.
12. Pinterest
The celebrated platform for pinning favorite pix can be a great teaching and learning tool. It also encourages
quick collaboration between teachers on all sorts of subjects and interests. Teachers can set up a Pinterest
page for one particular class or a series of classes with Pins that focus on themes or subtopics important to
the lesson at hand.
13. YouTube
Educators of any level can click on the education category within YouTube and find several subcategories such
as university, science, business, and engineering. YouTube even has a special section dedicated to teachers
and how to teach with it. But, even if teachers never visited that section, they could teach using all the great
videos available according to subjects or searches.
14. TeacherTube
If YouTube doesn’t make the cut, try TeacherTube. It’s dedicated to all sorts of education, from the basics to
more complicated work. Interestingly, the tabs for docs and audio are some of the more useful resources
within it. However, it’s the idea of TeacherTube and it’s tools that make it so useful because teachers can use
it to communicate with students and there’s no question that this is within an educational format.
15. Academia.edu
For academics whose main goal is to share research papers, Academia.edu draws a crowd of over five million
visitors. Academics can monitor the effect of their research and keep tabs on the research of the other
academics that they follow. It’s a great tool for anyone needing data and information on various subjects and
interests.
16. LinkedIn
While acting as a professional social forum for employers to connect with applicants or search for potential
employees, LinkedIn is used for so much more than that. Having students post professional resumes there
and then contacting them about the job market and the business world around them keeps them in touch

with reality and the endless possibilities through a targeted education.
17. LabRoots
Access millions of documents and hundreds of scientific news feeds by using LabRoots, a social networking
site catering to scientists, engineers and technical professionals. Besides the plethora of information, it helps
stay connected with colleagues and peers. Pulling students into the mix gives them a cutting edge feel and
insight into precious tools and information.
18. ResearchGate
Ijad Madisch founded ResearchGate, which is similar to LabRoots bringing scientists together for
collaboration. The difference really lies with the mission and the creators who are scientists working to give
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visibility to the dedicated researchers all over the world.
19. LabforCulture.org
Not a science lab, LabforCulture.org provides a place for artists to start blogs or an art group as well as
connect and share information. Mostly made of Europeans, LabforCulture.org also highlights art news, events
and exhibitions and helps artists find jobs and learn more about funding their projects. Teachers can use this
for motivation and to help students get a feel for other artists’ work.
20. CultureInside
Focusing on the gallery concept, CultureInside creates space for online galleries and actual galleries. It might
just be an artist’s dream if used correctly. With the guidance of a teacher, students can profit from their
creativity as well. There’s also a feature called lightbox, which connects artists and helps promote artwork in
other artists’ lightboxes.
21. GogoYoko
GogoYoko began as a solution to the problem many musicians and artists have. They don’t make the money
they deserve. Sharing and streaming music through GogoYoko keeps users listening and needing more, so
teachers can use it to do the same. On top of that, GogoYoko helps musicians and artists sell and promote
their music.
22. Sgrouples
If there’s concern about privacy, Sgrouples promotes itself as a networking site that allows users to have
ultimate control over who belongs to what group. It’s supposed to reflect how we click together with our
“small” group. More importantly, the site doesn’t share anyone’s information, so staying private really means
anything shared, remains in that group.
23. DailyMotion
A French video sharing site, DailyMotion adds an edge to social media by presenting users with a “news” feed
of the latest videos. Teachers can use it for themselves in order to keep up-to-date on bizarre and informative
social networking but also for posting their own videos or sharing some of the unique videos available through
DailyMotion.
24. RebelMouse
The New York Times, Mashable, Wired, and Time magazine among others tout RebelMouse as the best tool
for organizing all the social media networks any one individual uses. While also used by publishers or larger
organizations, RebelMouse brings the many networks together for one person and creates a presence that fits
a teacher’s agenda.
25. HootSuite
Another powerful social networking manager, HootSuite makes it easier to access various forms of social

media and analyze how valuable the use of one media is over another. Sometimes getting caught up in the
social media craze can be overwhelming so using HootSuite helps make sense all the media at the same time.
MOBILE APPLICATIONS
In 2020, finding educational apps of high quality seem like a daunting task particularly when you take into
account the fact that there are over 500,000 educational apps. Finding good quality education apps that
actually enhance teaching and learning can be tricky. We have spent several hours researching and testing
educational and learning apps that are recommended by educators, teachers, parents, and students.
Interactive educational apps help kids learn early academic skills like math and reading.
In the field of education technology, most apps for the tablets and smartphones work to improve the
educational experiences of students and teachers. Tens of thousands of education apps on the App Store and
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Google Play Store cover everything from Math and English to Science and History. iPad apps are expanding
the learning experience both inside and outside the classroom, making it more interactive, immersive, and
engaging.
These handpicked, child's education apps cover a wide range of subjects for a variety of levels and learning
styles. These apps will meet your learning goals, keep your classroom motivated, and reach every type of
learner.
Apps for education can make children more interactive, more engaged and perform better. Keeping teaching
methods fresh is integral to getting students engaged in their studies and learning apps are a fantastic way of
achieving this.
Apps are designed with primary input from educators and curriculum developers, or shown in educational
research to be an effective learning tool. The apps we cover in this guide are great learning apps not because
they’re designed to make kids smarter, to drill facts, or to replace in-school learning, but because they’re fun
and interesting for kids and adults.
We have also compiled a list of the best apps for schools, as well as the best iPad apps and best apps for
kids for parents and teachers to enjoy.
Check out the best educational apps for teachers, students and educators that are currently available for iOS
and Android devices.
Reading Eggs
Reading Eggs is the multi-award winning learning app that helps children learn to read. They will learn how to
read using interactive reading games, guided reading lessons, fun activities and over 2,000 digital story books.
The lessons are presented in levels outlining your child’s learning path to keep kids engaged. You can take
advantage of their special 30-day FREE trial offer and see how your child's reading can improve in just weeks.
Reading Eggs is a complete learn to read system for children aged 2-13 and covers the five essential
components of reading: phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. Parents can
see instant results in their dashboard and receive detailed progress reports, which shows exactly where their
child is improving and where extra attention is needed. That makes it one of the best educational apps for
academics on a budget.
Reading Eggs app is free to download on iPhone, iPad and Android devices.
iOS Android
Speech Blubs: Language Therapy

Speech Blubs is a Speech Therapy application, created in cooperation with Speech and Language Pathologists,
that uses voice controlled and video technology to develop speech articulation for young children with or
without speech difficulties. The app has thousands of activities that aid over the practice of speech sounds in
a fun and engaging way.
Improve your child's speech in a fun and engaging way! Interactive videos, face filters, stickers and tons of fun
facts are what will keep your child engaged while improving their speaking abilities. Learn all about animals,
dinosaurs, stars, vehicles, emotions and much more with this great app. Want to play guessing games?
Practice speech through singing? Speech Blubs has it all and much more!
7-day free trial available on iPhone, iPad, and Android
Google Classroom
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Google Classroom is part of the G Suite for Education (formerly known as Google Apps for Education) package
that includes Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar and other apps. It’s targeted to teachers and students in
both K-12 and higher education markets.
One of the biggest benefits of Google Classroom is it’s simple to use and encourages collaboration between
students and teachers. Teachers can create a class and list educational apps, such as assignments in a few
clicks. They can add students by name or send them a code to join. Students then can see what assignments
are due, participate in discussion forums or message the teacher (either in private or via group chat).
Google offers a variety of applications - which ones will be available for students to use?
• Docs, Sheets and Slides: A suite of applications for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.
• Calendar: A calendar that can be used to enter events with the potential to be shared with others.
• Gmail: Allows students to send messages to other students and teachers.
• Drive: Allows students and teachers to store and organize assignments, documents, or class
curriculum securely and access them from any device.
• Forms: Allows teachers to create forms, quizzes, and surveys to collect and analyze responses with
the help of machine learning.
• Google Meet: Allows students or teachers to join virtual classrooms and meetings from anywhere.
• Google Sites: A web page software that allows the user to build a site to display and share
information.
Google Classroom integrates with many student information systems, along with websites such as Discovery
Education, Curiosity.com and the American Museum of Natural History.
Google Classroom accounts for teachers and students are free, but schools must register for the Google for
Education platform first. Google Classroom is also available as a mobile app for iPhone and Android devices.
ZOOM
Zoom is a powerful cloud video conferencing platform that allows you to host meetings with hundreds of
participants. Using Zoom, educators can share lesson plans, give instruction, swap files with students, and
communicate directly with the group or individuals via chat, all within the app.
If you're working from home for the foreseeable future due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, you're
going to be getting a lot more comfortable with Zoom, video conferencing service. Zoom has removed the 40-
minute time limit for calls on the platform's free plan for K-12 schools in countries all around the world,
including nearly 60,000 K-12 schools in the United States, which can be accessed for their teachers and
students via this sign-up form.
Available on iPhone, iPad and Android

Kids Academy
Kids Academy app is one of the most innovative and engaging program for young learners. Their unique learn-
through-play program combines the most advanced in adaptive technology, artificial intelligence,
personalized learning, and gamification to help kids put their best foot forward and get the education they
deserve.
Kids Academy has now over 5000 learning activities that includes educational games and videos, interactive
and printable worksheets, songs, puzzles and flashcards. They cover the key subject areas of Math, Reading,
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Language Arts, Science and Social Studies.
Parents will be able to keep track of children's progess, identify and develop their child's talents and work on
the topics that need improvement.
ABCmouse.com
ABCmouse.com Early Learning Academy’s preschool curriculum focuses on important basics in the four main
curriculum subjects of Reading, Math, World Around Us (beginning science and social studies), as well as Art &
Colors, establishing a foundation of knowledge for young children that they can build upon with confidence
and success.
ABCmouse.com features hundreds of interactive and fun games, each designed to teach a specific concept.
Their preschool games help children ages 3+ to learn sounds, numbers, shapes with the preschool alphabet
games, preschool art games, preschool number games and preschool shapes games.
All of the games include voiced instructions, so even very young children will find it easy to learn and play. You
can read the full ABC Mouse review here.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy is a free education app for both students and teachers. Khan Academy offers practice
exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their
own pace in and outside of the classroom. This classroom learning app helps finding educational resources for
math, reading, writing, science and more.
The app allows you to watch more than 4,300 video lessons on topics including math, science, economics, and
humanities either by streaming them from the site or downloading them for later viewing or when you don’t
have an Internet connection.
Available on iPhone, iPad, Google Chrome and Android

Edmodo
Edmodo is a social learning app for students, teachers, districts, and schools. Edmodo can be used for
communication, polling, assignments/quizzes etc. Managing classes is much easier, and students can easily
send teachers individual messages or materials.
Edmodo is designed to help reduce the workload for a teacher and make it easier to stay connected with your
their classroom and their students. Edmodo has millions of resources, created and shared by other fellow
teachers, ready to use in the classroom. Millions of teachers have used Edmodo to reach their students,
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improve learning outcomes, and get more out of their lesson plans.
Parent accounts are a great way for parents to observe and stay up to date with their child’s Edmodo
activities. They will be able to see their children's assignments, grades, messages from the teacher, school
calendar and so on.
Kahoot!
Kahoot! is a tool used by teachers to administer quizzes, discussions or surveys. It is a game based classroom
response system played by the whole class in real time. Multiple-choice questions are projected on the
screen. Students answer the questions with their smartphone, tablet or computer.
BrainPOP UK Featured Movie
BrainPOP® creates cross curricular animated, educational content that captivates students, supports teachers,
and adds excitement to lessons. In primary and secondary classrooms, on mobile devices, and at home,
BrainPOP’s award winning resources explain the world using animated videos, educational games, interactive
quizzes, and online activities.
Socrative Student
Socrative Teacher app offers an interactive environment for students and teacher to share their learning.
Socrative is easy-to-use and fun to implement. Teachers can ask questions, conduct polls, and conduct
assessments with real-time data displaying during the session. Gauging student understanding and ideas has
never been so easy.

Available on iPhone, iPad, Google Chrome and Android
Nearpod
Nearpod offers teachers an easy-to-use app for creating interactive lesson plans, presentations, assessments,
and digital content. Nearpod allows teachers to create digital lesson plans, share it with students during class,
and track individual progress. Lessons are comprised of teacher-created slides that can include text, video,
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images, websites, questions, quizzes, polls, and assignments. Students are able to follow the lesson on their
own devices at their own pace or teachers can lead a synchronized session where students can follow the
lesson in real-time.
Remind: Safe Classroom Communication
Remind is a safe, classroom-friendly communication tool to help teachers send messages, en masse or
targeted, to students and parents. Teachers can schedule reminders about meetings, assignment deadlines,
send students messages such as daily homeworkd assignments, reminders of upcoming tests, photos of class
activities or notes, links to outside resources like articles, videos and more. They can also message individual
students, an entire class of students, or multiple classes at the same time.
From students and parents, it will help them to stay on top of what is going on at school from class
assignments to extracurricular activities.
Quizlet
Teachers can discover content for their classes amongst the millions of study sets on Quizlet. Save time by
finding study sets created by other teachers that cover exactly what students need. Encourage the students to
compete for the top score by playing Quizlet’s study games Match and Gravity in school or at home.
With the Quizlet app, you can easily find resources for any subject at any level. Revise for any subject with fun
and interactive flashcards, games and diagrams. Quizlet makes it easy to discover and create study materials
for languages, history, science and more.
News-O-Matic EDU

News-O-Matic is the first daily newspaper just for students. It provides an exciting and engaging nonfiction
experience for students, complete with valuable literacy tools for the classroom. Thanks to its unique
combination of editorial and technology, News-O-Matic creates innovative solutions to help children become
tomorrow’s responsible citizens. It gives young readers a window into the world — and a reason to love
reading news.
More than 1,000 schools use News-O-Matic for nonfiction reading, social studies, geography, science, and
more!
Edublogs
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Edublogs lets you easily create & manage student & teacher blogs, quickly customize designs and include
videos, photos & podcasts – it’s safe, easy and secure so try out an Edublog today! A growing library of over
80 hands-on Science lessons that is great for home and the classroom. These short videos demonstrate
inexpensive and easy to recreate experiments that are designed to inspire and excite kids of all ages.
Available on iPhone and iPad
Evernote
Evernote is an impressive organizational app for teachers. Its limitless uses range from planning a course to
delivering a lesson plan to capturing feedback after class. It allows you to take notes, capture photos, create
to-do lists, record voice reminders and makes these notes completely searchable, whether you are at school,
at home, or on the go.
WolframAlpha
WolframAlpha is an ultimate tool for homework and research for students. It is one of the popular apps for
high school students that delivers specific answers calculated from the data gathered from all the information
related to your questions. Students can learn anything because it covers a variety of subjects on array of
topics, from mathematics and biology to chemistry, physics, geometry, geography and more.
K-5 Science Apps for Kids
K-5 Science Apps for Kids is an educational app for iPad and iPhone. The app is so engaging while teaching kids
a variety of science topics. Tappity teaches 100+ science topics with fun experiments, stories, and games. The
narration and interactive features make it ideal for a wide range of ages.
Tappity’s science guide Haley will take students on mini-adventures to teach concepts related to a variety of
science topics. Parents are frequently involved with the app as Haley urges children to get their parents to
share in the marking of their accomplishments. Teachers could make good use of the app in lessons either by
getting Haley to explain a topic or by letting individuals work through a topic on their own.
Available on iPhone, iPad
Piazza
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Piazza is the leading social learning platform in education, used by tens of thousands of instructors to
efficiently answer students' questions. Piazza engages students and promotes answering classmates'
questions in a private, secure, centralized location. Students love Piazza because they get faster answers to
their questions. Instructors love Piazza because it saves them time, while giving deeper insights.
Available on Android
NASA
Students can learn just about anything they ever wanted to know about the solar system and about NASA's
missions by navigating through the videos, photos, live feeds, and loads of text in NASA App. For kids with a
big appetite for learning about the solar system, NASA App provides a wealth of information. However, given
the amount of text and information, young users may need more focus than the app provides. With guidance,
kids can discover a wealth of information about the solar system with NASA App.
Star Walk 2
Star Chart lets you to see the stars and planets in the skies accurately by pointing their Android device
towards the sky. This astronomy app makes it easy for you to learn more about the objects you are viewing by
tapping the star or planet. One of the amazing features is Time Shift that allows you to go back and forth in
time to see past and future celestial placement patterns.
Google Earth
Google Earth offers the means to display geographic data from a wide variety of sources together in a
geospatial context. This data includes imagery for the entire globe at varying resolutions that contains a great
deal of interpretable visual information. Students can use it to find their homes, schools, and other locations
that are familiar to them. They can make inferences by comparing familiar places to other locations.

Duolingo
Duolingo is one of the best English language apps today and highly recommended for English beginners. The
gamified learning system of the app helps you learn English quickly by spending twenty minutes a day.
Duolingo structures your lessons that teach you about seven new words based on a topic and skill points
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being awarded for completing the lessons.

Duolingo is the most comprehensive online language learning platform. The most popular languages include
Spanish, Dutch, Danish, French, German, Italian and Irish. Other languages offered include Russian, Japanese,
Dutch, Turkish, Korean, Greek, Mandarin Chinese, and even a few fantasy languages. You can learn languages
for free using Duolingo app.
Memrise
Memrise uses some creative and easy way to remember words for learning English. The focus of this app is to
help the users expand their vocabulary by learning English words in an effective way. Memrise also offers an
offline mode to continue learning without internet connection.
ShowMe Interactive Whiteboard
ShowMe Interactive whiteboard app is an application that allows teachers and students of any age to create
presentations called ‘ShowMe’s that can be shared via the device on online privately or to a community
audience. The user can record and create engaging voice over presentations of their chosen topic by using
some of the many tools such as adding text, drawings, photos and images.
Turn your iPad into your personal interactive whiteboard! ShowMe allows you to record voice-over
whiteboard tutorials and share them online. It’s an amazingly simple app that anyone can use, no matter how
young or old!
Notability
Notability is one of the most versatile apps available for notes taking. You can type or write notes on
notebooks and organize them into folders inside the app. However, it also lets you annotate PDFs, which can
be great for grading student papers. Notability also records audio and lets you take notes at the same time.
So, you could be having a reading conference with a student, or testing their reading fluency with the audio

recorder, while taking notes at the same time on your iPad.
Explain Everything Whiteboard
Explain Everything is one of the easy-to-use and best interactive whiteboard and screencasting app. It can be
used to present information to students in a visually engaging way. The exciting part of this app will help your
students learn to create and present with it – individually or on group projects from sketches, through PDFs,
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to videos.
The app creates collaborative learning experiences where students and teachers can share thoughts and ideas
in real-time. You can strengthen leadership and collaboration skills by giving students the tools to create and
share their own tutorials, animated stories, and presentations.
ClassDojo
ClassDojo is one of the best apps for teachers that be can used in a classroom from start to finish. ClassDojo is
a consistent and very structured classroom management app for teachers to improve students behavior and
communicate more effectively with parents. It can be used to a small or large extent depending on your time,
purpose, and interest.
Available on iPhone, iPad, iMessage and Android
Popplet Lite
Popplet is an excellent way for students to create graphic organizers to organize and share what they have
learned! It is easy to use, allows the user to incorporate images and text, and can be exported to photos to be
shared via a website. Popplet is a simple and innovative way to organize a student’s thinking by mapping their
thoughts in a text, drawing, or image features.
Book Creator
Book Creator is the simplest way to create digital books, even for not-yet-readers and writers. Children can
add photos, videos, or drawings to enhance or tell their stories. It's easy enough for preschoolers, yet can be
used by older students or adults. It is a rare content creation app that is just as at home in a child’s hand as it
is a teacher’s. With this app both can create useful and compelling eBooks, magazines, and guides without
taking an age to learn how to use the software.
Available on iPad

Showbie
Showbie is a free educational app for teachers and students that makes creating and completing assignments,
providing assessments, and storing grades easy. Students can submit their assignments through Showbie. It
has the ability for students and/or teachers to leave voice notes with assignments.
Multiple teachers can create classes within Showbie, so that students can see each class that they belong to.
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Then, they click on the class to see the assignments that the teacher has created for that class. Teachers are
able to give due dates/times for assignments, thus not allowing work to be turned in late. Work is
timestamped, so that the teacher can see exactly when it was turned in to Showbie.
Available on iPhone, iPad, Google Chrome
Educreations Interactive Whiteboard
Educreations Interactive Whiteboard app is designed mainly for teachers to present lessons that can easily be
shared with other students, teachers, or parents. Educreations is a unique interactive whiteboard and
screencasting tool that's simple, powerful, and fun to use. Annotate, animate, and narrate nearly any type of
content as you explain any concept.
Available on iPad
Puppet Pals HD
Puppet Pals HD Directors Pass is an easy to use cartoon creator app that allows you to create your own
animations using a variety of themes and characters. Children's imaginations can really run wild when using
the app. From creating a pirate battle to retelling a favourite fairytale or story the possibilities are endless.
For more games, check our list of the best educational games for iPad to help educate and entertain young
kids.
Available on iPad, iMessage
Teach Your Monster to Read
The Teach your Monster to Read is an award winning kids learning app that teaches children to read in a fun
and simplistic manner. The app covers the first two years of reading, from matching letters and sounds to
enjoying books. The app has been designed in collaboration with academics at Roehampton university and
Complements Phases 2-5 of UK Government-approved Letters and Sounds and other major systematic
synthetic phonics programmes.
Mazaam - The Musical Genius
Mazaam is an engaging and animated app for children to develop their understanding of music through a
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range of games and levels. It is ideal for parents to work alongside their child, play games with them, and
check their understanding.
The audio is excellent, the animations are exciting and engaging, and the sharing collaborations with parents
or teachers is an excellent opportunity. The games are full of fun and colour, and students wouldn’t be able to
recognize that they are learning, as they will be having a lot of fun!
Mazaam offers an intuitive and progressive framework. Visual clues provide guidance at the beginning of each
module, then gradually disappear to solicit your child’s auditory attention more and more.
Khan Academy Kids
Khan Academy Kids, targeting two- to five-year-old children is adaptive to children’s development and lets the
child navigate through the platform at their own pace. Kids improve skills through a customized series of
interactive activities, books, videos, and creative lessons. Khan Academy Kids’ holistic approach engages
students in subjects ranging from literacy to math while encouraging creativity and building social-emotional
skills.
BrainPOP Jr. Movie of the Week
BrainPOP Featured Movie (Android, iOS): BrainPOP is an educational media stalwart with a wealth of
animated videos aimed at K-12 students, and now, BrainPOP's mobile app brings these videos right to your
kid's smartphone or tablet. The Featured Movie app brings a small library of free videos as well as a daily
featured movie and quiz; subscription options increase the number of videos you can view while unlocking
the full BrainPOP mobile library of educational videos and quizzes.
BrainPop is designed for kids of age four and up. Lessons begin with a brief animated video and include a wide
variety of school- and life-related topics. Each video is accompanied by interactive activities and quizzes that
reinforce what kids have learned.

Hit the Button Maths
Hit the Button an interactive maths game from the TopMarks.co.uk website, are useful in the early stages of
learning on multiplication (e.g. times tables) and division facts. Hit the Button is an interactive maths game
with quick fire questions on number bonds, times tables, doubling and halving, multiples, division facts and
square numbers. The games which are against the clock challenge and develop a child's mental maths skills.
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Epic Reading App
With access to more than 35,000 children’s books, audiobooks, educational videos and quizzes, Epic is a
monthly subscription service that’s basically the Neflix of education. Epic Reading app allows kids to explore a
vast library of child-safe content, with material designed for kindergarten up to 7th grade reading levels, with
personalized reading recommendations helping you find new material. An Epic for Educators version aimed at
librarians and educators is available for free.
Mobile learning allows for flexibility by eliminating the need for learning to happen at a particular time and
place. Mobile learning takes learning flexibility to another level by making instructional content like videos,
podcasts, and other multimedia formats available on smartphones and devices. If you're not taking advantage
of the above mobile learning apps, you're missing out!
DO THIS!
Answer the following questions in a sheet of paper.
1. Which of the above software and applications have you tried using?
2. How was your experience in using such software or applications?
3. Do you think using these software or applications can help you in your
teaching? How?
4. Do you think using these software or applications can help your students learn
your lessons more effectively? How?
5. As a future teacher, what do you think are the importance of knowing how to
use these software and applications?

References
• Ansari, Md Mohsin. The Top 62 Productivity Tools, Apps and Software Programs of
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2020. The Time Doctor Blog. Accessed October 5, 2020.

https://www.timedoctor.com/blog/productivity-tools/
• Farley, Ryan (2020). The best screen recording software in 2020. Zapier Blogs.
https://zapier.com/blog/best-screen-recording-software/
• Martinez, Krystina (2020). The best presentation software in 2020. Zapier Blogs.
https://zapier.com/blog/best-powerpoint-alternatives/
• Cartwright, Jamie (Accessed October 5, 2020). 14 PowerPoint Presentation Tips To

Make More Creative Slideshows. Hubspot. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/easy-
powerpoint-design-tricks-ht
• Paul Grabowicz & Jeremy Rue (Accessed October 5, 2020). Spreadsheets. Berkeley
Graduate School of Journalism-Advance Media Institute.
https://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/spreadsheets/
• Chesser, Lisa (2013). 25 Awesome Social Media Tools for Education. informed by Open
Colleges. https://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/social-media-tools-
for-education/

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EDUC81: Technology for Teaching and Learning 2

What are Productivity Software?

The Top Productivity Tools, Apps and Software Programs of 2020

Crafted by PABLO B. ATACADOR for USTP-Oroquieta.

Communication and Collaboration

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Crafted by PABLO B. ATACADOR for USTP-Oroquieta.

Time Tracking Tools

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Crafted by PABLO B. ATACADOR for USTP-Oroquieta.

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recording of activity history.

Project Management Tools

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Crafted by PABLO B. ATACADOR for USTP-Oroquieta.

Crafted by PABLO B. ATACADOR for USTP-Oroquieta.

Crafted by PABLO B. ATACADOR for USTP-Oroquieta.

Crafted by PABLO B. ATACADOR for USTP-Oroquieta.

Distractions and Focus Tools

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Bit.ai: Smartest Interactive Documents

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Crafted by PABLO B. ATACADOR for USTP-Oroquieta.

File Sharing Tools

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• Built-in video sharing and/or convenient exporting tools

Camtasia (Windows, Mac)

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Apowersoft Unlimited (Windows, Mac, Android, iOS)

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Movavi Screen Recorder Studio (Windows, Mac)

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FlashBack Pro (Windows)

CloudApp (Windows, Mac, Chrome, iOS)

Active Presenter (Windows)

Best free screen recorder for Windows/macOS

Crafted by PABLO B. ATACADOR for USTP-Oroquieta.

Export to popular video formats (MP4, AVI, WMV, WebM, MKV)

Google Slides (Web, iOS, Android)

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Apple Keynote (Web, macOS, iOS)

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How to Make a PowerPoint Presentation

2. Choose a "theme" or create your own.

3. Create a variety of slides for different purposes.

5. Add transitions to your slides (optional).

Crafted by PABLO B. ATACADOR for USTP-Oroquieta.

6. Add animations to your slides (optional).

Select the element you want animated by clicking on it.

Some of the ways to customize animations include:

7. Save your presentation.

8. Run your presentation.

9. Advance the slides.

Crafted by PABLO B. ATACADOR for USTP-Oroquieta.

3. Edit your slide template design.

4. Write text with your audience in mind.

How to align objects to the slide:

9. Crop images into custom shapes.