Cathy's 23 Mobile Things

Cathy Coats - Library technician at St. Cloud State University

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23 Things

The day is almost over and my attempt to get them all done in one day did not work. However, I am having a lot of fun with this and will continue doing them anyway. 

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Thing 14: Video

When our library's Social Media Committee held a focus group on social media, the students raved about Vine. I downloaded it and did a search for "library" and found lots of videos in libraries, and many of these videos were of college students. 

I'm not sure I would find much use for this in my personal life since it seems more popular with teenagers than people my age. But our library could use Vine to connect to students, perhaps we could have our student workers to create the content that the library shares on Vine. 

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Thing 13: Presentations

I downloaded Haiku Deck and it looks really simple and easy to use. I created a presentation about our Edible Books Festival in less than five minutes. I will try Haiku Deck for my next presentation. I think the library's Social Media Committee could use this app to present their yearly updates to our Dean's Council. 

I have invested in the Macintosh Keynote app for presentations in graduate school and I love it. I can import Powerpoint presentations and also convert Keynote presentations into Powerpoint. It's a great app for creating quick, beautiful presentations right from your iPad. The interface is intuitive and easy. It also easily connects to the Dropbox app, so I can access my presentations from the cloud. 

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Thing 12: Books, Books, & More Books

I have used Free Books for a long time, but I was very excited to see a free audiobook app. This app is going to be a permanent addition to my iphone. I love audiobooks when I'm in the car or exercising and I am always waiting impatiently for my monthly credits from Audible.com.

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Thing 11: Library & Reference

Although my library catalog has a mobile version, it does not have it's own app. I also checked our local public library and they do not have an app either. But I do use the Overdrive app to access their Overdrive catalog quite often. I downloaded Anoka County's app and explored the interface. It's a great library app and I wish our local library had one.

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Thing 10: Sharing Photos

I signed up for Instagram several years ago but abandoned it when I saw there were only a few of my friends who used it. But when I signed in again today I was excited to see almost 100 of my facebook friends on it. I will definitely be using this app on a weekly basis from now on. 

My library has just launched an Instagram account and we hope this will be a great way to reach out to students. 

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Thing 9: The picture of my daughter that I made with ColorSplurge

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Thing 9: Taking & Editing Photos

I tried color splurge for this Thing. I was excited to create something with a picture of my 4 month old baby. I had a hard time getting it to look nice but I think it turned out okay.

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Thing 8: Social Media Management Tools

For this Thing, I tried Hootesuite because the Social Media Committee at my library plans to investigate the use of Hootesuite to manage the library's social media. 

Navigation for Hootsuite was not as intuitive as I expected, so I watched the free webinar that they offered in the welcome email. This helped immensely and I had all my social media sites connected and organized in no time. 

For personal use, this is a great app for people who are active on all the biggest social media sites. But I tend to spend most of my time with Facebook where the majority of friends, family and coworkers are posting on a daily basis.

Our library might find this a good way to manage the Twitter and Faceboook pages together. However, the library's Pinterest page could not be included. Our library's Social Media Committee has designated one person to lead each social media site, so Hootesuite might be somewhat unnecessary. However, a library that has only one person managing their social media might find Hootesuite useful.

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Thing 7: Content Saving & Sharing

Pinterest is a website that I have been using for years. I love Pinterest because I can keep all my professional and personal content in one place. I can organize it, see what my Facebook friends are pinning and share my pins with them. Pinterest is one of the most often used app on my phone, second to Facebook. I love having a space away from Facebook to share content with friends and coworkers. 

For my library work, I have used it for our library's Edible Books Festival. I am also attending graduate school and my fellow students and I use it to share content with each and comment on it. For personal use, it is my recipe keeper, health inspiration and vacation planner. 

The downside of Pinterest is that sometimes when you return to your "Pins," the link is broken or no longer there. 

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Thing 6: Creating & Editing Docs

I have been using CloudOn for a long time, so I decided to try Quickoffice. The most important difference between the two for me is where your work is stored in the cloud. Quickoffice is great for people who use Google Docs a lot because you use your Google account to sign in and it easily saves documents to Google Drive. However, I already have nearly all my documents stored on Dropbox, which is used easily with the CloudOn app.

The interface on Quickoffice is much nicer than CloudOn, but CloudOn looks exactly like Microsoft Office looks on a regular computer. Although I do use Google Docs and Goodle Drive, it is only for a few things and the vast majority of my work is stored on Dropbox. So for now, I will continue to use CloudOn until Quickoffice is more easily integrated with Dropbox.

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Thing 5: Notetaking

I tried Dragon Dictation for this Thing because again, I have heard a lot of people using it. The dictation was amazingly accurate! I have used other dictation apps before, but I have always quickly abandoned them because the editing and clean up was more work than simply typing it in the first place. This app works well and I will probably continue to use for dictation. However, it's probably not ideal for note taking in meetings or classes. I will continue to use Evernote for typing out notes in these situations. 

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Thing 4: Keeping Up

So, I was on maternity leave for 3 months and have been catching up at work since I got back. I am going to attempt to meet today's deadline and get through my remaining 23 things in one day! 

Thing 4 was fun for me because I love news media. I downloaded Flipboard because I have heard a lot about it. I like that I can take content from Facebook and mix it into my news content. The everyday function in my life seems similar to Pinterest, in that I can save, organize and combine content. However, Flipboard offers a lot more versatility, so I will keep this app for a while and play around with it. I hope it will help me integrate my personal and professional news interests in one app. 

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Thing 3: Utilities

I have used QR reader to scan QR codes, but I have heard that Red Laser is popular. I was excited that there were many more features beyond QR reading. I used it to scan the barcodes on a few books at my desk. It showed me prices at Barnes and Noble as well as ebay. I was disappointed that it give Amazon prices or show libraries where the book is available as I have heard other apps can do. I scanned a few product barcodes, like Halls cough drops, and found once again the results only included a select few corporate retailers. I'm not sure I will keep this app since the non-QR reading functions do not seem that useful to me. However, I might replace my other Qr reader app with Red Laser since it does offer that basic function with more options. 

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Thing 2: Mobile Device Tips

For this thing we were asked to explore tips and tricks for our mobile devices. I have been using iPod Touches, iPhones and iPads for over 3 years now, so I was astonished at how much I learned! Although, many of the most useful things are part of the latest iOS update.

Here are some of my favorite features that I found with Thing 2:

--The notification and control center can both be launched from the lock screen.

--You can swipe to the right anywhere on the lock screen to get into your device.

--The ability to make in-app purchases can be disabled.

---There is a flashlight in the control center! I found this and promptly deleted the flashlight app that I have used for years. The flashlight in the control center is much quicker to access than the apps are. -You can set exceptions to the silent mode

--You can search within a webpage on Safari

--Text messages are time stamped. You can view the time stamp by sliding the text message to the left

--You can set your device to automatically update your apps. This has been one of the best features of the new update. It has prevented me from having to update several apps at once. 

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Thing 1: Blogging & Registering

With 23 Mobile Things, I hope to increase my knowledge and usage of mobile apps in my personal and professional life. I am a graduate student and my ipad is mostly used for that right now. But I really want to learn more ways to use it for my work in an academic library. I'm also looking forward to learning my way around tumblr because I have heard it's very big with high school students right now. I'm also responsible for setting up and investigating a tumblr blog for our library. This is my first experience with blogging, so I hope to get some goof experience with that, too.

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Register for 23 Mobile Things MN!

Registration is now open to library staff in the state of Minnesota for the 23 Mobile Things program brought to you by the Minnesota Multitype Library Systems.

Visit the 23 Mobile Things website for the details.

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Just getting started. Can't wait to learn some new things!