Given the exceptional events that we are experiencing today due to the coronavirus, teleworking is imposed as a necessity for both teachers and companies. From Androidsis os we recommend the best apps to be able to do telework from home.
A series of apps that has its version for mobile phones and they allow you to cross all the data, documents, images and more via cloud syncing. We are going to do it with these apps that will come in handy these days and that will give you wings for communication, organization and performance of your work.
A few first recommendations
Before going to all the teleworking apps, keep in mind that these apps below are subject to personalization and our own needs. In fact I will talk about Zapier and the experience of having worked with them in my day to day work to collaborate with the team with which I develop my profession.
If I say subject, it is because we can optimize their integration between them and improve all workflows. Like them, they have hundreds of integrations. I would recommend that you spend time investigating, because you can find automations that allow you to save work time both for you and with the team or class with which you are working.
Un quick example. You are a teacher of a class. You have a chat room in Slack and in it all the students of a subject. In this chat room you are restricted from commenting and only you can. In this chat room you have Slack integrated, and every time a student from Trello creates a card indicating that they have finished the work, a notification is generated in the said room in Slack. This automation is a clear example of what can be done.
Use these apps to adapt them to your needs and see them as what could be a hammer or a table to be able to carry out the work. Go for it.
Slack
Slack is the app chat for professionals and for telework par excellence. An excellent app in its free version that is characterized by creating workspaces and in each of them the option to create all the chat rooms, with their pertinent permissions, that we need.
One of its main objectives has been replace email. And you will wonder how he can do it. Very simple: any message you send to a chat room can be seen by whoever is in it. Simply the student or team member, when entering Slack, will be able to take a quick glance of all the messages received, and those in which it is mentioned with the at sign, they will see it.
It has a great interface and is suitable in design for today. We will not need the paid version at any time, since in the free version we have everything we need to communicate with the work team or with the class of a specific subject. Emojis to confirm that we have read the teacher's message, adjoining talks to leave the theme of the main room untouched and thus not make an offtopic or off topic, direct mentions to the members or the general chat, and the permissions so that each user can only see certain rooms. That is we can create a room for bosses and another for the team.
Another of the great virtues of Slack as an app for teleworking is the great capacity for integration with other services. We can add Google Drive, Trello, Dropbox and many more to add new functions.
Slack has a web version, its own app for Windows 10, Mac, iOS and Android and it is the best app for telework communication for teams, students, teachers and professionals.
Trello
Trello is a great collaborative tool that we can adapt to our needs. It is characterized by a board with a series of lists and each list with a series of notes. Work teams can be created to assign to certain boards and give the consequent permissions so that anyone can edit a card or simply read it.
In the notes you can add images, create votes, add to-do lists, upload all kinds of documents, organize the text with markdown (pay attention to this great app for notes of this type), add team members, organize each card by colored markings and all those copy, paste and more options.
From the Trello blog we have access to a multitude of templates from this link for pre-defined and time-saving dashboards. And to give you a Trello dimension, pay attention to the list of templates by category: business, design, education, engineering, marketing, HR, private affairs, productivity, project management, product management and many more.
Trello is a tool that we can customize as we want. An example of a Trello template for education and showing the enormous organizational skills of this solution: you do a board for each class, each of the lists are the weeks of the semester and each grade is the things that need to be done in class (being a teacher) for the week.
Like Slack, Trello has the Add Ons to integrate other services. For example we can integrate it with Slack. We take a card and share it directly with a chat in Slack and from the slack chat all team members click "accept" to view the card. But we can integrate Dropbox or Google Drive and thus take the cards to the cloud of these two platforms.
All synchronized in the cloud from your mobile with Android or iOS, web version or the respective apps for Windows 10 and Mac. Another of the essential apps for teleworking and that when you discover it you can no longer live without it.
Google Drive
We could put Dropbox, another great cloud storage service, but Google Drive has a great feature: it integrates perfectly with office applications such as Google Docs, Sheets, and Google Presentations. That is Google Drive is a great app for telecommuting to share PDFs or larger files thanks to its configuration possibilities.
Apart from being able to upload all the files or share a folder so that a work team or students can access it, also integrates with the other two teleworking apps said. In fact we can make all the documents that are uploaded to a Slack chat room to be stored (but we can do this with the following solution).
Like the rest, and because Android is from Google, we have versions for all operating systems, web version and Windows 10. Its great capacity to share a spreadsheet or collaborate directly on a document, it also allows us to save the installation of apps dedicated to the notes. What to say about your options to scan documents and upload them directly after taking a photo with the mobile camera.
Zapier
We are not facing an app for the Android mobile, but we do is a service that will help us to merge many applications, platforms and online solutions for teleworking, and thus automate them. For free with Zapier we can create "Zaps" for certain functions that we will "program" in a very simple way.
A very simple example, we can connect Slack with Trello so that every time a comment is marked with a star in a certain Slack chat, a new card is generated in a list of a selected board. Or simply have a notification generated in Slack every time a card has been created in a certain list.
That is, if we put the case that we are in a team or class chat, at the moment that the project manager or teacher will create a card in trello With such action to do or homework, a notification would be automatically generated in that chat.
Zapier allows us to connect thousands of apps and services and we simply have to look for those to see what connections they have. Programming it is very easy and for free we have a 5 zaps and a 15 minute update for synchronization. A fabulous solution to integrate all those teleworking apps.
Zapier - Website
Zoom
In a large number of native digital companies, Zoom is becoming the platform par excellence for video conferencing. A great app for teleworking so that we can see "our faces". And you might think that we have others like Skype or Hangouts, but we stayed with Zoom for several reasons.
It offers great versatility when it comes to communication, since from a link we can connect both from its version web as from your app for Android or Windows. It works very well and has great streaming quality; in fact We already talked about it for months as a great solution.
And as, also integrates with Zapier so that, for example, you can create Zoom meetings from new calendar events or receive a notification when there is a new meeting from Zoom.
These are one of the best apps for teleworking and that will allow you to connect perfectly in these days in which many are going to be forced to carry out their tasks from their homes. A coronavirus that has made us get here, but luckily we have exceptional tools to communicate, collaborate and work or study without any problems.
