App Swap at The University of Cambridge

Andy Tattersall

 I've run several App Swap Breakfasts at the University of Sheffield and had the opportunity to run one for librarians at The University of Cambridge earlier this week as part of their on-going professional development programme. App Swap Breakfasts began life at The University of Brighton and instantly caught my eye as a great way to share good practice with mobile devices but also highlight useful apps that peers might be missing.



I gave the presentation to about 16 librarians from across the various campuses and started by talking about some of the really useful peripherals you can buy for your mobile device. These included my Lightning to VGA connector (I have a HDMI one too), my X Mini speakers, and the tripod stand for holding your tablet device straight and give you a free hand. It was a good opportunity to discuss the issues around having apps and was interesting to find out that more than half of those in attendance didn't have a tablet device - thankfully I had a second one for them to look at with some of my featured apps installed on it.

I gave the presentation below on 20 featured apps which focused on pure library apps, ones for communications and productivity as well as those to help with teaching and research. It was good to showcase the likes of Ad

obe Voice and Haiku Deck as well as Explain Everything for screen capture and Hootsuite for Twitter curation. The full list and presentation are below. I also met with an ex Sheffield colleague afterwards and was given a short personal tour of the campus and city which as you'd imagine was really nice. It was interesting to find out that Cambridge has no less than 114 libraries and that until recent times new starters had to sign a charter to say they would live within five miles of the university.

It was a long round trip of about eight hours, but well worth it to visit such an impressive campus and deliver a workshop around apps, even though there was no breakfast. You can see which 20 apps I chose to showcase in my Haiku Deck below.

Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires