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15 Apps Every Principal Should Have: Whether Fostering Collaboration, Easing Communication or Tracking Common Core, These Mission-Critical Applications Keep Today's Principals Connected with Their Colleagues, Students and Parents

There may be hundreds of thousands of apps in the various app stores, but only a minuscule percentage of those are actually useful, and an even smaller percentage are relevant to the job duties of the mobile-minded principal. To help separate the wheat from the chaff, THE Journal asked five tech-savvy principals in five different states to reveal their favorite work-related apps. And just to be clear: Candy Crush doesn't count, even if it does relieve stress after a tough day. Augmenting (and Staying Connected With) Reality Scott D. Godshalk, principal at 400-student Tohickon Valley Elementary School in Quakertown, PA, indulges his taste for the cutting edge with a free augmented reality app called Aurasma from HP Autonomy. Aurasma's commercial applications include holding a smartphone over a movie trailer, for example, then watching that picture come to life through the phone with full video. "This is all about taking a picture, and then creating an aura for that picture, and it's pretty wild actually," said Godshalk. "I was trying to come up with a way to create a virtual tour of the building. We have new students coming in frequently, and I thought it would be interesting, because we have a lot of iPads here at school." With the help of the Aurasma app, students and parents can take a guided tour of the school. At different points in the school, Godshalk said, 'They hold their device, point it at the certain picture, and that picture kind of comes to life on their screen, and there is a teacher describing, in a video--what happens in the physical education classes, for example. They call it a trigger image. As your device recognizes that trigger image, it triggers the video that's associated with it. As people walk through the school, they can learn more about individuals in our programs through this app." [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] While it's not nearly as exotic, Godshalk said the app he uses the most is Google Drive. Located at the top of his tablet and smartphone displays, the familiar app "drives what I do all day long," he said. "When I say it's a basic app, I mean it is a shared document. We deal a lot with online forms and documents. Having everybody with access to these documents has increased our efficiency." In the realm of classroom management, Godshalk seeks to help his teachers with the high-tech equivalent of a gold star for students. The free app ClassDojo is essentially a behavior management tool. "Teachers set up this app, and it's a mechanism to give feedback to students," he explained. "They bring this up on their computers through the website, but it's also accessible through iPads and iPhones. When a teacher sees a student doing something that is appropriate, they touch that student's icon on the iPad, which communicates with the website with an audible sound that is positive. Kids get that feedback up on the screen. "I started using this in the cafeteria, the bane of every principal's existence," continued Godshalk, who is now in his 10th year as Tohickon Valley's principal. "We had each class in the cafeteria set up with their own little icon, and as they were demonstrating the appropriate behaviors, lunch aides were using iPads and giving points to classes, and they would see and hear the positive signal." Preparing for CCSS With Interactive Conversations Kara M. Butler, principal at 1,400-student Cupertino Middle School in Sunnyvale, CA, keeps her staff on the Common Core track with Common Core Look-fors (CCL4), which is $2.99 on iTunes. The app allows Butler to go into classrooms and make notes about activities connected to the standards. Butler, now in her ninth year as Cupertino's principal, said, "I can even videotape and record things that are happening in the class for posterity, then provide feedback for teachers. All of that goes into a file for me to accumulate information as to what I'm seeing in my classrooms. …