Name: OneShot
Platform: iOS
Cost:Free
Imagine that one afternoon after school the teens you work with are hanging out at the library reading articles of personal interest on their iPhones. All of a sudden one of the teens reads something that she has to let others know about. So, she decides she wants to Tweet the link. But, really what she wants to do is highlight one particular sentence in the article for her friends to read. She could copy and paste the text into Twitter, but maybe that makes her Tweet too long to post easily. But then she realizes, I have OneShot on my phone and I can take a screenshot of the part of the article that I want to point out, highlight the text on the screenshot, and then add that image to the Tweet. So, that's what she does.
I think that story highlights that OneShot is a simple idea and a simple app that does one thing really well - allows Twitter users to use screenshots in Tweets and enables highlighting in those screenshots (OneShot also makes it possible to crop screenshots and add a background color). It's one of those apps that before I used it I didn't realize I needed it. I was making due with the tools I had - copy and paste, ordinary screenshots, and so on.
Here is an example of a recent Tweet that I posted using OneShot to highlight a portion of a web page:
ICYMI @yalsa shark bowl is ur chance 2 lvl up a #digitalliteracy idea get 2 #alaac15 & win cash & tech pic.twitter.com/EYKKJ1YOIv
— Linda W Braun (@lbraun2000) March 3, 2015
At the moment the app only works on iPhones. The developers say that a universal version should be available any day now which means that it will be available for iPad as well. I can see that the iPad version could be very useful for teens and staff who are reading articles and web pages on their personal and/or library provided devices.
I know that OneShot probably seems like just an extra tool that is OK to have but not a necessity. But, if the teens you work with, your colleagues, or yourself take part in Tweeting that includes links to articles and other web content, try it out. I think you'll be happy that you did.