Hello and welcome to mr Tompkins edtech. In this video I’ll be taking a look at “Taskade”,
which is a productivity app aimed at small teams working remotely together,
allowing them to collaborate on tasks and projects and to communicate with each other.
I really like this tool and found it powerful, helpful and easy to use. I’ll be looking at
Taskade’s key features, and discussing how it might be used by small teams working remotely,
by teachers working with their students, or students collaborating on a project for their
school, college or university, and even for families looking to keep on top of their busy
schedules. So if you are interested in finding out about a free productivity tool that runs across
all your devices and can aid you with keeping all your tasks on track, then keep watching.
Now many of you will have seen my videos on Microsoft Teams, which is a great tool
for large organisations, allowing them to provide a wide range of fully customisable
communication and collaboration tools all under one roof. The problem with Teams though for many
of its users is the very thing that makes it so attractive to organisations – it’s customisation,
and the fact that admins can disable key features that they don’t want us to have access to.
In education this happens a LOT and is particularly true for students,
as their schools and colleges simply don’t trust them to use the chat and video features sensibly
and so just turn them off for everybody. My son has just started university, and
I had wrongly assumed that universities might give their students more freedom to use these tools as
they are intended, but was genuinely surprised to discover his Teams experience was locked down
even tighter than my secondary school. It’s simply not feasible for him to work with other students
in any meaningful way when it’s locked down like this. So we looked around for something
free and easy for him to work with fellow students on joint projects and we came across
Taskade which seemed to fit the bill nicely. Taskade is designed specifically with small
teams in mind, so it has great collaboration tools, there is a wide range of templates
covering a all sorts of different uses to help you get started, and there is video
chat and messaging service built in, so you can easily work together remotely.
It has clients for a range of devices, windows, mac, iOS and android, plus there is also a web
version, so it works on anything that has a browser. I’m on a PC, so to get started,
just go to https://taskade.com. I was able to sign up with my google account, which I liked – who
wants to remember another user/password, and doing this also allows taskade to integrate with
your email and calendar, sending you timely reminders about tasks that need completing.
If you don’t have a google account, you can sign up with any email address you do have.
Once you are in, you can continue to work with the web version, or download the taskade desktop
client, whicgh is what I decided to do. Now personally I have been using taskade
to keep track of my various projects relating to my YouTube channel,
and I’ve also got the family using it for organising all our weekly tasks and appointments.
Up until now we’ve used a paper calendar that hangs in the kitchen with all the key dates and
things we need to do. But taskade has helped move the Tompkins clan into the 21st century,
and actually means that I’m using it a lot more, as it’s on my phone and desktop all the time.
OK, lets take a look at getting started with Taskade. One of the first things you’ll want
to do is set up your desktop the way you want it. You’ll find a choice of pastel colours or
some lovely backdrops you can choose from, or you can even upload your own.
For those of you who are a fan of Dark mode, you’ll be pleased to know there is a dark
mode option for taskade, which you can select from your account icon in the top right corner.
Now we have things visually the way we want them, the next thing
you’ll need to create is a workspace. You can create multiple Work spaces – for
different aspects of your work. Now I’ve currently got two separate workspace, I’ve got my “Tompkins
family stuff”, and a separate workspace for my “Mr Tompkins Edtech” tasks and projects. These
workspaces can be just for you, or you can invite other people to share them with you. So I’ve set
my edtech one up just for me, and I’ve persuaded the rest of my family to create a taskade account
and we are managing that one together. Setting up a new workspace is really easy.
Just tap on “New Workspace”, give it a name – I’m going to call this one “Personal”,
and choose a colour for it. I’m going to pick this lovely shade of purple.
You can also upload an icon for the group to make it stand out a bit from the others. You can see
I’ve added a mr T here for my edtech workspace, but I’m just going to leave this one for now.
Next I get to invite other team members along to share the workspace with.
So for my family workspace, I tapped in the emails of each family member, and they received an email
inviting them to sign up to taskade to access the new workspace. Alternatively, I could copy and
paste this join code here into an email or instant message and send it to them directly. Now you also
have a choice as to whether you want them to be “editors” which will allow them to create or edit
tasks within the workspace, or “viewers” who can just read what’s there without making changes. For
my family group, I made them all editors, as we all need to be able to create and tick off tasks.
This group is just personal things and so it doesn’t need any additional members added,
so I’m just going to skip this step. I can always choose to add someone at a later date
by tapping on this “invite” button up here. At the top of the screen, you can see my
little cat face, which is the cute icon taskade automatically assigned to me when I joined.
You can upload your own, but its just too adorable and has to stay. The green dot indicates that I’m
currently online and using taskade. If I tap on the Tompkins Clan,
you can see there are more cute animals in this workspace representing various family members who are part of this project
In the main window here you can see a few different projects we’ve already set up.
So to help organise our family, we started off using the “Weekly Planner” template,
which was a handy place for us to plan out activities and chores for the coming week.
Lets create a new one for this week. I simply click on “new” up here. There are loads and loads
of pre-made templates that you can use to create these projects, or you can start with a blank one,
or even create your own. For now though, I’m just going to tap on “weekly planner”,
and then add a “week beginning” to the project title to distinguish it from previous weeks.
OK, so “projects” contain a collection of associated “tasks”, and in this particular case,
that’s going to be all the various activities that each family member needs to do over this coming
week. Creating tasks is very simple – you simply start typing next to one of these tickboxes,
and if you need more, just press enter and it will add another one for you.
Tasks can be assigned to one or more people, which I can do using this button here.
You can see it gives me a drop down list and I can select task assignees from it.
Once assigned, you’ll see that particular person’s avatar next to the task.
You can also give it a due date, or tap a second date to give it a date range instead.
I’ve found it’s definitely handy to do this for each task, so the tasks will appear in
your calendar on the correct days, and team members who have been assigned that tasks
will be sent notifications and reminders to help them to complete their tasks on time.
You can keep track of progress on a project by using these little tick boxes.
Clicking it will cross out the task, or if you prefer you can just make them disappear
entirely. I like to see them crossed out so I can see I’m moving forward on a project.
Taskade will also give you nice visual feedback by filling in part of the
overall progress bar for each project as you tick off the various tasks within it.
Now there are some other neat things you can do with these tasks to help you keep organised.
You can add emojis or use highlighters on your text to draw attention or to
categorise tasks in different ways. On the family projects,
we decided to highlight each of our tasks in a specific colour, so mine are green.
You can also add hashtags to your tasks, which is a great thing to do as it then makes them
searchable and allows you to drill down on them and quickly group them together. So this #TCOLC
hashtag refer to my school, and if I click on it, you can see its now just showing me these tasks.
Tasks can be grouped together into “blocks”, and these blocks can be folded
or unfolded to hide and reveal their tasks. If you don’t like the square tick boxes, you can
change them to circles or hearts, or just numbers or bullet points. You can even create sub-tasks
to each task, by simply tapping the tab key You can also attach files to particular tasks,
so you can easily use taskade to share documents with your colleagues, students or family members.
So all in all, these “projects” and “tasks” offer a lot of flexibility to create useful structures
to manage your team’s work flow and keep on top of things.
Now you will probably find there is a template already made for pretty much
any type of project you can think of. If you click on “new” and then “more”, you’ll get a
massively long list of them all, which have been helpfully grouped for you into various categories.
If you cant find exactly what you are looking for, you can easily adapt one or even create one from
scratch, and save this template for repeated use. As well as the weekly planner, we’ve adapted
the “monthly task tracker board” template to make a “Birthdays and Anniversaries” project.
This has a block for each month, where we’ve put in important family birthdays
and set these up as repeating year events. So between these weekly plans and whole year plans,
we have pretty much replaced the main function of our old paper family calendar.
Once you have fully completed a project, you can mark it as completed by ticking here.
It will then disappear from your view of active projects,
but you can tap on “completed projects” to view all of these.
In my Mr Tompkins Edtech Workspace, I’m keeping track of my various YouTube projects.
You can see I’ve got a number of projects on the go, in various states of completeness.
You can see the progress bars for each project gives a nice clear visual representation
of how far I’ve got on each of these projects. Now each of these workspaces contains a number
of projects, and each of those contain a number of tasks. How do you get an overview of all your
different tasks from all these different workspaces and projects? Well, that’s what
this section of tools up here are for. You have a search tool for finding particular tasks you are
looking for, “Recent” shows the latest updates from the various projects you are involved in,
“Activity” lists your latest notifications, “Calendar” lays out all your assigned tasks in
diary form, which you can view by month, week, day or in Agenda view, which is a chronological list
of all outstanding tasks. “My tasks” lists all the upcoming tasks assigned personally to me.
You can integrate all your Taskade tasks with your own calendar, for instance to google calendar,
within outlook or to your iPhone. It’s really easy to do, and you’ll find full instructions
to follow by clicking this “sync with your calendar” button here. There are a few
simple steps to follow, but once its done, it will happily keep itself updated from now on.
You can also integrate Taskade with your browser by additionally installing the Taskade Firefox
or Chrome extension. Now Firefox is my browser of choice so I have it installed here, and it allows
me to quickly add webpage links into Taskade by clicking on the little Taskade sheep icon up here.
You can also make Taskade your homepage so it becomes the first thing that opens
when you start your browser. So you have quite a few options to integrate Taskade into
your daily workflows and routines.
Lets take a look at the Collaboration features available in Taskade in a bit more detail.
Now I’ve already shown you how easy it was to set up a workspace and invite some colleagues
or family members into your workspace. Once they have accepted the invitation, you can
all use Taskade together in real time. The first thing you’ll notice when you start using Taskade
collaboratively is that if one of your colleagues is typing a new task into a project, you will see
their text appearing letter by letter in real time in front of your very eyes. Really cool.
But the feature that puts Taskade heads and shoulders above similar productivity tools such as
Notion is that you’ve also got real-time chat and video conferencing built directly into the app.
So you have this communication portal sitting on the same page as your tasks, and its really easy
to start a conversation with others in your team about up and coming tasks and projects.
So lets start a conversation with one of my family members about this week’s activities…
I can use the @ symbol that will pull up a list of team members, so I can get the attention of a
particular person in your team. You’ve got quick and easy access to emojis to scatter liberally
through your chat messages. You can also share documents this way using this upload button here,
and what I really like is that you can simply copy/paste images directly into the chat,
allowing you to take a quick screen grab and share it in chat.
Starting a video call is just a matter of pressing this “start call” button up here.
As well as video calling, you can also share your screen, or just a particular window,
which is a great feature. Lets take a look at a quick call.
- "Hello!"
- "Hello Josh!
- "I'm now using the app"
- "OK, cool. So have you got any goals for this week, Josh?
Maybe add them on so we can see...them appearing"
-" Ok I can see what you are typing appearing directly as you are typing it, which is nice".
- "So what's my colour for highlighting?"
- "I think you were blue weren't you? Or were you purple? No, you were purple. Ok"
- "Oh, I've already done that! Go me!"
- "So can you see yourself using this at College then. Josh, after having played around with it with the family?"
- "Yes, absoulutely. I can see a lot of potential for this, especially for organising group projects and stuff"
- "I can see that...the other thing I'm really pleased with is the quality of the calls. "
- "I can hear you really nice and clearly and there's nice frames-per-second (FPS) and good quality on the cameras."
- "Having used Discord before, they cap your frame rate and they also cap your call quality so this is a nice change of pace."
- "Nice! So it was a good find then?"
- "Yeah, absolutely! I can see this being very helpful at university".
- "And it gets around the problems you were having with Teams, and using that because it had been nerfed by your College?"
- "Yeah"
- "OK. Lets see if we can get a third person on the call and see what that looks like."
- "I summon....Caleb"
- "There he is - Hello!"
- "Hello Caleb. So this week you have an exam on THURSDAY!"
- "Look, it's assigned to you in Taskade. Just so you are aware."
Perhaps you should schedule in some revision between now and Thursday when you've got your exam."
- "Most definitely."
- "Cool. So I can see you when you talk. What about when you start talking, Josh? Does it refocus on you?"
- "Hello, can you hear me?"
- "Yes". "Amazing", "Yep"
"But for some reason, it's decided to make Caleb big and you small. I dont know if I can switch between them? Oh I can switch between them like that..."
- "OK, I suppose the tools are a little bit small aren't they. I could go full screen. Oh, I can scroll up and down here. That's alright!
- "And then I can choose to click on Caleb as well, and I suppose I could full screen all of you to see you a bit bigger. Lets try that..."
- "OK, great stuff! Oh and there's a tile view. Have you checked out the tile view?"
- "I have. I found everyone to be a bit small in tile view if there is three of us. If there is two, then its fine, it's side by side. But everyone is really small in tile view for me."
- "Yeah - that's right. But in full screen it looks good."
- "Oh, does it? OK, lets have a look."
- "Yeah, on the little side panel in Taskade, it looks tiny, tiny, tiny. So I dont think you want to be in tile view here"
- "Oh, yes in full screen mode this loooks good."
- "Cool! Well that works well, doesnt it. Thanks for your participation. Goodbye!"
- "No problem. Goodbye!"
Ok, well that was fun.
It’s interesting to note that these chat messages are specific to the project they happened within,
so a conversation you have in one project wont appear when you open another.
This makes sense and keeps your chat next to the projects and tasks you would have been discussing at the time.
So we’ve seen how to create projects and tasks in taskade,
discussed a few possible use cases, looked at integrating it with your calendar and browser
and tried out some of the collaboration features. So how much does this app cost? Well all these
features actually come with the free version! Taskade do offer a paid version, but the free
version is really very generous and everything I’ve demonstrated here today you get for free.
From what I can see, the only limitation currently is the maximum upload size of
documents you attach to your tasks is limited to 5mb, and this is unlimited in the paid version.
Taskade is in active development, and I’m regularly noticing various
new updates and improvements. I understand that the company has recently had a large
injection of venture capital and is looking to significantly expand its user base, so expect
to be hearing much more about it in future. So if you are looking for a tool to help
you organise yourself, your family, or a small team of people, which runs on all your devices,
then this might just be the tool for you. I can see this as being a very useful tool for families,
for students working on projects together, or for small teams working remotely.
If you found this video useful, please give it a “like” by clicking the thumbs up below,
and check out my youtube channel for more edtech recommendations. See you next time.