By Andrew Georgy
Adobe Express, CommonLit and Canva; what do they all have in common? Well, they’re one of a few free education apps found on Clever, a student shortcut app with tens of school-provided websites you can have access to with a few clicks of your mouse. Awarded as a finalist by Signal Awards for Curators Shaping Culture, Clever is one of the most useful apps our school provides, yet it’s one of the least popular apps used by students here on campus.
Ever needed help with condensing your essay? Don’t worry, Clever has Tutor to aid you in your process. Can’t decide on a career path? Pathful is here to help, with hundreds of videos on different jobs to aid your decision. Even if you feel you don’t need any of these apps, having Clever open is useful in itself; instead of waiting five hours for CK Express to load Canvas and then another three logging into the website, you can just click the shortcut.
In fact, with all of these shortcuts, you can add favorites through the little heart icon to save time instead of browsing through all of these useful apps.
Additionally, you can message many of your teachers on Clever if they have the texting feature active. Canvas emails, which are often much more formal and take a long response time because of the multitudes using them, are often less comfortable and efficient to use compared to the Clever chat feature. To access the feature, simply log into Clever using your school account and click on teachers; there, you should be able to find previous chats and settings.
Cons
However, every positive comes with a negative, and while Clever’s versatility is a major selling point, its lack of improvement on these features may feign students into thinking it’s useless.
The biggest issue may be that while one of the biggest positives is reducing load times, logging into Clever takes time in itself. First, you have to be logged into your school account before accessing anything, even on your personal computers. Then, even if you’re using Clever on a school Chromebook and are already logged in, CK Express may prove to be a pain (as mentioned before with apps such as Canvas).
Additionally, the messages feature named before is heavily limited as it’s rare for teachers to have the communication option open on their end, and even if it’s open, they might not be familiar with the app or how to respond to it.
Conclusion
Yet Clever’s little popularity is shocking compared to its usefulness. Although some minor cons are present, it’s much easier and user-friendly compared to logging into Canvas every single time you open your computer or close a tab. Moreover, the other district app logins provided aren’t available anywhere else except on Clever, and while teachers may not use some, others can be extremely helpful for students.
Even if you’re not a big fan of any features on Clever, you can’t help but admit that it saves countless minutes of painfully logging into Aeries or IXL.
So, why not click on the little blue C so you can see the difference?
