heads up re email

After a long weekend away, like everyone else, I returned to a ton of email — not usually a surprise when I haven’t checked it for a day or two. BUT - I was using my ipad to check email over the weekend and thought I’d taken care of everything that came in.

I use rules to sort email as it comes in and send it to appropriate files – for classes, committees, advisees and such. The problem is that the ipad email program evidently does not recognize new messages in any folder but the inbox. All those pre-sorted new messages got missed until I signed on to my workstation here at Briar Cliff.

So – if you use rules to sort incoming mail, don’t rely on the count of new messages, and remember to check all your folders (for me that’s a lot – at least 2 dozen).

DUH!!!
I just tried to grade papers in PDF expert – and discovered one little detail that I had missed in all the conversation about using it. It seems that you can add comments ONLY if the student paper is in .pdf format – you can read .rtf and .doc papers just fine, but no amount of screen tapping will allow me to do anything but select text to copy.
So – I presume that Sam has students submit their papers as PDF files.
Or am I missing something here????

Has anyone else noticed a marked slow-down of your workstation after installing dropbox? My system is always slow (I can often watch it draw the screens bit by bit) – but it seems as if since I’ve been using drop box, things are much slower no matter what I’m doing. This seems to be the case with my workstation at home as well, but I haven’t been on enough at home to really say.
Are there some parameters for dropbox that I should be setting?

How do I know whether I’m connected to the wi-fi/internet? It seems as if my email gets updated immediately – but when I try to access something “out there” on the internet, I get ‘can’t connect’ errors.

There is a small icon in the upper left of the ipad screen — is that an indicator for the strength of the connection? It seems to alternate btwn just the dot being lit and the smallest of the half circle marks being lit

How is it that email gets updated when I can’t connect to the internet? (I hear beeps from my ipad even before I see new mail in Outlook).

Could the wi-fi signal in my office be that sporadic? What would make it fluctuate like that?

more issues – I’ve just tried to access ANGEL on my ipad in my office:

using Safari:
I get a screen that will not scroll up/down or left/right even tho not all the courses on my ANGEL menu are visible.
There are lots of ? marks – I presume this means that the screen is not displayed correctly.
There are no navigation tabs or buttons visible – e.g. ‘logout’, ‘home’, ‘help’
Touching the links that do show up results only in the display “jumping” a bit – nothing else – no new pages, no error messages, no nothing.

Using Atomic Web -
I get a menu that has nothing other than a box with “home” and “logout” buttons, a public announcements box, a public information box, and a search and help box.
the little identity icon in the upper right of the main section of the screen says “guest” even tho the box with the home and logout buttons has ‘harringtonl1′ in its title bar
Nothing happens when I touch either the home or logout button -
The navigation buttons down the left side of the screen appear to work – got a help screen, and I think it would log me off, but i’ve lost the wi-fi connection – a hazard of my office location???

And where did that goofy icon that is associated with my posts come from????
It’s not bad – but probably not what I would have chosen!

Frustrations and questions:
Apple navigation is not “intuitively obvious to the most casual observer,” at least not for someone like me who has used Microsoft products since the days of DOS – and other operating systems such as Unix and IBM’s mainframe OS. Is there a tutorial/cheat sheet for navigation in the Apple world?

My “touch” seldom hits the option that I want (could be an eye-hand coordination issue, I know – I’ve ordered a stylus to see if that will help). Is there a secret to the touch?

Do apps close when you hit the “home” button so you see the main screen? If not, how do you close them?

How do you go back to a previous display when there is no arrow at the top of the screen? The double tap on that ‘home’ button (is that what it’s called – the round indented botton on the short side of the ipad) will get a row of icons across the bottom – are they all open? or are they just what you’ve got on your main screen? If they’re open, how did they get that way when I haven’t accessed them in the current “session” with the ipad? Do things close automatically if they’re not accessed for a while?