Draw A Stickman

If you’re feeling a case of the mid-semester blues, writer’s block, or just generally grumpy, give yourself 3 minutes at this website:

http://www.drawastickman.com/

Works on iPad and PC.  Very fun!

Sharing Bookmarks and Links

Some of you might already be using Diigo for keeping track of bookmarked websites.  If you’re not using it, check out the Education Basic plan – a free service for educators to use with students.  You can highlight text on web pages, add sticky notes with your own comments, or give the web page a summary in your bookmark description.

You can also add these features to your iPad with the Diigo Web Highlighter for Safari.

I’ve started tagging some of my Diigo bookmarks with “bcuedtech” for anyone interested in news from the world of educational technology.  Please feel free to use this tag on bookmarks you want to share.  Any Diigo bookmarks with the bcuedtech tag will show up in the new sidebar widget on the BCU iPad Pilot blog.  You can see all my bookmarks at http://www.diigo.com/user/librarienne.

Are you already on Diigo?  Have any tips or suggestions about using it?

Search Engine for Apps

Quixey. Quixey isn’t an app. It is a new(er) search engine for finding the right mobile device apps for a particular task. Haven’t used it yet.

Not an App (yet?)

Read Print:
Free online books library.

New York Public Library

If an app can be called elegant than this one may qualify. NYPL “Biblion” of the 1939 World’s Fair. Rich layers of multimedia within a really beautifully designed FREE app.

Free Travel Book in iBooks

From an iTunes email this morning:

Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet’s Best In Travel 2011 is available for free on the iBookstore until June 14. Download your essential guide to the best places to go and things to do around the world on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

Check It Out

Try following this link on your iPad, which will open up the iBooks app directly and take you to the Lonely Planet’s book description.  From there,  just click on the “Free” button and it will be added to your iBooks library!  It’s a beautiful 200-page ebook, full of color photos.  Available free till June 14th.

 

 

The Lazarus Extension

Also unrelated to the iPad … ever filled out an online form, only to lose all the information? The Prof Hacker blog has a link to a browser plug-in that can recover all that great stuff you typed up. From their blog post:

“Do yourself a favor then, and immediately install the Lazarus: Form Recovery extension, which automatically saves everything you write on the web in an SQLite database on your computer. If your computer or browser crashes, simply reopen the web page, right-click (or your one-button mouse equivalent) in the form you were using, and you’ll be able to restore the lost text.

Lazarus can be configured to meet your own needs or privacy concerns. For example, you can limit the number of days that autosaved text is retained in the database, you can disable Lazarus for specific sites, and perhaps most importantly, you can password-protect and encrypt your Lazarus database.”

The blog post: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/recovering-lost-in-browser-writing-with-the-lazarus-extension/33354

The Lazarus Extension: http://lazarus.interclue.com/

Apple AcademiX

The PDF presentation slides from last week’s Apple AcademiX online conference are online now:

http://education.apple.com/academix/

At least three of the presentations are all about iPads in universities and another presentation looks at using iTunes U content. Interesting stuff and I’m looking forward to the videos being available soon, too!

Notes from Bev’s Visit

President Bev Wharton came to our session on Monday to share her notes from the Academia Apple Conference that she and Bill attended in California just a couple weeks ago. Hopefully Apple will be sending out presentation notes / slides soon and she will forward those along when she receives them. These are just quick bullet points from the notes she shared, which were also quick bullet points, so if it seems like there is some context missing, that would be why. I have added links and additional information where I could find it.

Apple Academia — Invitations went to private colleges

• 100 colleges represented, BCU was the only Siouxland university with both President and VP of Academic Affairs
• It was two to three days long, lots of presentations

Presentations from previous Apple Education Leadership Summits (http://education.apple.com/summit/):

• Teaching & Learning in the 3rd Information Age, Abilene Christian University
• Learning Powered by Technology, U.S. Department of Education
• Call to Action: Challenge Based Learning in the Classroom
• Katie Morrow, O’Neill Public Schools
• This presentation is amazing. Since it’s a PDF, we don’t see the videos, but the slides about the Challenge Based Learning projects that the students completed are inspiring. Definitely worth a look.

Presentations covered aspects of technology in education, with some Apple influence

John Couch, VP Education at Apple

• Learning is changing for students
• “We believe every student is uniquely gifted, learning model is changing”
• Past – compliance, attendance, correction and one size fits all
• Future – participative, personal, motivating, individual
• Before returning to Apple, he turned around a school system from low performance to high
• Apple’s culture of leading edge change: Apple has or is changing the computer, music, publishing and education industries
• Apple is putting more faculty development material online:
• http://www.apple.com/education/professional-development/
• Apple says iPad is content, not technology
• Future – professors will be connected to students in dialogue, as a guide
• Learner centered education

St. Thomas University, St, Paul – putting the MBA program on the iPad

• http://www.stthomas.edu/business/degrees/ustmba/healthcaremba/currentstudents/iPad_pilot.html

Anya from FastCompany

• http://www.fastcompany.com/user/anya-kamenetz
• http://diyubook.com/
• student loan debt exceeds credit card debt
• Message about cost of education, reducing it is difficult
• Flat World Knowledge, open textbooks (PDF), open study consortia like MIT
• Murder Madness Mayhem class in literature
•  Students had to write an entry on Wikipedia and make it stick
• Anya does do Skype presentations if we’re interested : Diyubook@gmail.com

Ron Johnson, Retail and Marketing at Apple … The stores

• … Making the stores a social experience
• … Need to create a lot of ideas, don’t let people suck the oxygen out of ideas
• … Apple says no a lot to stay focused but more and more ideas encouraged, improved
• Audience challenged the speakers on learning assessment
• “don’t let middle age ideas stop the students from learning”
• Great brands inspires people’s spirit; Culture of Relentless innovation, innovation takes belief that you can do it, skeptics settle for just improvement of existing methods
• For Apple, Open = loss of control in quality of product
• When they make a decision to change products, they don’t keep making the old one

Presentations from Duke and Seton Hill; iPad has changed the conversation on campus for both students and faculty, didn’t force it on people but after a year, even naysayers were interested in getting involved

iPad leveled the playing field – now everyone has the same thing, Seton Hill is a Title III school, use grant funding for iPad project

Seton Hill University: http://www.ipadonthehill.com/

Duke University: http://www.studentaffairs.duke.edu/ra/programs-services/ipad-enabled-programs

Martin Been, Vice Chancellor, Open University, England http://open.edu/itunes/

• Facebook – how many of us would be in in our jobs if it had been around when we were young
• 12 year old said, school is like an airplane … Sit down, trust the pilot, and turn everything off
• Grounded in social justice
• Technology enables engaged and relevant learning

Jason Ediger, iTunes U : http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/

• Spoke about mobile devicees … mobile internet access will be higher than desktop internet access by 2014
• Transforms the classroom, changes how subjects are taught but not a substitution
• iTunes U
• Discovery Education for K12
• apps and digital books
• Flash is a click and keyboard based interface, will have to change for touch based interfaces
• Have moved beyond content consumption into content creation

Beware the In-App Purchases

If a young child is playing with your iPad on a regular basis, you might need to turn off In-App Purchases. A recent lawsuit was brought against Apple about the in-app purchases kids have racked up on their parents’ iTunes accounts: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/15/apple-faces-lawsuit-over-in-app-purchases-by-children/

To turn off In-App Purchases, go the iPad’s Settings, General, Restrictions, tap on Enable Restrictions and set a 4-digit PIN. Then slide the button beside In-App Purchases go “off”.

To know if a particular app has in-app purchases, look at it in the ITunes Store, where the left sidebar will have a section for “Top In-App Purchases”.