iOS 5

iOS 5 has arrived and it brings a number of exciting new learning affordances to iOS devices.

This weeks session revolved around my personal favourites from the new OS version. We looked at the possibilities for education with each of these new features, here are the highlights.

Notifications are now managed and easily accessible with a downward swipe from the top middle of the iPad. This makes life easier when you have a lot going on and would like to catch up on your recent mail, messages, appointments etc.

Reminders are a welcome addition to the OS, we are hoping to be able to sync it with Moodle in thefuture to have students automatically reminded of assessments and other important study related milestones.

The new gestures on the iPad make multi tasking even easier as you can quickly swipe with four fingers from left to right or vice versa to jump back and forth through your recently used apps. Upward and downward four finger swipes will bring the multi tasking bar up or down and a full hand pinch will take you back to the home screen, so you no longer need to look around for the home button.

Student communications could become even easier with the new iMessage service built in to all iOS 5 devices. While instant messaging isn’t anything new, it is nice to know that all your students that have an iOS5 device can message each other regardless of their preferred instant messaging service.

Of course some of the most significant new features are tied into the release of Apple’s iCloud. It can automatically sync content across all your iOS5 devices and makes them easily accessible online seamlessly and for free. Its a great first step towards better integrating iDevices with traditional computers. Students can easily work on documents on their iDevices and then polish them on a computer or vice versa. Another exciting part of the iCloud is photostream which can automatically sync your photos across all your devices. This is very handy if you happen to have an iPhone and an iPad as you can combine the iPhone’s superior camera withthe ease of photo editing on the iPad.

While there are many other useful updates the last one I want to mention is the addition of video mirroring with Apple TV. Basically you can now wirelessly stream anything that is on your iPad screen directly to a projector or HDTV via Apple TV. It means you can move around the room taking your iPad with you while presenting. What it also means is that your students can easily project their screens from anywhere in the room too. This will be great for group work and presenting back to the class. This is certainly the feature I have been waiting for!

Pages

In the age of the cloud, Web 2.0 and mobile devices, people still regularly make use of wordprocessing software. Microsoft Office is one of the most crucial parts of Microsoft’s business model, and the lack of “Office” on the iPad is one of the most common reasons I hear for not buying an iPad. While this is tue, Microsoft has not developed an iPad version of Office, there is a version of Apple’s own word processor, Pages. Like Keynote, Pages is a very easy to use and well featured mobile business productivity application. It enables the user to create letters and other written documents, with formatting and insertable objects such as pictures, shapes, tables and graphs. It is compatible with word files (except for certain advanced formatting features) and enables you to either import Word Documents to view and edit or to export documents you have created using pages to refine or modify on a computer. While the iPad is not the ideal all in one computer for some people it is more than capable of creating high quality documents. I for example have written an entire research article on the iPad in Pages, so If you want to do some work on the run, it is a pretty good option.

A bit of training on how to use Pages was in high demand from our group as lecturers are frequent users of word processors and the idea of accessing and working on documents on the run was very appealing. The training ran very smoothly as Pages is very intuitive and very similar to Keynote in its layout and use. I look forward to seeing some of the staff Pages creations!

Screencast creation on the iPad

Screencasts can be a valuable addition to your class materials. They can be a screen capture video of a software demonstration, a series of stills or slides with captions, a video of a lecturer teaching or some kind of combination of elements to help teach or consolidate a concept. While there are a number of ways to do this on a PC or a Mac, the iPad is currently lacking a video screen recorder. There are still a number of ways you can create a screencast on your iPad and of course the iPad is a great way to view them.

iMovie

When Apple released the iPad 2 they also released the iPad eddition of iMovie. This is an extremely easy to use and yet powerful video editing app. You can take video or still footage with the cameras on the iPad or import fottage and stills taken with other cameras. You can narrate your screencasts within iMovie and can export your movie to be used in a variety of ways, including Youtube.

Showme

Showme is an application that works like a smartboard in that it allows you to draw on the screen imitating a whiteboard. In addition to the whiteboard view you can also draw over an image from your camera roll or albums. One of the best features of Showme is that you can video capture these drawings from within the app, and you can even narrate as you draw. This can be great for illustrating maths or science examples while explaining the concept. Once you are done with your Showme you can publish it to be viewed online.

If you keep your screencasts short, you can use them in a variety of ways, as a revision aid, or even strung together to teach a concept. You can upload them to Youtube for the world to see, upload to Vimeo to control your audience, embed them in an LMS (Learning Management System) or even embed them in an eBook.

 

 

Getting content on and off the iPad

One of the first things you may notice when looking at the iPad is it’s lack of usb port. For many people, usb is the preferred way of moving files on and off their PCs. So with the iPad you need to think out side the square a little. It is a device designed for use with the Internet. Apple engineered the operating system to make use of email for sending and receiving new content with the device. This is a simple method and compatible will the vast majority of other devices, however depending on your email provider, will start to run into troble as your files get bigger.

Over the last few years the popularity of online file sharing services has significantly increased, and now services like Dropbox and Box.net have many users. Both services provide a free account option with a limited file capacity, whichin most cases is more than enough for moving standard files around. Dropbox in particular has an excellent file syncing application you can install on your mac or pc that automatically syncs designated files on your computer with your online dropbox files. Both of these services also have a free iPad App, making it easy for you to access your files on the go.

These Apps are constantly improving and adding new features, however I recommend the use of another App called Goodreader. Goodreader is a file management application for the iPad that makes it easy to move your files on and off the iPad, to organise them into folders and pass them to other applications. Goodreader permanently stores these files within itself and is allows you to download files from web pages, which safari doesn’t entirely allow. In addition Goodreader can be linked to online file storage solutions, like Dropbox, Box.net and Google Docs. These features themselves make it a must have App. It also allows you to annotate pdf files, including adding notes, drawings and highlights.

Keynote

It was now time to move on to some of the more significant Apps and the one I decided would have the biggest impact first was Keynote. In my opinion Apple have done a great job in developing Keynote. It is extremely easy to use and captures the best aspects of presentation development and display. What I like best about Keynote is the ability to quickly develop a professional looking presentation that is rich in media and flows through transitions and animations. If you have loaded some useful content onto your iPad you can easily incorporate your photos and brief videos into a presentation. Of course if you haven’t then you can still take screen shots, still photos and videos or save images from web pages and liven up your presentation in no time. Recent updates to Keynote have also improved it’s compatibility with the computer based presentations by allowing import and export of files in Keynote, Powerpoint or PDF formats. If you have big presentation files that won’t play nicely with your email then you can use a Webdav based server (such as the free web storage service provided by box.net) to shift presentations on and off your iPad.

One of my biggest frustrations to date with presenting from the iPad is that you need to have it physically plugged into the projector. To me this defeats the purpose of having such a mobile device as I like to wander around the room when presenting. When iOS 5 is released this should be solved as you will be able to wirelessly stream the image from the iPad via airplay and an Apple TV. In the meantime as I have an iPhone, I use the Keynote remote App which was recently updated to support the iPad version of Keynote. Thanks to this App I can wander around the room, with my notes visible on my phone and can advance the slides with the flick of a finger.

Session 2

After their initial session and a week of playing around with their iPads the staff were ready for some more in depth learning on the capabilities of their tablets. The session introduced a Moodle course designed specifically to support the community we had formed. It included a couple of glossaries for Apps, one pre built with recommended Apps and another there for the general community to post Apps they were interested in to. There were resources on the basics of using the iPad and setting up related web accounts and a forum for discussing their experiences.

Next on the agenda were some control tips for the iPad, such as how to deal with multi-tasking, managing rotation and organising Apps. Then on to some educational examples. The group was was briefy introduced to three free educational Apps that they may find helpful.

Firstly the makers of Evernote have created anApp called Evernote Peek. It is a fun App for quizzing yourself that is designed specifically for use with the iPad 2 and Smart Cover. While this limits the compatibility of the App, it certainly displays the kind of creative ideas that the iPad has inspired. The App allows the user to create a notebook of questions and related answers. With the App running, the user simply closes the smart cover, and then peels it back by one section to see the question. The user can then try to remember the answer and check it by opening the cover the rest of the way. They can record their results in the app and review this later to see the progress they have made.

The second App we reviewed was called Showme Interactive Whiteboard. This App can be an alternative to a smartboard, as it allows you to draw on screen, erase and even place an image (such as an empty graph) in the background to draw over. One of the best things about the App is that it allows you to record the drawings you are making and include a voiceover. So with this simple free App you can create miniature lessons and post them online. Once online your Showme and many others are available to be shared via a link or embedded straight into a blog or website.

Finally we looked at an App called TeacherPal. It allows you to create a class list of your students, and add their photos to it. It can be used to quickly and easily record attendance and take notes. In addition to this you can create basic assessment items for recording grades. The App can sync classes via dropbox allowing you to easily move theoff your iPad and onto the computer if you want to do some further analysis of the attendance or grade history.

So all in all we covered a number of useful things in this session.

Baby steps

To start off once everyone had activated their iPads we got together for a bit of a fun session learning a bit about how they work. I showed off some of the cool and exciting things you can do with an iPad (most of which were related to education). I then walked everyone through some of the basic concepts of using the iPad, such as turning it on and off, buying apps from the store, using email and the camera.

The staff were understandably excited about the possibilities and were very keen to find out about the next session before this one had even finished!

All teaching staff permanently equipped with an iPad 2

After an increadibly long wait for the stock to arrive, our department is now fully stocked with iPads. We have big plans for these devices, but it is all starting with upskilling of our staff so they can get the most out of their iPads. I’m drawing on my previous experiences with our student projects and thousands of hours of play time since the iPads first came out last year. Based on this i have milestones for the staff, which will be supported through a community of practice. I will post here regularly to share and evaluate the journey.

Bachelor of Business staff iPad trial

As part of a trial of iPads for our program I have distributed iPads to staff on a loan basis until the end of February 2011. They are exploring their potential with some weekly drop in sessions, supporting each other in person and using a dedicated Moodle site. Each staff member has been gifted a set of useful apps, plus they are exploring many other apps and possibilities as they go.

Here is a pic of some of them working away on creating WordPress Blogs using their iPads.