Today I had my first play with an iPad.  I have been building up reservations about it in the days prior.  Comments from Fiona in the last post pointed out that the unit is a content reciever and not a content creator.  Content creation and publishing  is what we want for education.  The chatter seems to be more about what it can not do and what it is lacking, rather than what it can do. Today I tried to use tools such as http://vocaroo.com and http://fotobabble.com and the lack of an Adobe Flash facility on the iPad rendered these sites useless.  However, on the fotobabble page I was prompted to download the fotobabble app from the app store.   Online tools such as Vocaroo and Fotobabble are brilliant  for students to create and publish content quickly and would be the kind of utilities that I would want to use with a tool so mobile as the iPad.

It is the locked in nature of it that worries me, all programs to be installed on the iPad will either be created or vetted by Apple.  Today as part of the discussions about its functionality for education purposes, or lack of it, we were developing workarounds using Drop Box etc.  These solutions are clunky at best.  The iPad can not surf freely due to the Flash embargo, maybe I am missing the functionality point here and am wanting to bend the device to meet a need it was never intended to meet, but still, not supporting Flash?  I have heard that Google docs can be viewed but not edited, what is the reasoning behind this?  I had hoped that this tool would prove to be a boon for education, but in this first iteration it is too locked down, why I am not sure, other than pandering to my dark Orwellian marketing theories that I could entertain on behalf of Apple.

If the machine can enable content creation, if the installation of third party software via the Internet is enabled,  if open surfing to Flash enabled sites occurs, if it gets a camera and a USB port, the iPad still has the potential to be a real winner.  As you can see from my images it is smaller than an average NZ school exercise book and almost as thick, it is light and very intuitive to use the tools and apps we have been allowed to install were fun, but not educationally significant, early days I know.  I liked it.  I liked its feel, weight and interface.  It lacks the educational substance, and freedom that I personally desire.  But who knows by the time the 3rd black sweatered and overly orchestrated launch comes round it might be a tool that has education potential without clunky work arounds.

Written offline on 6 April. Uploaded when WiFi at conference allows. Uneventful trip via Sydney only negative point was sharing my seat volume with a guy whose shoulders spilled over three seats! Made negotiating meals a tad tricky, but as this was only on the Sydney to Melbourne leg, it was not too bad, if this had been a long haul flight I would not have been too pleased at the prospect of sharing my allocated volume of space with someone. Despite the physical detractions however I was free to think more about my ‘Augmented Reality” project and how I can adapt the already existing apps for an educational purpose. I have a clear vision of the how it would work in the classroom, I am now just joining up the dots with the various free tools that are available for this to happen and mashing them together into an easy to use end product for teachers and students alike.

I have just run my 90 tools in 90 minutes presentation again, with added tools.  This is the second time that I have done this presentation.  I had a couple of moments of brain freeze where I muddled up tools.  It is such a high energy presentation it leaves me exhausted!  I actually delivered 94 tools in 84 minutes.  The response from the delegates was overwhelmingly positive, the gratifying thing is that 55 people completed their forms and submitted them.  I will run it again if there is interest in me doing so.  I am currently working on a presentation for Ulearn in Christchurch, but this one is more aimed at school leadership and systems analysis.  I am now working on tomorrows far more practical session.

With the leas of my new MacBookPro, I have created the perfect facilitator toolbox.  I have just spent the morning installing Sun’s Virtual Box onto the machine.  I have created a 50GB partition and have allocated 1GB of RAM to a Windows virtual machine.  I am now able to work in any environment and work on the OS that the client is familiar with.  I now have to install the Windows based Open Source programs that I want to work with as well as install the Mac variants.  One thing that I do have to find are the Windows drivers for the Mac’s wireless adapter, at the moment I am ‘blind’ on the Windows partition unless I am connected to the Internet via a LAN cable.

I was asked this week to locate some software for students to use that would enable them to create animations easily.  I have been playing with Synfig for the last couple of weeks and it is more like an open source variant of Flash in its interface rather than the kind of animation tool I was really looking for.  I have been playing with it becuase a client has asked me to work out how to use it so that I can introduce it to their staff.  This tool, however is not appropriate for students to use, well not year 6 students anyway.

In consultation with a teacher I went off to the Internet in search of something altogether more pure in an animation sense and easy to use for students.  What I have found is a cracker of a program called Pencil.  The beauty of this program is that it has tried very hard to be a traditional animators desk, very few tools, a colour pallette and a layers area are the only distractions or complications from the main drawing area.

It took me about 5 minutes to master the basic controls of this program, something that I like in a program.  Now it will be my lack of creativity that determines the success or otherwise of the outcome and not the overly complex requirements of a program.

What is more, this program comes into its own if you have a tablet, drawing freehand with a mouse is always trcky.  The students in question do not have access to tablets, but every class does have a Smart Board in it, enabling the students to draw very accurately with their fingers, thus producing some excellent results very quickly.  A great tool and one that I would urge you to investigate.  There are a couple of tutorials on You Tube, I will create some too and post them, however the program is so easy to use, a tutorial is almost superfluous to requirements.