The Rover App

This weeks app of the week is the Rover app.  There is much to love about the iPad but there is also much that is frustrating and one of those frustrations is it’s complete lack of support for all things Flash.  As we know there is much content on the web that is Flash based and when viewed on the iPad a black space where once was content is all that is left.  This is particularly frustrating for educators.  The web is in a state of transition to HTML5 and a post Flash based world of media content.  But for teachers who have assiduously collected links to many resources over the years, much of what they know to be good sites for learning are invisible to them via the iPad.  Many legacy sites and even great current service providers, such as Mathletics are entirely Flash based and will take a long time, if ever to convert their sites from Flash to HTML5 and be a viable resource on the iPad.

This is where Rover comes in.  It acts like a third party browser and enables you to use your trusted Flash based sites on your iPad.  It is simple, and free and is my app of the week.

Continuing the Open Source software theme.  I have been attending a course on 3D animation for the last 10 weeks, it came to an end this week.  I attended primarily to bring my Blender skills up a notch or two.  I am self taught and am well aware that while this method can work well it is also a recipie for engendering bad habits!

The course was at the Freelance Animation School here in Auckland and their program of choice is Max 3DS.  As is usual at the end of these things we had to complete an evaluation.  I thanked Mark our tutor for teaching me more about Blender in the previous weeks that I had learnt in a long time.  He was confused as we had not even looked at Blender!  It got me thinking and we discussed how using Open Source 3D animation would be a good choice for adult evening classes.  At this point his boss walked in and we had a discussion about why Open Source software should be offered as a short course option.  I believe that offering short courses in Inkscape and Blender for example to secondary school teachers would be able to provide foundation courses in these programmes in school which would teach the pupils the basic principles of the programmes that in courses such as the ones offered at Freelance, students would arrive with a better grounding and with a skill set that could be easily transferred to the commercial variants that the work with at Freelance.

Mark’s boss seemed very impressed by this notion.  We are currently investigating how I could put together a programme of lessons for their tutors, alumni and existing students in such open source programmes as Blender, Inkscape, The Gimp etc and have me deliver them.  I have already drafted out a series of lessons and skills, I will be meeting the school again in a week or so to continue the planning.