Blogsy: a decent drag and drop blogging app for the iPad

At last, a respectable and good value ($5.40) app for blogging. Just link it to your blogging app - Blogger, Wordpress, etc, and then some easy HTML text editing, and drag and drop images and video.
There is a nice twin view - the edit view (write side) and publish (rich side) and the user swipes between them. Very cool. The edit page has complex looking HTML code on it but there are buttons to access the main format tools so there is no need to be familiar with HTML, just the ability to not be fazed by seeing it.
Inserting an image is the test for me. From the rich side, click on the image icon and locate an image that has been saved, and drag and drop it onto the page, and simultaneously choose its format and size. Very simple.
Finally, the iPad is not embarrassed by its file management. Creating and inserting an image is now dead simple.

1. saved screen shot - press button and on/off together
2. Open image in camera roll and go to Edit to crop the required area
3. return to Blogsy and in the rich side, click the images icon, find the camera roll and drag the image into an envelope and upload it.
4. back on the rich side, drag the image to where you want it L or R aligned

The number formatting is achieved by selecting the option in either view. Not a difficult exercise, but an unnecessary step in any regular blog.

iPad in the classroom... ScreenChomp

ScreenChomp is a free little app that does one thing very well: provides for on screen drawing and voice recording and cloud sharing. It is free, from one of the big names in video capture. ScreenChomp allows for immediate finger drawing with or without a narration. This makes is a great tool for explaining and demonstrating. The finished image can then be published in another app, or published as a mini-video.

A background image can be imported to the drawing which makes it very effective for explaining and annotating a screen capture or other image. In the image to the right, you can see annotations that have been written on the map. These can be erased and modified without affecting the background image. So one can in effect draw to one's heart's content on the world map until it is in the best version.

The main attribute of ScreenChomp is simplicity: it does a relatively unsophisticated task reliably and quickly. It has obvious use by teachers and by students.

Anyone for the internet delivering on moral purpose?

I was inspired by yet another experience on the internet yesterday. I came across an article talking about a remarkable Harvard University political philosopher - Michael Sandel. He has one of the most popular coursed at Harvard called Justice, where he hones students' understanding of moral philosophy. He is also a strong exponent of open learning, and the Justice in moral reasoning web site is has years of his lectures in video and text, for all the world to see. There is another very good example of Sandel in full flight in a TED talk last year, The Lost Art of Democratic Debate  (20 min)


The article that led me to Sandel was one by Tom Friedman in the NY Times which featured the huge following Sandel has in China and Japan, where his lectures are widely translated and viewed. So there is clearly a demand for discussion of moral issues, which is what partly inspired me about this story, but the more important inspiration for me, for this blog, is how the great teaching of this man is so widespread and accessible all around the world at quite modes cost. The internet makes this extraordinary communication reach possible, at a relatively low cost. I think one would need an educational heart of stone not to be moved by this story. Partly because helping young people develop a sense of morality is so important, partly because Professor Sandel involves the a thousand students in a genuine discussion, and partly because I, like anyone else in the world with a computer, could locate and enjoy this experience in a matter of minutes. At the end of the TED talk Professor Sandel was asked what his goal with this technology is, and he said to have American, Chinese and other young people engaging in these discussions simultaneously, no doubt exposing fascinating cultural similarities and differences.

This is at the high end of internet communicating, but it is not different in kind with what we can do with students in school. That's impressive.

Why are we really doing this stuff?

The other day I was talking with a teacher with a leadership role in a large school to implement '21st Century Learning' with the aid of ICT and she is wrestling with the complexity of the issues involved. Learning beliefs, staff training, infrastructure building, student take home policies, parent information, student supervision and safety and a dozen other significant issues. It is easy to be overwhelmed by this elaborate set of interlocking issues. 

My instinct is to identify a few fundamental purposes of the planned change and focus on these, pushing all the topics listed above to a second level of importance. These core issues for me, and my conversational partner, are some variation on this short list: student independence in learning, high level learning, creativity, problem solving and collaborative skills. 

If we identify purposes like this for our school and recognise that ICT plays a big role in achieving these, then all the myriad of issues related to ICT development can be judged in relation to these. The leaders' task is much clearer. If, for example, we are discussing whether students should have admin rights to manage their take-home laptops or iPads, then it is very clear to me that Independence, Creativity and Problem Solving at the very least will be strongly enhanced by students having as much control (and responsibility) as possible. Seems to me, high level goals can make decision making much easier because they can clear away distracting detail by saying, 'This is really why we are doing this stuff.'

Cowboy doctors? Cowboy teachers - surely not!

A delightful and interesting essay in the New Yorker, Cowboys and Pit Crews by Atul Gawende, who is a surgeon and staff member at Harvard among other amazing achievements, says that medicine is practised according to its cowboy roots in the 1930s and now in a much more medically complex environment should work more like a pit crew. A pit crew is a highly coordinated team working on a task rather than the individualistic cowboy approach that he says still exists. Gawende says that in the 1930s a doctor could carry around his patient records in his head and his treatments were quite limited in number and complexity. He says this leads to a cowboy culture, where highly individualistic doctors act according to their own judgements when in fact they depend on a growing team of fellow professions and specialists. In other words he is saying a lack of team work is damaging health delivery. He says, "A structure that prioritizes the independence of all those specialists will have enormous difficulty achieving great care."

Well, isn't this the same criticism that is being made of our traditional school culture, where the classroom teacher is in almost full control of her methods of teaching and the tradition of privacy blocks accountability? It seems that from every quarter there is more evidence that intelligent collaboration works better than

By the way, Gawende points out, in conclusion, that modern cowboys are very sophisticated in their cattle management and work in well coordinated teams!

iPads take off in schools

There can be little doubt at the potential success of iPads as a mainstream device in classrooms given the significant take-up in schools in less than a year from its launch. In Adelaide, for example, half a dozen schools introduced large-scale programs of iPads. St Peters College has one for each Year 11 and 12 student, with a main focus on using them as a text book reader. Rostrevor College for all Yr 11 and 12s, Pulteney Grammar School for all Year 8 and 9s and Mark Olifant College for yearly childhood students. At Adelaide University, all first year Science students were provided with and iPad. In the Northern Territory iPads are being introduced in a number of schools and in particular for indigenous students.

For a new type of device to have such immediate penetration of the very conservative school environment suggest that there is something significant going on. The speed of the take-up has taken many by surprise, not the least being the considerable band of iPad sceptics, most of whom looked at the cut-down nature of tablet capabilities, compared to a laptop, or even a netbook, and said, "Not enough." The shortcomings of an iPad still exist (but are shrinking) but what the critics need to pay attention to are the advantages of a tablet, and the iPad in particular. I think the most relevant of these are:
1. portability
2. compact size,
3. battery life
4. eReader
5. simple operation
6. integration with iTunes and iPhone

No 5, simple operation might be the most significant of these. When an 80 year old relative who has never operated a computer was intuitively scrolling through an image gallery on my iPad, I took notice.

Written on an iPad using Blogpress

School administrators: goodbye netbook, hello tablet

Schools across Australia are buying thousands of netbooks (lower-capacity laptops) under their Digital Education Revolution money. This has been a logical step because the Netbooks do most tasks quite well and they are very cheap and portable. However, a interesting report in the New York Times says that while netbooks have had a rapid rise, it looks as though they will be overtaken in the near future by tablets like the iPad.

A number of schools have already purchased hundreds of iPads for students and I think it very likely that next year there will be large scale take-up in schools of iPads and other tablet computers.

The debut of the second generation tablet, the iPad, has been remarkably. Imagine what will happen when a the competition gets its iPad-like devices into the marketplace this year.

The convenience and portability of tablets will make integration of ICT into the classroom a lot easier.