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by Paul Left

Is the iPad just too big?

November 27, 2010 in Tools

The ideal form factor of a hand-held mobile computing device is always going to involve lots of trade-offs:

  • If you use it for reading and browsing, roughly the size of a book seems sensible. To me, the current iPad seems a good size for this purpose, although Paul Miller thinks the iPad is too big even as a reading device.
  • If you use it as a phone, you want something you can hold to your ear comfortably. The iPad is just too big. Anything much bigger than (say) an iPhone and you’ll need a bluebooth headset or accessory. More stuff to cart around.
  • If you use it as a camera, you need to be able to hold it up to your face. Again, the iPad is too big, so an external camera would be needed and more stuff to cart around.

Steve Jobs clearly states that the iPad won’t get any smaller and that for many purchasers it will replace the laptop computer. But one of the strengths of the laptop is the relatively open connectivity provided for both hardware and software. The iPad doesn’t (yet) provide such an open plug-and-play system.

The iPad is a beautiful device but is not yet the ideal touch-screen device for me. If it’s going to be this big, it needs to be more capable of real work and not rely on closed proprietary OS features. Personally, I’d prefer it about half the size it is now, all ready to go everywhere with me as a phone, camera, browser, email client, and app platform with no other devices or accessories needed. Maybe I need to look to Android rather than iOS?
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by Paul Left

The iPad: a tool for teachers

September 7, 2010 in Tools

When the iPad was first announced I posted some brief thoughts about its potential for education. Since then, it’s been released and I’ve had the chance to spend some time playing with one. It’s been an opportunity to see to what extent the device itself and the software available would be a useful tool for supporting the work of teachers and lecturers.

My initial impressions that the iPad functionally resembles a giant iPod Touch have been confirmed. Still, I use my iPod Touch all the time, so all the advantages of a bigger display are very attractive. The key question for me is to what extent the bigger display makes the iPad a great device not just for consuming media but also for generating content.

The iPad is a great device to view content – it’s fast and the display quality is impressive. And of course there is a huge number of apps available for it,  given that it’ll run existing iPhone / iPod Touch apps as well as apps developed just for the iPad.

But as a working teacher I also want to generate content. And it has limitations here:

  • Want to edit online content such as Moodle or mediawiki pages? Results vary – you’ll almost certainly need to use HTML or wiki markup since the iPad is unlikely to work with wysiswyg editors. I don’t mind that – in fact I prefer to use HTML or wiki markup – but many teachers will find this a real drawback. And things are worse if you’re one of the many educators using the PBWorks wiki- at the time of writing it was impossible to edit a page with the iPad.
  • You can’t print. So you’ll need to rely on a desktop or laptop computer for this.
  • Using Google Docs? At the time of writing you can view but not edit using an iPad.
  • Want to create media resources?  There are useful apps becoming available, but the lack of native support for accessing the iPad file system and the use of proprietary file formats is likely to be a barrier. My two-year-old grandson loved using the built-in mike to make that cursed animated cat speak funny – but there is no obvious way just yet to record audio to standard file formats that can be moved easily to a desktop, edited in other applications and published.

In my mind, Apple has focused too much on the entertainment aspect of its portable devices and neglected their use for real-world work. I’d like to see both, and I don’t believe they need to be mutually exclusive. The iPad is not quite ready to meet my needs as a working teacher – can’t wait to see the next version.

Image: Glenn Fleishman

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by Paul Left

Getting started with PBWorks wiki

July 18, 2010 in Professional development, Tools

To my surprise, I’m still recommending PBWorks to teachers as a good way to get started using a wiki. That’s because the Moodle wiki is still not a very effective tool, and PBWorks is easy-to-use and provides some good features for developing and formatting content. It’s proprietary, of course, so it has to be used with caution, but it’s a good way to get started.

When I’m introducing teachers to the potential of wikis and other web tools, I naturally start by getting them to set up and work with wikis themselves. It seems to me like a set of core skills – how to plan and put together a collection of linked pages. This can be applied in reflective individual writing or as a collaborative exercise.

Here’s a 3-page PDF document on how to get started with PBWorks. It’s covered by the by-nc-sa licence so you are welcome to download and use it as you see fit provided it’s not used commercially and my authorship is attributed.

If you modify or adapt it, please add a comment to this post with a link to the new version.

Image: Andjam79
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by Paul Left

Open source synchronous classroom

June 6, 2010 in Tools

BigBlueButton is an open source tool that provides:

  • Text chat
  • Webcam support
  • Audio discussion
  • Shared desktop
  • Shared presentation

You don’t need to install anything to check it out, there’s a working demo available:

I did find what seems to be a small bug using Firefox (Mac OS): the placement of minimised tools is not quite right, the thumbnail is pushed too far to the left of the screen and is hard to find. Other than that, it seems to work really well, and it seems to have lots of potential.

What I really like about BigBlueButton:

  • It’s very simple – the interface is much more straightforward than (say) Wimba Classroom. Admittedly it appears to have fewer features but it has enough to be a very effective tool for synchronous learning and teaching.
  • There’s a Moodle integration available – that’s a big plus that should ensure its uptake.
  • The moderator and presenter roles are clearly defined. My first impression was that ‘viewers’ had not enough control and were limited to passive learning, but it seems easy to share control of the various tools and enable active learning modes.
  • There are clear tutorials and help files available.
  • Did I mention it’s open source? And the authors seem to be doing everything right with the project: there’s a published API and open issue tracking and version control.

Given its simplicity of use, I think learners will have fewer problems in using it than they currently do with some of the proprietary systems. Overall, this seems a great tool and one I’ll be following closely.

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by Paul Left

Writing online – tips for teachers and learners

March 30, 2010 in Tools

Learning and teaching online, especially when using learning community approaches, places an emphasis on writing. This may involve writing in discussion forums, wikis, blogs, or more specialised tools such as the Moodle database. I’ve written elsewhere about the importance of read-write activities for learning.

But writing online can be a nightmare for teachers and students who are familiar with the web as an information resource but are new to creating content online. There are a number of pitfalls: what is a relatively simple task when using desktop software can be very problematic when using an online editor such as those found in blogs, wikis or LMS software. But most problems can be avoided by using a few simple techniques:

  1. Never paste from a Word document. You can end up with garbage text like that shown in the illustration, or other formatting problems that are not easy to fix. If your text is in Word, copy and paste it into a text editor first (such as Notepad in Windows or TextEdit in OSX), then copy and paste that into the online editor. All the formatting will be lost, but you’ll have a clean copy without problematic formatting.
  2. Never press the ‘Submit’ button without a backup. While you were writing, the LMS may have logged you out, or your network connection or session may have been lost. You can spend a long time composing a thoughtful reflective response to a forum posting, or composing an informative web page, then lose your work when you submit. A simple strategy is to select and copy all the text before you click submit. That way, if your work is not submitted, you can paste into another editor and try again. And if what you have written is really worth keeping, consider saving it as a text file to your hard disk – just in case!
  3. Don’t worry about formatting – at least at first. Most of the WYSIWYG editors built into LMS or CMS software are idiosyncratic at best, so get your thoughts onto the screen and leave putting in the bulleted lists etc to last. If you’re used to writing using desktop software, lower your expectations – your formatting options are much diminished using most online editors. And if you’re reluctant to give up a lot of text formatting, you’ll also find it helpful to know how to use a few formatting tags – HTML or wiki markup – for those occasions when the editor gets confused and you just need to make a few changes to the source code.

Teachers and learners can get really frustrated and turned off the use of LMS and other online software if they lose work or can’t format it they way they want. We need to predict that these sorts of problems will occur and inform teachers and learners how to avoid them beforehand.

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