e-Learning Stuff

iPad App of the Week – Skitch for iPad

This is a regular feature of the blog looking at various Apps available. Some of the apps will be useful for those involved in learning technologies, others will be useful in improving the way in which you work, whilst a few will be just plain fun! Some will be free, others will cost a little and one or two will be what some will think is quite expensive.

This week’s App is Skitch for iPad.

Express yourself with fewer words, emails and meetings…with Skitch for iPad!

Use shapes, arrows, sketches and text annotation to get your point across fast. Mark up photos, screenshots, maps, and webpages then share them with anyone you like.

Free

In my line of work I often have to make screenshots and sometimes annotate them. In the past I would take a screenshot using the built in function in the OS and then paste into Fireworks before using that to add annotations. I would then need to either e-mail the image or upload it somewhere.

For a while I used TinyGrab, mainly as it automatically uploaded the screenshot to the web and copied the resulting URL to the clipboard so it could be pasted into an e-mail or as I was doing more frequently then into Twitter. However TinyGrab wouldn’t let you annotate (so sometimes I would resort back to Fireworks) and then there was the premature launch of TinyGrab 2.0 following the hacking of TinyGrab. It was at this point I decided to look for another app and fell upon Skitch for the Mac. This was (at the time) a paid app, but it worked really well and I still use it on a regular basis.

So when Skitch for iPad was announced I downloaded it for my iPad.

Having started Skitch for iPad, the first thing is to get a screenshot or an image into the app. You can use an image or photo from your photo library, use the camera in the iPad, take a screenshot (using that built in function in iOS to take screenshots). You can use the built-in browser in the app to snap webpages. The app also allows you to browse Google maps and then snap a map before you annotate it.

Finally you can also start with a blank canvas (think whiteboard). The app adds previous snaps to the apps main screen so if you need to go back to a previous working image you can find it pretty easily.

Once you have an image in Skitch you can annotate it to emphasise or add information.

So you can create arrows, shapes and add text. Though there are limitations in the options you have for the different annotations, I can live with that. If I really really really need to do something really really really complex then I won’t be using Skitch. Skitch is for quick screenshots with quick, rough annotations.

You can edit your annotations once places, however editing is quite limited in the same sense of adding them. However you can reposition them, recolour them or remove them!

The sharing options built in are “limited”, you can send to Twitter, e-mail or save to your photo library.

Of course once in your photo library then you can “push” them out to where you need them. Now that Evernote own Skitch you can also send your annotated snaps to Evernote.

For those that want to “show” their snaps, you can use Airplay and an Apple TV connected to a projector or TV. Another option is to use the VGA or HDMI cable.

There are lots of uses for an app such as Skitch.

• Point out details in a photograph or a screenshot.
• Show someone how to use a particular app or website.
• Where to find stuff on a map.

Overall I really like Skitch for the iPad. Though I don’t use it as much as I do the Mac version, it is still a key app for my iPad. If you ever need to annotate screenshots on your iPad then do have a look at Skitch.

Get Skitch for iPad in the iTunes App Store.

iPad App of the Week – PhotoToaster

This is a regular feature of the blog looking at various Apps available. Some of the apps will be useful for those involved in learning technologies, others will be useful in improving the way in which you work, whilst a few will be just plain fun! Some will be free, others will cost a little and one or two will be what some will think is quite expensive.

This week’s App is PhotoToaster.

Flexible Interface

PhotoToaster™ combines the ease of use of a ‘pick from a preset’ app with the power and flexibility of full manual adjustment. Three different editing interfaces are available to provide ease of use for the novice and creative accuracy for the discerning professional. Start with the collection of beautiful global presets, move down to the category presets, or dive right in and adjust individual settings. The edits are non-destructive, so you can experiment all you want.

Blazingly Fast Performance

Speed is a major ingredient of the Toaster. You don’t have to let go of a slider and then wait to see the result. The sliders are ‘live’ and the feedback is instant. There’s no waiting with the Toaster.

Non-destructive

Non-destructive photo processing means that order doesn’t matter. If you add a vignette and then adjust crop, the vignette will be reapplied. If you add a border and then do an image adjustment, the adjustment is applied only to the image. This allows for a fun and creative editing experience.

Creative

The adjustments are combined to provide infinite possibilities. Your photo doesn’t have to look like everyone else’s with the Toaster. Even if you start with a preset, you can open the manual settings and adjust the controls until it’s just right for you.

You can email or message the result, post it to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Instagram or Tumblr, or save to your photo album.

£1.49

Regular readers of this series will know that I have a particular fondness for image editing apps and do like trying out different photo imaging apps.

PhotoToaster allows you to edit photographs, manipulating the brightness and contrast, add filters (effects), add textures and add borders or vignettes. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the criticisms I had of the official ebrary app for iPad was that if you used Federated Access or Athens the only way to authorise the app was via Facebook.

I am never a fan of making people sign up to a social networking service just so that they can do something else or to support their learning. Also in many FE Colleges, Facebook is blocked for either staff, learners or both, or there is restricted access.

I had heard of the Bluefire app before, but hadn’t looked at it, as the reports I heard was that it “didn’t work” across Federated Access or Athens and needed a dedicated ebrary account.

Whilst researching my ebrary on Android article I decided that the Bluefire app may be worth another look, as I had read that it was possible to use Bluefire with an Adobe Digital ID to access and download ebrary books, all without needing to go through Facebook.

Download the Bluefire app from the iTunes App store, it’s a free app.

Authorise the app with your Adobe Digital ID.

Visit the ebrary platform in the mobile Safari browser. Sign in, through Federated Access (or Athens) and then find the book you want. Select Download and then download the book.

If you have the ebrary app on your iOS device then you will be asked which app you want to use with the download.

Select Open in… and then select Bluefire Reader.

In terms of usability both Bluefire and ebrary work in a similar manner.

The advantage of Bluefire over ebrary, is not just not needing to connect your ebrary account with Facebook, but also you can use the Bluefire app for other e-books, so you can use a single app for all your reading. If your college is publishing resources and assignments in ePub format then you will be able to read these in the Bluefire app.

ebrary – iPad App of the Week

This is a regular feature of the blog looking at various Apps available. Some of the apps will be useful for those involved in learning technologies, others will be useful in improving the way in which you work, whilst a few will be just plain fun! Some will be free, others will cost a little and one or two will be what some will think is quite expensive.

This week’s App is ebrary.

Researchers now have an optimized way to experience authoritative content – both online and offline – from multiple sources including e-books that their institutions acquire from leading publishers and materials uploaded and integrated by librarians.

Free

I have a bit of a passion for e-books. It’s not about replacing paper books, much more a way to provider greater access to books at a time and place to suit the learner.

The e-Books for FE from JISC Collections enables FE Colleges to start with e-Books through the ebrary platform.If you can it makes sense to provide authenticated external access, either through Federated Access or Athens.

One of the disadvantages of the ebrary platform was it was browser based, though that meant you could easily access the collection through a PC or a Mac, it did mean that it was either not possible or challenging to read them on a mobile device.

Recently ebrary have added a download feature to the collection, this means you can download either 40 pages as an unprotected PDF or the whole book for a 14 day loan using Adobe Digital Editions. This means you could transfer it to some e-book readers such as the Sony Reader.

ebrary have just released an iPad and iPhone App. What surprised me was how much better the app was for reading books than the browser based platform on the iPad.

Disappointingly the only way I could get the app to work was to link my account on ebrary that I use with Federated Access with my Facebook account and then link the App with my Facebook account. There didn’t appear to be a way of logging into the App using Federated Access (and I also believe it isn’t possible with Athens either). I guess there is a technical reason for this, but this could cause problems if your institution blocks Facebook for staff or learners (or both).

The app doesn’t “hold” the authentication for very long either, so as a result you do need to re-authenticate on a regular basis. So it’s not like you can authenticate at home and then use it in college, you would need to authenticate across the college network. Though if staff or learners have a 3G iPad then they could just use 3G to authenticate and then go back to wifi to access the book!

In my own college that wouldn’t be an issue, learners would have access to Facebook over the student wireless network and though we do block Facebook to staff, staff who have an “academic need” to use Facebook can get the block lifted. Using Facebook to access ebrary would be a legitimate “academic need”.

Once authenticated you can search and browse for books as you can on the browser platform.

The books download page by page which on a slow connection can be frustratingly slow. It makes much more sense to download the books, but to do that you need an Adobe ID for the Adobe Digital Editions. This is in addition to the other IDs. I can imagine that this could be complicated for learners in having to combine various IDs to use the app. Also if they have been using Ebrary purely through IP authentication on campus they may not even know they need an ID to access the books.

The books are quite large too, the ones I looked at were in the 70-100MB range which on a slow broadband connection will take a while to download. Once downloaded though, moving between chapters, or flicking between pages the experience is so much faster and better than trying to read the books “live” having to download each page. Also it doesn’t require you to re-authenticate so making it much easier to read books on the move. However once you have downloaded a book and it expires you don’t seem to be able to download it again!

I am looking into this limitation. You can return a book early, so I am guessing that is one limited solution. I have managed to re-download an expired book, but I suspect that there may be a watiing time before you can “borrow” it again. The ebrary help does cover some of this, but as the ebrary platform can be used for a variety of books and collections, the help isn’t always specific to the e-Books for FE or the iOS App.

You can copy and paste text from the e-books and what I do like (as it does in the browser) is it adds the appropriate reference to the pasted text. This makes it much easier for learners to understand and recognise the importance of referencing the text they cut and paste.

I will admit that the ebrary app is not perfect, but it does work and it does allow you to access the ebrary collection from your iOS device, there is an app for the iPhone as well as the iPad.

If you are subscribed to the ebrary collection, have a Facebook account and have an iPad, then get this app.

Get the ebrary app in the iTunes App Store.

Thursday in New York, Apple gave a presentation which announced three new products and services for education, iBooks 2, iBooks Author and an iTunes U app. I’ve already written about iBooks 2 and iBooks Author, so what about iTunes U.

Before today, iTunes U was in the main a marketing tool for universities and colleges. It was a way of showing prospective students great content and give them an idea of what they may expect to experience if they went to that institution. There were some institutions which used iTunes U as a delivery mechanism for their learners, it was even possible to “close” or “lock” down iTunes U so that only authorised users could access the content.

The key though was that iTunes U was a content delivery system and was not about interactive content, communication or collaboration. It also wasn’t a total content delivery system, as iTunes U was in the main focused on delivering audio and video content (and in some cases PDFs).

Most of the main UK Universities and Colleges were not using iTunes U to deliver all their content to their learners and certainly though there was some excellent content, it was just one delivery mechanism for learners. I would hazard a guess that in most institutions, once the learners are there, most of the content would be provided through the institutional virtual learning environment, a tool such as Blackboard or Moodle. These tools do allow for communication and collaboration and interaction. What was always lacking, until very recently, were usable and decent mobile access to the institutional virtual learning environment. Both Blackboard and Moodle now have either a mobile app, or a mobile optimised stylesheet, however these really don’t “work” as well as they could, as both products were designed to work in a standard web browser on a computer.

Apple have “upgraded” iTunes U to allow much more diverse content to be delivered to learners through iTunes and a new iTunes U app for the iPad. With iBooks 2, interactive textbooks can be “purchased” alongside the planned delivery of video and audio. iBooks Author allows teachers and lecturers to create their own “books” that either can be given or sold to learners (through the iBookstore). This means that much more varied content can be delivered through iTunes U.

What Apple have done with iTunes U for the iPad is design an app for the delivery of curriculum from a mobile perspective. The learner will be “given” a complete course that they can then use on their iPad complete with textbooks, video, audio and other content.

What iTunes U lacks is the social interaction, communication and collaboration tools that an institutional virtual learning environment can provide. Learners would probably say, “so what” as we interact and communicate using Facebook and Twitter. So though iTunes U fails from a two way student engagement perspective, there are other ways in which learners will talk, discuss and communicate, whether that includes the practitioner, that remains to be seen.

Will iTunes U replace Blackboard or Moodle? A lot depends on what we as consumers do. It’s true that iTunes has had a huge effect on the music industry and digital downloads. So there is a precedent for Apple changing an industry, the same can be said about the iPod or the iPhone. However we also need to consider Ping and iWeb, not everything Apple does has that golden touch.

Of course you can’t just use iTunes U, firstly your institution needs to apply to be on iTunes U and that isn’t a simple process, and it isn’t something an individual does, you will need to get management in your organisation on board. However I suspect this will be easier once more institutions get enrolled and you could argue about it from a competitive perspective.

Though a lot of stuff on iTunes U can be viewed on a computer, to take advantage of the real potential of the new iTunes U, the learner is going to need an iPad. You can’t read the new textbooks or books created with iBooks Author on a Mac or a PC, only on an iPad. So if you do put content on iTunes U for use with the iTunes U app then you will need to be sure that either a) all your learners have an iPad, or b) you provide the content in a different format. The latter will be challenging as the export functionality in iBooks Author leaves a lot be desired, the alternatives to the iBook format are PDF and text which don’t utilise the use of media or interactivity.

If every learner in your institution has an iPad, then iTunes U is a great way of delivering content to your learners, if every learner doesn’t… well I wouldn’t bother with iTunes U.

Get iTunes U in the iTunes App Store.