e-Learning Stuff

PlainText – iPhone 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 PlainText.

For editing text on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. PlainText is a simple text editor with an uncomplicated, paper-like user interface. Unlike the default Notes app, PlainText allows you to create and organize your documents in folders and sync everything with Dropbox.com.

Free

PlainText is a simple tool that allows you to edit a text document and unlike the built in Notes app it syncs automatically with Dropbox so you can access your notes when you need to from your computer, another device or a browser.

You can type in text on your iPhone and once you have connected PlainText to your Dropbox it will “appear” there!

PlainText is an universal app so also works on the iPad. If you need something with more settings then the developer of PlainText has created WriteRoom.

If you want to make notes and sync them automatically to Dropbox and you are not worried about formatting or tags (use Evernote for that kind of thing) then PlainText is probably the right app for you.

Get PlainText in the iTunes App Store.

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.

Dermandar Panorama – iPhone 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 Dermandar Panorama.

“While many iOS apps offer panorama stitching, or even capturing and stitching, few make it as easy as Dermandar Panorama … it’s really hard to take a bad panorama.” – Macworld.

Features:
Fully automated capture system
Blazing fast stitching, see the results in no time
Full light exposure control
Immersive 3D viewer, pinch or double tap to zoom, autoplay…
Full 360 panoramas
On-device local gallery
Web gallery to enjoy thousands of public panoramas
”Near me” gallery, see panoramas near your location
No need to register anywhere to save your panoramas on your device
Sign up/sign in and upload for free to Dermandar.com

Sharing:

Save to your Photo Album
Facebook, share a link to an immersive 3D viewer page (HTML5 and Flash)
Twitter, tweet a link to an immersive 3D viewer page (HTML5 and Flash)
Email the panorama as an image or as a link
Copy the link (to paste it somewhere else, like in an SMS)

Quick-start guide:

Hold the device in portrait mode and avoid tilting it (straight vertical !)
Tap the START button
Rotate the device to the left or right
When the two shapes on top form a circle, an image will be taken automatically
Keep rotating the device in the chosen direction
Tap the FINISH button or put the device in landscape orientation to stitch and view the panorama
Tap the Gallery button anytime to cancel shooting

£1.49

I have tried a few panorama apps before, I quite like PhotoSynth and You Gotta See This! both of those however don’t really create “true” panoramas.

I bought Dermandar Panorama some time ago on the recommendation of a friend, but never really tried it out in anger, as in taking an actual panorama.

The process for taking a panorama is very simple and literally is almost point and shoot.

The process was simple and clear and I was quite pleased with the end result.

I thought the stitching was quite seamless and a lot better than other panorama apps I have used.

There are various options for sharing your panorama, but you can simply save to your camera and roll and then do whatever you want to from there. You can get an account with Dermandar, but it isn’t necessary to, in order to use the app.

A future update will bring higher resolutions which will be useful for print.

Overall I was really pleased with this app, it’s easy to use, and produces really good results.

Get Dermandar Panorama in the iTunes App Store.

Fotopedia Heritage – iPhone 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 Fotopedia Heritage.

This app was recently selected as one of the top 50 apps of all time in Apple’s new Hall of Fame. With 25,000 awe-inspiring photos, this much loved app has been called the world’s largest photo book, an inspiring travel guide, an entertaining teaching device and even a bed-time relaxation tool.

Created in cooperation with the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Fotopedia Heritage provides a virtual passport to the hundreds of sites that constitute the world’s collective cultural and natural human legacy.

With our thanks to the Fotopedia community of photographers who created or contributed so many of the world’s most beautiful and representative photos, while curators carefully sorted and selected them to provide a stunning experience.

Free

I quite like photo browsing apps, the Guardian Eyewitness app for example is really nice.

What Fotopedia Heritage does is curate a series of photographs from various soures (including Flickr) and presents them as online slideshows.

What makes this useful for learners over just searching sites aimlessly is the curation of the images themselves. Imagine a Travel & Tourism student doing a project on Venice, well here are a series of images that show the beauty of Venice.

One of the issues I do have with the app is the navigation, it wasn’t entirely clear how to navigate the collections through the menu at the bottom of the screen. This is an ongoing issue I find with many iOS apps that there is an inconsistent approach to button and menu placement. It means that you need to learn how to use each app individually rather than learn how to use a standardised OS interface that can then be applied to each app. However that is not unique to iOS, the same can be said for Android, HTML5 Web Apps as well as Windows and OS X.

What’s nice about the images within the app is that it tells you the licensing so if you want to re-use the image (say in a presentation) you can knowing that you won’t be infringing copyright. It also means that practitioners can use the photographs too, for their presentations, handouts or learning objects.

You can of course visit the Fotopedia website via your computer, but the nice thing about an app is that it provides a focus for the user. It also has nice features that enable you to share or download the images you find that you want to use or keep.

It’s an universal app so will also work on the iPad and would make for a nice photo frame app with slideshows.

Overall an app that allows you to browse some wonderful images, and for some courses these images will be really useful for the learners and practitioners on them.

Get Fotopedia Heritage in the iTunes App Store.

Flipboard – iPhone 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 Flipboard.

Named Apple’s iPad App of the year and one of TIME’s Top 50 Innovations, Flipboard creates a personalized magazine out of everything being shared with you, from Instagram photos and Facebook updates to Tumblr posts and articles from your favorite publications. Fill Flipboard with the things you like to read, from the smallest blogs to publications like Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair, and use Instapaper or Read It Later to save articles to read later. Connect Flipboard to all your social networks, and you’ll have a single place to enjoy, browse, comment on and share all the news, photos and updates that matter to you.

New to Flipboard on iPhone is Cover Stories, a selection of interesting articles and photos being shared with you right now. And it gets smarter every time you use it.

I really do like Flipboard for the iPad, it was in my list of top ten web tools of 2011. I was pleased to hear that it was also available for the iPhone. I did wonder how it would work on the smaller screen and if it would have the same usability as the excellent iPad app.

Once Flipboard had intergreated Google Reader into the app, it was at this point (along with Twitter and Facebook integration) that the app turned from an interesting diversion to a useful tool that allowed me to keep on top of the news and social stream of information without becoming overloaded. Flipping between pages of content felt very natural and magazine like.

So I was intrigued if Flipboard could make the transition to the iPhone, they had certainly taken their time, Flipboard was Apple’s App of the Year in 2010, so well over a year in the making.

One useful addition to Flipboard has been user accounts, this allows you to sign in and all your “feeds” are then there ready to go. This is very useful if you as I do have multiple iOS devices. So there I was with the Flipboard iPhone App, I signed into my Flipboard account and it found all my feeds.

The interface, though nowhere as near as nice as the iPad version, does work well on the smaller iPhone screen. I think Flipboard know that their large screen interface wouldn’t have worked on the small screen and as a result are trying something different. I quite like it and I found it easy to move between links and stories.

I even think it is quite usable as a casual Twitter client, remember that it doesn’t get all of your Twitter stream. Having said that you can of course drill down with Flipboard from a larger stream to a smaller one.

Overall I am pleased with the new Flipboard for the iPhone and if you like to browse your RSS feeds, Google Reader, Twitter and Facebook, then do have a look at Flipboard.

Get Flipboard in the iTunes App Store.