Tag Archives: travel & tourism

app of the week, iphone

Fotopedia Heritage – iPhone App of the Week

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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. Update: no longer available

app of the week, ipad

Virtual History, Roma & Firenze – iPad Apps of the Week

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Virtual History, Roma & Firenze – iPad Apps 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 Apps are Virtual History, Roma & Virtual History, Firenze

Firenze – Virtual History, a three-dimensional journey using your iPad through the city that invented the Renaissance. Enter this epicenter of art, invention and history and even explore in detail masterpieces like those of Dante, Leonardo and Michelangelo.


Mondadori presents a fantastic voyage to Ancient Rome, the capital of the largest empire in the ancient world, which has been reconstructed in virtual form and which you can explore in a “full-immersion” panoramic experience.

£6.99 each

I was discussing with my team the other day on whether we should be placing iPads into the libraries at the college to provide additional resources and content for learners. There have been quite a few projects and trials that have shown the value of library users having access to the iPad for research and reading. The iPads would not replace existing paper resources or online content, but would supplement and enhance. I hope to expand on these ideas in a later blog post.

As a result I have started to look at the type of content we could put on the iPad, the DK Human Body (that I covered in a previous post in this series) was an obvious one for biology or anatomy.

For arts, history and travel & tourism I found these two apps (from the same publisher) that I feel would be useful for learners on those courses. Both the apps have an “immersive” experience that allows the users to explore both these famous cities using the touch interface of the iPad.

These apps would introduce the learner to these great cities and would be a starting point before moving onto for example for travel & tourism students we might also have on the iPad, the Rough Guide to Rome. We would also place e-books onto the iPads for additional detailed and indepth content, as well as content and links from practitioners.