Lately, I’ve been using it with my iPhone when I’m out and don’t have access to wifi. It works ok, but I was getting tired of constantly moving the iPhone, trying to get it in a good place to use it with the keyboard. I started looking online for solutions, since there were a ton of iPad cases with BT keyboards, I was hoping there would be something for the iPhone. It was then I stumbled across the Wingstand. Consisting of two pieces of plastic, it can be used with or without the BT keyboard to prop up your phone or tablet. It’s not Apple specific. At $14.95 shipped it seems a little pricey for a couple pieces of plastic, but it is made here in the USA and it does work really well. I’m typing this post with my BT keyboard and using the iPhone (unfortunately I have to use the iPhone in the portrait orientation since the WordPress app doesn’t appear to switch to landscape). My original iPad fits with the Apple case on, and so does my HP Touchpad.

If you are going to use an external keyboard with your iPhone or iPad, this might be an inexpensive way to work. Let me know if there are any other solutions I’ve missed in the comments!

As part of the project the student get to keep the machine when they graduate from school.

The netbooks weren’t powerful enough, so now they’ve moved to more robust laptops.

How the idea was born
- Textbook costs and weight in book bags
- Utilize 21st century learning skills and tools

Need for change
- Only 28% of Ohio students (2011) who took the ACT met all four college readiness benchmarks
- 1968 Divergent Thinking Study by George Land – Created tests to identify geniuses.
• example question: How many uses of a a paperclip? 10 is normal, 200 is genius
•• 3-5 year olds, 98% genius
•• 8-10 year olds 30%
•• 13-15 year olds 12%
•• Adults (31 year average) 2%
•• (The same group of students)

Finite curriculum that we assess with a series of multiple choice questions.

Need to focus on how we are teaching students, we currently focus too much on the what.

Educators spend too much of their class time transferring knowledge. Then assign homework to be completed when the teacher isn’t around.

If you’re using the iPad in the same way you used the textbook, you haven’t fundamentally changed the delivery of content.

Flip the classroom
- Transfer knowledge is the homework
- Class time is spent answering/clarifying the knowledge that was learned for homework.

Example old lesson:
Round robin reading of the material, teacher adds their commentary through a powerpoint, then homework is assigned.

Flipping the classroom
Transfer happens on student’s time, classwork consists of working through questions about the material.

Barriers to flipping the classroom
- Availability and reliability of technology
- Teacher resistance to change
- The learning to read, reading to learn curve. Starting in grades >4 it’s easier to work, students can read for instruction.
- Educating parents about this chift in teaching

Advantages of flipping
- More time is spent on applied learning
- 3Cs communication, collaboration, creative thinking
- Student centered classroom

If the presentation was flipped
- Participants would have been required to watch the presentation before hand
- Broken up into groups, watch videos of teachers in the classroom, discuss
- Present findings to the group

Implementation
- What’s the home situation like? How many siblings share a computer?
- Ownership of the laptops, students take care of the equipment.
- Started with 8th graders
-

Q: Internet access for free/reduced?
A: Not provided.

Q: Buying textbooks?
A: Up to the textbook companies. Should they even buy textbooks?

Q: How do teachers with multiple preps do it?
A: Building it out slowly. Once it’s done, it’s done.

Where do good ideas come from?
- Does chance favor the connected mind?
- Steven Johnson video
• Recurring patterns to innovations
•• Slow hunch
••• Good ideas come from the collisions of other ideas that are stewing
••• Tim Berners-Lee, WWW. Took ten years
••• Sometimes it takes a hunch from someone else to combine with another hunch for the eureka moment.
• Great driver in innovations is connectivity

Important to provide
- Quality tech
- Adequate bandwidth
- Adequate tech support
• 7:15am on Tuesday, 3:15pm on Thursdays

William Daggett Rigor/Relevance Framework

Filtering
- We filter, exercise in futility
- By law, not necessary at home
- Ultrasurf: Created by the government for Egyptians to surf

Move to year round usage?

8th grade student
- Watching the lecture gives him the freedom to pause/rewatch and repeat.
- Can just ask a question if totally lost

Science teacher
- Gives students the ability to take responsibility of their own learning.

Some students don’t like the flipped classroom, they’re used to the currecnt way instruction is given.

Q: How do you do teacher training
A: Training during the week. Additional training for the teachers with classrooms that have netbooks.

Q: What do you say to someone who’s afraid of failure on the state test due to the change in structure?
A: They’ve never had a student come back and say they didn’t do as well on a state test, they come back and tell how much better they are at communicating. Supt: I want to know how the students are learning, and believes that they do well on the tests.

Q: How much time is spent on homework?
A: More time right now, as they learn, and not all teachers are doing it yet.

Q: How are you planning on staying up with technology? Software upgrades?
A: Cloud computing has helped.

Teachers aren’t excited about how easy it is to be fact checked.

Q: How long is a video?
A: Ten minutes average.

Q: How is video delivered?
A: Google Apps with Google Sites

Q: When they leave what happens to licenced materials?
A: District takes it off when the student leaves

Android is an open source operating system created at Google based on Linux. Google allows distributes this OS free of charge to be used by manufacturers and cellular providers on mobile devices. It competes against other mobile operating systems such as Apple’s iOS (used on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch), Microsoft Windows Phone 7, RIM Blackberry OS, and HP’s WebOS.

I purchased a Motorola Droid off of eBay and received it this past week. I’ve been playing around with it for the last couple of days, so this isn’t so much as a review as it is my first impressions.

My smartphone history

A little history about my past and smartphones. I bought my first smartphone, a Motorola Q around 2007 (I think. ). While it was my first taste of online connectivity whereever I was, it was also my first taste of, as the French would say, le pew. It was slow, ate batteries like it was going out of style, ugly, and would just restart for now reason. I moved on to a Samsung Omnia, then an HTC Ozone. The Ozone, at the time (mid 2009) was Verizon’s most unlocked phone. It had wifi and the GPS was useable. All in all, not a bad phone, but still running Windows Mobile. In August I purchased a Palm Pre Plus, which was heaven compared to the Ozone. What holds it back is not the OS (which feels like it could be an Apple product) but the hardware and lack of apps. As an aside, AT&T does not offer service in my area, so I’ve gotten by with an iPod Touch (first gen represent!) I bought in 2008.

This “First Look” will try to focus on the software itself, since in the Android universe the quality and quantity of devices would overshadow any comments about the hardware of the Motorola Droid.

Rundown

Things I like:

• The back button: Until I used WebOS I hadn’t really thought about how useful a back gesture (or button) could be.
• Widgets: It’s nice to be able to put my calendar on a screen, or a battery life indicator with other information about the hardware.
• The number of applications: So far I’ve been able to find an application for everything I need. In the market place there are also tons of clones of iOS games, but for the most part these are inferior to their iOS counterpart. Rope Cut is not Cut the Rope for iOS.

Things I don’t like:

• Notifcation bar: To open notifications you have to click and hold on the top bar and then drag down. Why I can’t just click on the top bar for notifications I don’t know.
• Application switching: Unless I’m missing something, the only way to switch apps is to either exit back to home and click on the item or hold down the home key until the recently used applications show up. And heaven forbid you want to return to an open browser window.
• Navigation in applications: This is not consistant. Some apps, like imo.im (the instant messaging app I use) gives me a different menu depending on what screen I’m on, and to navigate to a certain screen may require several key presses and swipes through several other screen.

Uses in Education

Until models are released that don’t require a cellular plan, educational uses of Android are going to be limited. This year is going to be interesting, but if you are currently researching which OS to use in your classroom it would be hard to recommend Android until other models are released. Android will have two big advantages over iOS (which is going to be its biggest competitor in the upcoming year): price and openness.

Price

Schools rarely look at the total operating costs of equipment and instead focus on purchase price. The Android tablets and handhelds will be cheaper than their iOS cousins, and in some form factors will not have competition (the 7 inch form factor such as the Nook).

Openness

Since Android is Open Source, companies can release software to automatically manage a fleet of devices. If you’ve been involved with iOS app purchases, it requires several hoops to jump through, and then it can’t even automatically install the apps. This can change with Android. Unfortunately, this will probably mean that any price savings you received on the purchase of the devices will be eaten in the management.

Is it a contender?

Yes, Android is a contender in the mobile space. I believe that it is a credible threat to the iPad/iPod Touch dominance we see in schools today. Should you wait? No. If you are looking at implementing a mobile device initiative then don’t wait for Android devices. From an educational point of view there isn’t anything that can be done on one that can’t be done on the other. The Android app store seems to be thriving, and as more devices are sold it will only entice more developers. Mobile devices are set to overtake personal computers any day now .

What device do you use a majority of the time?

Why the 11″?

Choosing the 11″ over the 13″ Air models was an easy decision. My goal was portability. Screen size doesn’t really play into it, since at work I have a 24″ LCD and at home I have a 23″ LCD. I was never very impressed with the older 13″ Air model. It was still the same size as my MacBook, only thinner. If screen size does matter to you, I would think long and hard before I would buy the 13″ Air over a MacBook Pro.

Quick!

Using the machine, the quickness is very surprising. Of course, the SSD gets most of the credit. When discussing the speed of the machine versus other Macintosh models, a good analogy is in cars, electric cars versus gas. Car motor power is measured by two different factors, horsepower and torque. Horsepower is where you get your speed, and torque is how fast you can get to your horsepower. Now an interesting thing happens with electric cars versus gas. In a drag race, the electric car has the advantage at the start since an electric motor has 100% of its torque available at 0 RPMs, whereas a gasoline engine requires the motor to hit a certain number of RPMs before torque is available. Depending on the length of the race, an electric car can win every time against a more powerful gasoline powered car. This is the same feeling with the MacBook Air. With the SSD, the computer is faster than more powerful computers for a wide range of tasks a user may do during the day. While a core i7 MacBook Pro is going to beat the MacBook Air at rendering video, if the race is shorter, say launching Safari and browsing the web, the MacBook Air is going to win. Can this machine be my main machine? It already is!

Overall size

Size wise, it is about as thick as my iPad (in the Apple Case) is, and weight wise it’s pretty much a tie with the iPad. In fact, I handed my MBA and iPad to my sister-in-law and asked her which was heavier, and she said the iPad! Although the MBA has about the same depth and thickness as the iPad, it is around 1.5″ longer. Not as portable as the iPad, but pretty close.

The screen size at first took a little getting used to. I wasn’t too worried about the smaller screen, but the first couple of days of using it I kept wanting to bump up the font sizes when browsing. This need went away, and I’ve now gotten used to the size of the fonts on the screen. (By the way, when is a browser going to give me the ability to double-click on an article and have it zoom into that text, like my iPad and iPod Touch does?)

Odds and ends

Build quality is excellent, the full size keyboard is great, and the touchpad is amazing. My extra MacBook charger works with it too! I ordered mini-display port adapters for $30 from monoprice.com for VGA, DVI, and HDMI. Compare that to the $29 Apple wants for just the VGA adapter! 

The ugly

I actually don’t really have any cons against the MacBook Air 11″. Twice I’ve woken it up and the backlight didn’t come on, but it hasn’t happened enough for me to worry about it yet (and I’ve got 11 more months to decide whether to buy AppleCare for it . It’s almost a perfect travel companion, and if Apple could shave another inch or so from the width it would be perfect!

Have the MacBook Airs gotten you interested in a Mac? Would you buy an Air and run Windows 7 or Linux on it?

The purchase:
I reserved my ipad the day they opened reservations on line so I would be guaranteed to pick one up on April 3rd. I didn’t trust Saturday delivery, so I headed to Columbus to the Easton Apple Store to stand in the “privileged line”, the one which had the others who had also reserved their iPad. When we arrived at 7:30am, there were approximately 40 people in the reserved line and about twice that many in the “unreserved” line, those that were hoping to still pick one up.

Anyway, I bought mine and while my brother and sister played with iPads in the store, I pulled out my Macbook and setup my iPad. Some reviews talk about the iPad ready for use right out of the box, but mine popped up the “connect to iTunes” symbol. The initial sync didn’t take long, but I really wasn’t syncing up too much.

Initial Impressions:
Fast! It is probably the fastest browsing experience that I’ve ever experienced. For the first time it was the speed of the network and not the hardware slowing me down. The onscreen keyboard isn’t that bad, I’m typing this article on it, but it does take some getting used to. The biggest problem is keeping your fingers up off the glass so it doesn’t register additional “key” presses. The other issue is that it is practically impossible to type without looking at the keyboard, so if you are typing in information that is on paper, it will be a lot slower. Im debating whether to buy the bluetooth keyboard. I paired it with my old Think Outside keyboard, which was a piece of cake, but that keyboard is getting old and the k and l keys do not work the best. I also bought the Apple case for it, which helps put the iPad at a good angle to use or type on.

Longer term impressions:
There are more situations where a tablet can be used than a laptop, and the additional screen space makes the iPad a lot more useful than the iPod Touch. For example, at a meeting I can have the iPad in my lap or on the table. Where the iPad shines is when I want to show others information or something on the screen. I can just hold up the iPad or hand it to them without the awkwardness one would experience with a laptop. Maybe it’s just the websites I visit, but lack of Flash has not really been an issue. A lot of the video sites already support HTML 5, which works flawlessly on the iPad.

I’ve been impressed with the number of iPad ready apps already in the app store. Some of my favorite apps, such as Evernote, WordPress, and iSSH are already available.

Educational implications:
That being said about Flash above, students would notice the inability to use some of there favorite sites. Sites such as Starfall, which would be amazing on the iPad, fail from lack of Flash. The availability of Pages and Keynote bring some productivity to the iPad, but the clumsy method of using iTunes to transfer files would hinder their use in the classroom.

Closing thoughts:
I’m going to be posting more as I work with the device longer. I’m excited to use it to teach a lesson in a kindergarten class to see how well it will work as a teacher device. Some accessories will probably end of purchasing include the camera connection kit and the Bluetooth keyboard. The big unanswered question is “who is the iPad for?”, and, unfortunately I can’t answer that yet.

So far, So cool.

Over at instructables Saul has posted his directions for using Tyvek wrapping for a Tyvek Projector Screen. Since this is used for wrapping houses it is very inexpensive and somewhat durable. He used a pipe in one end to keep it taunt. From reading the comments there are ways of purchasing it without the logo or using other materials, such as black out clothe, that is available in white.

At almost $500 I don’t see it as either. The biggest negative about the Kindle will also be the last thing fixed, if it is ever addressed, and that is the ability to re-sell your content (or at least lend it to others). I’m sure the textbook companies are falling over themselves to support the Kindle. Here is the ability to sell a text book, with no production/delivery costs, and then know that the book will not be resold at the end of the semester.

The newspaper subscription idea has merit, but then again, they need to lower their subscription rates. I’ve looked at transferring my USA Today subscription to digital, but it costs almost the same as getting a paper copy! At least with the paper copy I can lend/give it to someone else, or cut out an article to save.

Is anyone looking at using the Kindle in a school? What would be the advantages of it over something like a netbook?

Nvidia has announced that it plans to power $99 mobile internet devices with its Tegra 600 series chips, perhaps as early as this summer.

If they can get an Android version released at $99 that is something that could be a game changer in education. Although I’m a big fan of the iPod Touch being an option for a 1-to-1 program, a $99 device with keyboard and more openness would easily make one-to-one programs a reality.

It seems like I’m always waiting…