🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄
Here are the slides with notes: Handout from my presentation. For
those following along with Twitter here are the results of the poll:
[
][]
I really enjoyed the conference, and want to thank everyone that was
involved at putting it on. It was very well run (although I didn’t win
the MacBook Air door prize… :-).
The slides are available on Google Docs.
The slides are available on Google Docs, and I’ve started to put my
links under http://www.delicious.com/mr.rcollins/partvi.
Have you succumbed to the dark side? Do you use technology for good or
evil?
I was interviewed by Amanda Murrow at the Ohio eTech Technology
Conference:
Star Wars for Teaching from David Smeltzer on Vimeo.
I’ll be presenting twice at the conference this year. On Monday, I’ll be
presenting “21st Century Schools: Part VI, Return of the Jedi” from 3:45
– 4:30 pm in Room: D230 – 232. This session will be on motivating
students and teachers, while trying not to stray to the “dark side” of
technology. The twitter hastag will be #rcpartvi.
My second presentation is Tuesday, “An iPad, Kindle, and iPod Touch
walked into a classroom…” at 3:45 – 4:30 pm in room: C213 – 215. This
session will explore the Kindle, the iPad, and the iPod and how they can
be used in the classroom. Alternative technologies will also be
presented and discussed. The Twitter hashtag will be #rcmobile.
For both presentations I’ll be using Google Docs, and will update this
site with urls to the presentations. I’m going to try to use the “View
together” feature, where participants can follow along and actually
converse if they have Google accounts. For audio, I’ve set up a
Shoutcast server and I’ll be attempting to broadcast the audio live
while presenting. I don’t know how well it’s going to work, but it
should be fun!
Update: The “21st Century Schools: Part VI, Return of the Jedi”
presentation is online at http://eduk8.me/nrMMMm. I’ve started to
collect the links for the presentation at
http://www.delicious.com/mr.rcollins/partvi
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][]
While there are several full screen text editing apps, I’ve settled on
JDarkroom. Written in Java, JDarkroom is a distraction free text
editor, taking over your entire screen so you can concentrate on writing
and not worry about new email or tweets. It is patterned after Darkroom
for Windows and Writeroom for Mac.
I was using Evernote for writing, but it doesn’t have a full screen
mode. To emulate the ability to sync my notes written in JDarkroom with
my other devices I use Dropbox (Affiliate code in link,
dropbox.com is the website without the affiliate code). Now I just
save my notes into my Dropbox, and Dropbox takes care of syncing them
across my devices. The Dropbox app for Android allows me to edit text
files directly in the application, and there are several apps for iOS
devices that will let you do the same. For mark up in text files I use
John Gruber’s Markdown. It’s a very readable way to encode
formatting in a text file. There are several libraries that let you then
convert it to html or back to markdown. I installed the WMD plug in for
Wordpress which allows me to write in Markdown (or just copy and
paste from one of my files.
Yes, it’s a little convoluted, and as soon as Evernote as a full screen
editor option I’ll probably switch back to it, it does work for me. 🙂
[]: https://ryancollins.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/sc_1.png
As I prepare for my eTech 2011 presentation, An iPad, Kindle, and iPod
Touch walked into a classroom…, I decided that it would be
beneficial to plan on questions about Android, Android Tablets, and how
they may work in schools. The Consumer Electronics Show was held this
past week, and during it a bevy of manufacturers announced tablets, with
almost all of them running Android.
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.
Since Steve Jobs blessed my MacBook Air and I received it two day early,
I’ve had almost a week to investigate the 11″ MacBook Air. I opted to
max it out, so it has 4GB of RAM, 128GB Solid State Drive (SSD) and the
1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU. The educational price was \$1,329, which
was almost more than I was willing to spend, but so far, it’s been worth
it. The MBA is replacing an original 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo MacBook,
which had been upgraded to 2GB of RAM and a 7,200 RPM 200GB hard drive.
Before I ordered the MBA I did some quick calculations, and CPU wise,
the MBA should be as fast as my old MacBook (the Intel Core 2 Duo is
10-15% faster than the Intel Core Duo, and the MBA has a front bus of
800MHz compared to my MacBook’s 667MHz). Adding more memory and the
faster drive, it is faster than the MacBook that replaced it. (more…)
Tomorrow Apple is holding an event to announce new products for the Mac.
What will be announced is anyone’s guess, but here’s what my intuition
is telling me:
Anything I missed that you want to see Apple unveil?
The latest update to the best \$.99 I’ve ever spent on an all for my
iPad just made the application even better. Goodreader now allows you to
mark up PDFs, adding notes, highlighting text, or drawing. It can save
the markup in the same file or make a copy for you, preserving the
original.
If you have \$1 and an iPad, this app is well worth it.
