Ryan Collins

January 17, 2013

Use a GMail filter to organize emails from students

GMail has a somewhat powerful filtering mechanism that you can apply to incoming email. Unfortunately, I say somewhat since there really isn’t an easy way to select student email and take it out of your inbox. It won’t match on part of an address, so you can’t just search for an email address that starts…

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September 12, 2012

Has Apple lost it?

Apple announced the iPhone 5 today and updates to the iPod line. Most of the announcements were lackluster at best, but the event laid the groundwork for the rumored iPad mini event in October, which could be even more disastrous than the iPhone 5 event today. The iPhone 5 is a nice upgrade, thinner and…
July 23, 2012

Impressions of the Nexus 7 Tablet

For those that know me, ordering a Google Nexus 7 Tablet when it was released isn’t much of a surprise. I did wait a day though. 🙂 The Nexus 7 Tablet joins the stable of portable devices at home, which include a couple of iPad 1s, and iPad 3, a couple of cheap Android tablets…
April 17, 2012

Something about iPads

[![][]][] I’ve been thinking a lot lately about iPads, Chromebooks, Android Tablets, and Linux laptops. In planning the next 5 years of technology in my school district, I know it will be mobile, but what device should I be thinking about? And then I noticed something very curious about the iPad and how people interact…

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March 17, 2012

First impressions of the new iPad (from an iPad 1 user)

[![][]][] I’ve had the new iPad for 24 hours, and it has already ruined me for all other displays. I noticed it yesterday, as I was working on my 24″ 1920×1080 monitor at school. It just looks bad after using the new iPad. As an upgrade to the iPad 1, the new iPad is a…

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February 13, 2012

Beyond Paperless

[][] Slides: Beyond Paperless – eTech 2012(pdf) Audio: Beyond Paperless – eTech 2012 []: http://ryancollins.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/2012-02-13-at-10.19.33.jpg

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January 13, 2012

Can Insync dethrone Dropbox as a cloud storage service?

A couple of weeks ago I read a Techcrunch article about Insync. It is a service that works almost identically to Dropbox. Their differentiating feature is the fact that they use your Google Docs account for storage. A downside to this is that you only have 1GB of storage with normal accounts, but Google lets…
November 30, 2011

Beware of the echo chamber

As my school district was preparing for a building levy back in November (which did pass, yeah!!), I talked to community members what they felt the chances for a new building were. Most of them were enthusiastic, saying that they were hearing a lot of positive talk on Facebook. But when I pointed out that…
November 17, 2011

The Wingstand: a stand for your iPhone or iPad and the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard

One of the first accessories I purchased with the original iPad was the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard. I had grand plans of replacing my laptop with the iPad. That didn’t happen, Apple introduced the MacBook Air and I was hooked, but I still held onto the BT keyboard. Lately, I’ve been using it with my iPhone…

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