Tag Archives: iphone

To new iPad or iPad2 – that is the question!

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(This is an extract from an email to one of my brothers – I am seen as the ‘techie’ of the family!)

It seems that I cannot get an Educational discount on iPads currently. I went to the school link and the prices were the same. Sorry! I am however happy to advise!

Gb Size

Basing 1GB per film, it is worth considering actually how much GB you actually need  – in my opinion, it is incredibly overpriced for what it is, and none of us really do vastly exteed stays away from home, but it depends how you will use your iPad.

I have an app on my iphone called Air Video, and this sends any film on my computer to my ipad/iphone. It streams it wirelessly, so costs no money, and also saves me using up GB space on my iPad. The app costs about £3. An extra 16GB on an iPad – £80.

Wifi/3G

I have managed fine with wifi. The way to consider this one is to consider all the places you might need the internet on it when you are NOT within range of a wifi signal. This will be diffeent for all of us, but for me, it was the occasional time I was on the train, and the occasional night away – not enough to justify roaming charges!

IPad 3/ iPad 2

No major difference unless you count pixel size. Se below:

http://gizmodo.com/5894094/we-people-an-ipad-2-told-them-it-was-the-new-ipad-and-they-loved-it

The picture on my original ipad is very good, the ipad2 even moreso, but you would be advised to look for yourself and see if you would appreciate the difference; if you think the extra £70 is worth it or not.

Refurb
Something I wouldn’t dismiss straight away – my white iBook was a refurb – it was essentially new, no marks or scratches at all ,in fact the only difference we could find was that it didn’t have the commercial shiny white box – it came in boring old cardboard, just with a 20% discount. Do have a look at the link below:

http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/specialdeals/ipad

There might be something which catches your eye.

Summary
I can’t make the decision for you, but am really happy to advise. The key is to really consider where and how you might use it, and work back from there. I LOVE my iPad, but have ended up using it for specific tasks – it is just very hard to predict what your tasks will be!

 

What have you got? What are you tempted to buy? Please share below!

31 iPad Apps for a noob

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A really good friend bought an iPad2 yesterday, and sent me an emails, asking for ‘the best apps please.’ He is a negotiation trainer, creative genius and all round good egg, so I sifted through the stupid number of Apps on my iPad, and came up with this shortlist!

ThicketClassic – automatically generated ethereal background music
Allrecipes – Brilliant online recipe finder
FindiPhone – download these on both iThingys, then allow you to find it if/when they get stolen. Genuinely works!
Dragon Dictation – even better than iPhone, as you can dictate more
GoodReader – Fab for downloading and annnotating PDFs and Docs
DocsToGo – Edit Word and Excel Docs – a bit hamfisted, but does the job
Notesy – notepad which links with Dropbox. I use this every day and love it.
Teamviewer – Remote access to your computer when on the move. Fab.
Mobile mouse – Acts as your mouse on your lappy, should you want it.
Air Video -As iPhone – incredibly useful, especailly if yout iTunes is loaded with films, saves all the synching hassles
IMDb – A really nicely thought-out App for film lovers, plus lots of great trailers
Zeebox – A twitter talkback for TV. Turn on TV, turn on Zeebox, then follow what poeple are saying.
TED – Educate yourself in 12 minutes. Brilliant for the 3am insomnia.
iPlayer-  choose a programme, then give up all hope waiting 20 minutes for it to load, before it crashes five minutes in
4oD Catch up – see iPlayer, above.
Guardian Eyewitness – Brilliant Photos every day. Has my children enthralled daily
Snapseed – Cracking for photo editing – regularly free, so wait for an offer
Flipboard – Turn Twitter/Facebook into magazine-like loveliness. Well worth downloading
BBC News – is good
Sky Grid – learns your interests. Very US-centric
Google Earth -simply amazing. And free. And MAPS!
Trip Advisor – read what the fringes of society love/hare about everything, and often the same thing.
Bluefire reader – great ereader for library ebooks
Kindle – just like the kindle, except no e-ink, and £89 cheaper
Press Reader – any paper downloaded in full for only 69p – what’s not to like?!
Dropbox – Insanely brilliant virtual info folder. If you don’t have this, you clearly hate being organised.
Springpad – an inspirations storage App. Really useful for us creative types!
Summly – Shrink a long and worthy article into bitesized bits.
Glide hockey – great fun
Scrabble – as per the board game, but even better, plus if you download the tile-holder on your iphone, even easier to play.
TantrixStrategy – A really clever tile game, solo play only.
Well? What have I missed out? Anything you disagree with here, or utterly adore too?

3 New Powerful Twitter Apps

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I have used all three of these Apps in one way or another in the past fortnight, and thought I would review them under one roof!

Summify – A very clever service which examines your follower’s tweets, then ‘curates’ an email summary of the most popular/retweeted posts or blogs. This is fantastic if you are the sort of Twitter user who dips in and out, rather than someone who tends to graze throughout the day. You can set it up to send you a daily email, and since doing this, I have found some real gold in every email.

Buffer – Again, perfect for those who dip into their twitter stream. Rather than swamping your followers with a bunch of responses and RT’s in a ten minute space (which I know I and others are guilty of) and risk annoying others of swamping their stream, this allows you to stack up marked posts or links, and then sends them out on your behalf throughout the day. I emailled the CEO of Buffer with some ideas and he emailled right back, pointing me toward

SocialBro – Based around a chrome Plug-in or the Adobe Air platform, this is an incredibly powerful Twitter Dashboard with some really advanced metrics. It gave me a really good insight into my followers and their habits – the best being that my weekly post reviewing business books was wasted on a Sunday evening for example, as it was one of the least-populated times for my Twitter stream.

All of these Apps are here to give Twitter more value as a tool, and in a way that I haven’t seen before. While to would theoretically be great if Twitter added these kinds of functionality, it might end up bulky and overwhelming. Far better that you can use plug-ins as appropriate.

Reasons I’m resisting a Kindle (for now)

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book venn tech image

 

I have been considering a Kindle for a while now, but am resisting for several reasons, and thought I’d list them, if only as a record for myself.  I am a huge fan of books and tech, so in theory I should be a Kindle consumer!

 

 

1. Picture books look better, bigger. As a Dad, I love reading large picture books to my children. Even my eldest, whilst a hearty Mr. Gum fan, still loves the gorgeous glory of a picture book. Where’s Wally on a six inch screen doesn’t wash. There The Wild Things Are on a Kindle wouldn’t be the same thing.

2. Price. I just cannot get past the fact that I feel any kind of electronic book should be cheaper than a printed version. I cannot get my head around Amazon’s pricing policy, which seems utterly random. Victoria Hislop’s latest book for example is £7.03 in hardback, and £9.99 on the Kindle. EH?!?!? However skewed my logic may be, it operates like this:

Kindle Price = (Paper price – cost of printing) + VAT

rather than

Kindle Price = RAND*(Paper Price)

 

3. Swapsies. I have several friends and family who I regularly swap finished books with. It could boldly be suggested as sharing the love but in truth, it is lifting the expense and broadening the mind. As a guess, half my books are from other people, and I’ve probably given half my books away.

4. Charity shop bargains. A cracking read for £1.50? What’s not to like!

5. Your place. There is a pleasure in knowing where you are physically in a book. Most evident is when you are ‘in’ a great book, and you have that converse joy/fear at how few pages are left!

6. Multifunction. I try where possible to reduce what I am carrying/owning, so I love multifunction devices. My iPhone and iPad cover a huge amount of functionality for example. I worry that if I get a Kindle, it will be one more thing to buy/charge/carry/worry about damaging/lose.

7. Waterstones. Great shop, even if they have REMOVED THEIR 3 FOR 2 DEALS. Browsing finds charms in a way that ‘Readers also bought…’ doesn’t. My favourite book of 2010 I discovered on a shelf, spine-facing, in a bookshop. I wouldn’t have bought it online. Oh, and the same one in  2011 too – utterly out of my genre interest, completely compelling to read. I realise this makes me sound paranoid about missing out on culture through serendipity. This would be accurate.

In truth, I know it’s probably only a matter of time, and I suppose I am simply mourning the love I have had for books since a young child. Early Adopters call books dead trees, but that reduces them down to their very base physicality. You may as well call anything by its materials, rather than the empathy it engenders.

Right? Wrong? Thoughts?

 

The best 8 Apps I use for school

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I’ll start by admitting that I love my iPhone. It is brilliant for what I want to do at school ,both in a teaching and in a managing work sense. Here are some of what I would consider my best Apps for Education. I would add that they are teacher-led rather than child-led.

Calendar – This may sound an obvious one, but I have linked my school Gmail Apps account to my phone, which means that my school calendar seamlessly merges with my phone – reminders, agendas, the whole lot. I love it.

Notesy – A brilliant little notepad, which also syncs with Dropbox (see below). I have tried To Do programs in the past, and for me, a big old list works best. Worth every penny.

Dropbox – Something I could never live without. Dropbox is a fab little app on my phone, and my computer, which means that anything (image, doc, music file) on one device is automatically on everything else that Dropbox is installed on. If you have ever emailled yourself a document, or are poor at backing up, or carry your life in a USB pendrive, you need to get Dropbox, then nip back and thank me!

Clock – Great for the timer. If I could find a better stopwatch or timer, I’d use it. I can’t.

Bloom – This is an ethereal music generator. When I need the class to have ‘relaxed concentration,’ I put this on and leave it to play and generate music. Love it, and it also helps in getting me to sleep sometimes!

Dragon Dictation – Speech to type. Download this and try using it for those typing tasks you tend to put off. Works a charm, very little correcting needed and perfect for meeting minutes (I’ve found!).

Mobile Mouse – Laptop plugged into the data projector? You at the back of the class? Wifi enabled? Let Mobile mouse take control of your desktop. Great for making you a learning tool rather than a teacher at the front. Trello – A task organiser. I’m trialling the Beta at the moment, but it just isn’t as flexible as the website version, so I probably won’t use it much in the future. Worth a look though, especially for teams.

AirProjFree – This is a free little app which allows you to ‘throw’ any image in your picture library onto a browser, so very useful for the classroom, especially for those with projectors.

(Post inspired by Danny Nicholson‘s Ed Tech Carnival request)