iPad 2

I am writing this post on a newly acquired iPad2, one of 16 I have acquired for a project I referred to previously. It's white, which I thought I would hate but actually I rather like it... dare I say even prefer it to the black! Interestingly while the white ones seem to be readily available from Apple in Ireland, the black are now on backorder for the last three weeks.
I ordered a mix of colours so I can compare how 'dirty' the white appears compared to the black in a multi-user environment. This might be important if they are going to be used in a clinical setting. Does one want to see 'dirt' on the casing of a white iPad, or have it concealed on a black casing? Under normal usage will the white iPad appear dirtier than the black?
In one of the principal settings they will be used on my project (the anatomy dissection room) the colour won't actually matter because I will be using iPads in protective cases. The cases are white so as to highlight dirt and encourage the students to clean the cases regularly. More on the cases in a later post.
The iPad I'm currently using has a grey 'smart' cover. Haven't had it long enough to comment on but I'll post on this shortly also.

Back again

That was some hiatus! But I'm back blogging on the topic again for reasons that will become clear later.

Since my last post we have seen the release of the iPad2 which seems to be selling particularly well. I expect it will do even better with the release of iOS 5 (whenever) and the untethering from having to sync to a PC. However I can't comment on a comparison between it and its older sister as I haven't really had a chance to try one.

That's going to change very soon however, as I have received funding to run an iPad pilot with some colleagues during the coming academic year( thank you School of Medicine at NUI, Galway!). The pilot will involve medical students and staff using iPads in a variety of basic sciences and clinical settings, with a view to evaluating if the devices have a place in medical education. Once the pilot is up and running (in a few weeks) I will begin regular posting as we evaluate the device, the apps we will use and the student and staff experience. The participating staff have varying experience of the iPad, from none to lots and their attitude will very much shape the success (or otherwise) of the pilot. I intend to grapple them into guest posting to this blog as part of the evaluation.

Outside of medical education, I'm also going to be collaborating with my wife, who has received funding to pilot iPads in teaching anatomy to Sports and Exercise Physiology students at AIT. We already have some interesting (well I think so!) ideas as to what we might do and I'll blog on these in the future.

So, commencing in a couple of weeks, check here regularly if you are interested in the iPad as an educational tool for use in third level environments, and if you have opinions, thoughts or experiences of your own on this issue please contribute.

Reading and Markup

Screenshot of a marked up pdf in iAnnotate

One thing I have found the iPad really useful for is as an eReader. I use it (and my iPhone) for reading books for both pleasure and work. The iPad is particularly useful for reading the many pdf copies of journal articles I scan/read in a week. I haven't actually printed a journal article since I got the iPad!
Now if  you are one of those people that highlights and marks up pdf's as you read them (either in wetware or software), the iOS eReader will disappoint you - you can't highlight or mark up pdf's within the app. Fortunately for you there are a few good apps that address just this issue. I use one of the the best ranked, called iAnnotate PDF. Using this app you can manage the pdf collections on your device, and within a pdf you can highlight, add notes and mark up the text in a whole variety of ways. Best of all, you can email/export the marked up pdf so that your mark up can be read in any pdf reader, or indeed send it in a format that allows you to edit your markup assuming you have a compatible reader (Acrobat Pro for example). If, like many academics you distribute lecture notes and Powerpoint presentations as pdf documents, your students will find iAnnotate pdf really useful. If any students out there are using iAnnotate to take lecture notes on top of pre-distributed pdf files, I would be very interested to hear of your experiences and would gladly give you space for a guest post.

Some pages from my notes, formatted as ePUB and displayed in the iBook Reader

Personally I don't mark up pdf's that much (at least not up until now), so I am happy with the eReader that comes on the iPad. Where I really like the eReader is for viewing books formatted using the ePUB open format. Interacting with the book (turning pages, placing a bookmark) is really simple and natural. You can highlight passages in the book, add text notes, search words and phrases etc. The tool set is not as rich as iAnnotate, but I prefer the really simple, clean, limited mark up tools. The tools only work with eBooks formatted as ePUB, not with pdf which is actually quite a pity. I was delighted to find that I can export files from Pages (Mac OS X version) as an ePUB file and then transfer to the iPad/iPhone. A couple of major advantages of the ePUB format are that the document resizes and repaginates to suit the device and orientation in which it is being viewed, and the reader can change the font size to suit and the document repaginates automatically. I took some lecture notes of mine that contained illustrations, opened them in Pages (OS X) then exported as ePUB and transferred to the iPad/iPhone. You can see from the screenshot above how they appear. Very professional, even though I say so myself (and with essentially no effort on my part). In the next couple of months I will be expanding this into a demo project and I will post progress reports here as appropriate.

iPad 2

Thinner, lighter, whiter. Do I need the iPad2?

The answer of course is yes! But not for the reasons listed above. Nor is it for the dual core processor, or even the new smart cover (even though I do want a smart cover). No, the reason to choose iPad 2 is for the camera(s) and Facetime.
The camera allows the iPad to be used as a data gathering device. This could be shots of a whiteboard, a page of a textbook, a photo of something from the lab, a short video clip etc. The fact that Apple are now making  iPad versions of iMovie and Garage Band suggests this is something they see the iPad as useful for too. And then there's Facetime. On a WiFi networked campus, Facetime will enable real collaboration among faculty/students at different physical locations - forget complicated video conferencing setups.
Of course this will bring problems too - bandwidth for one, if enough people are using Facetime simultaneously. And within a medical teaching environment there are all kinds of privacy issues around the use of cameras. If the iPads belong to the institution it's not so bad because the cameras can be locked down if necessary, but that isn't possible if the iPad is student owned.
Still I am looking forward to trying one and will post a review once I have had a chance to try one out.

Do students need iPads?

I've been giving this some thought of late. I've also asked for some opinion from students on the matter. If you ask if students want iPads the answer is a resounding yes. If you ask if they need iPads the answer (in part) depends on who is going to buy the devices. If  iPads are provided to students at no cost then of course they need them. But if students are required to purchase iPads themselves, the necessity for an iPad comes under question. Why is this?

I think it comes down to the fact that no matter how you spin it, the iPad is not a standalone device. You must have a computer with which to sync, and realistically that computer must be yours, not one you simply have access to. If we take the cost of an iPad at €500, and a decent netbook at €500, that's €1000 for computer/connectivity. You're in Mac Air territory now, so if you have €1000 why not buy one device that gives you the best of all world's and is part of the Apple ecosystem? If you need greater portability well, that's your phone or your iTouch and they are part of a separate budget from your 'University required' one.

There's logic to the above, very compelling actually now that I reread it. Maybe I should just shut this blog, and start one on HTML 5.0 in University education. Either that or I need to delve a little deeper into what an iPad might do that other options cannot. I don't actually know what the outcome of this delving will be, but whatever it is I'll post it here.

I'll finish with following observation. Sometimes watching people tells you a lot more than listening to what they say. At the recent Apple tech series I attended, all of the Apple people used Mac Books to present and those not presenting were 'working' on Mac Books (email, surfing, etc). Only once in 6 hours did I see an Apple person actually pick up and use an iPad for something other than demonstration purposes. What might that mean?

More on File sharing

Dropbox will help me get files onto my iPad when I am not in a position to sync, but what about going the opposite direction? Say I work on a file on the iPad on the way to work, then arrive and want to access or use the file on my office PC (assuming I don't sync my iPad with my work PC). Unfortunately I can't save my work to Dropbox from the iPad (except pictures). Fortunately there is a way to transfer iWork files off the iPad without syncing (at least for now).
iWork applications for the iPad (Keynote, Pages, Numbers) have the option to export files to iWork.com, a public beta of an Apple cloud service, presently free. To use the service, save a file to iWork and log in using your AppleID and password. You will be sent a confirmation email. Open it and click to verify your email address then resend your file to iWork (you only need to do this the first time you activate iWork.com beta). Now log on to iWork.com using your browser on your PC. You can download the file onto your PC either as a pdf or in Office format (if you're using a Mac you can download and edit in iWork format) or you can view the file and comment on it directly in the browser.

The legalese associated with the iWork beta indicates the service is free for now but may require a fee in the future.

This seems like a lot of work to move files around and indeed it is, even taking into account the fact that you are also switching between different OS. If all of your devices are Apple then you need only use iWork because you can open and edit files in iWork on your desktop/laptop Mac, and export back to iWork. For those of us still using multiple devices with differing OS, this is the best (free) way I have found to deal with the problem. I am certain that within 12 months cloud services will make this problem go away, but I don't know if the solution will be free.
Just remember that you can set your iPad up to sync with multiple computers, and as long as you control what is synced and when, and as long as you have the cables at each of the computers with which you sync (or carry the cable with your iPad), then you need not worry about the convoluted method outlined above.

Dropbox

One thing people find annoying about the iPad is the necessity to sync the device to transfer files onto it, because it doesn't have a USB port. Syncing with multiple computers is also a pain, so the tendency is to pick one computer with which to sync (work or home). So how do you transfer files onto or off the device if you are not at the computer with which you normally sync?

The simple workaround is to email the file to yourself, then open the email on the iPad or computer you wish to transfer the file to. This becomes difficult if the file you are trying to transfer is large. You could open a Mobile Me account, but you will have to pay a subscription fee. You could configure a server running WebDAV but that sounds like far too much work! Or you can open a Dropbox account.

A Dropbox account is storage space in the cloud and files stored in Dropbox are accessible anywhere via the web. You download a small program onto your desktop machine, and it configures your dropbox account as a virtual drive. Any files stored in that virtual drive are accessible anywhere. What's more there are iPad/iPhone apps for Dropbox too, so you can access the contents of your Dropbox account directly on the iPad. Dropbox is free for a 2GB allowance, and subscription thereafter. A really useful feature is that you can configure Dropbox folders as public so anyone can see the contents. So say you wanted to share files with your students on their desk/lap tops or iPads/phones. All that is necessary is to configure a public folder and from there they can download files directly onto their own device. This really does extend the utility of the iPad and I strongly recommend using Dropbox (or any of the methods listed). And no, I have no relationship with dropbox other than as a user!

Flipboard

Someone without an iPad asked me to post some pictures of what Flipboard looks like, and how it displays the RSS feed from the twitter account I am using to push content. Delighted to oblige!

To the left is a Flipboard Contents (or home) screen. You can have up to three of these, and each can contain up to 9 tiles as shown here. Each of the tiles represents a feed to which I subscribe, including as you can see here feeds from Nature and New Scientist. These tiles update each time you open Flipboard, reflecting changes in the underlying content (if changes have occurred), so that although the same tiles appear on each contents page, the image on each tile updates. Tapping a tile opens the feed or account to which you are subscribing. You can see one of my own feeds in the tile on the lower left.

Here's what my Histology_AN505 feed looks like when I tap on its tile on the contents page. It shows three 'articles' in a magazine or newspaper like layout. The 'articles' are actually blog posts and the images are drawn from these posts also.Each time I update the blog it sends an RSS feed to a twitter account indicating that a new article has been added. Flipboard examines the twitter feed and 'scrapes' the content the twitter feed points to, including any images included in the blog post. Then Flipboard magically decides how to lay the page out to look nice. I think it does so very well most of the time.
The entire blog post does not appear in this view in Flipboard, just the first couple of hundred words or wherever you have specified the jump break tobe. To see the full article you need to tap on the summary. The summary expands and above it you see a link to the original content (see image below). Below you see the content in a kind of Flipboard browser that allows you to read the full article within Flipboard (see image below). Links, video etc in the blog post work in this FlipBoard browser window.

I think it looks good and I'm certainly pleased with it. Hope you like it as much as I do!

Student iPads continued

I attended an Apple Tech Series thing today about deploying iPads in educational environments. Very interesting and very informative I must say. It dealt with content production, delivery and with device management and deployment. Some of it went way over my head (some management and deployment stuff), but other stuff was clear and easily understood. Apple have a series of strategies for getting round the whole 'no USB port' controversy about iPads and the attendant issues about getting content onto devices. In a nutshell, with the correct setup you can drag and drop an item on your desktop into a folder, and that item appears instantaneously on the users iPad. Now of course it won't be quite as simple as the demo today, and I'll probably have to buy a giant overspecced iMac (boo hoo!) but nonetheless it looked slick and easy to use once set up. They also demo'ed (kind of) a WebDAV way of doing this that enables content produced on the iPad to be shared using the inbuilt protocols in some iPad apps - also very slick if it works as well in the real world as it does in a closed network demo.
Overall I was impressed. Apple have gone to some lengths to make iPads actually usable in an education environment, although not quite as usable as you might expect. The fact remains that the iPad is still essentially a single user/single owner device primarily designed to enable the owner to consume content via iTunes. The device works out of the box....getting the content you want onto multiple devices in an efficient manner will require work on your part (and support staff too probably). But that extra work may well be worth it for the educational advantage you might achieve.
It's less than a year since the iPad appeared so I'm interested in whether anyone has any real experience of medium to large scale deployment. Apparently so and there's even a Webinar next week on the topic. See
here for details. I'll be viewing for sure.

More to follow..........

student iPads

We're having some conversations concerning whether or not we should trial iPads for students. Lots of interesting issues come up. If we do trial some sort of tablet will it be just the iPad or will we trial Android devices as well/instead? What are the advantages of a tablet over a netbook/laptop (if any)? Are there things a tablet can do that can't be done by other devices? Would an iTouch work just as well as an iPad for what we might possibly have in mind for students?

These are difficult questions to answer, not least because we're not students. In general if you approach students and ask them if they would like to trial an iPad the answer is a resoundingYES. iPads are cool. But do we really want students tweeting in lectures, or surfing the web or watching films on devices we have provided them with? Or are we being unfair to students, who by and large are interested in learning and attend lectures because they find them valuable rather than because they have to?

The really hard question to answer is what do we want students to use an iPad for? iPads are devices for consuming content, which is largely provided through iTunes. Can we serve educational content on the device in a way that enhances the experience of education?

I am doing a trial of serving educational content through FlipBoard, a very popular (and free) app that brings together facebook and twitter feeds with other RSS feeds and serves them in a magazine style layout. It's a very polished and sexy app and definitely takes advantage of many of the iPad's features. I am posting content for a distance education course to a another blog I have (histologyireland.blogspot.com), and serving an RSS feed from that blog to twitter. I then connect Flipboard to the twitter account, and flipboard presents the scraped content in a nice attractive format (screenshot below).

How the Twitter feed appears in FlipBoard

Tapping on an article opens the scraped content the complete article appears in a browser window below. Links, multimedia content etc in the blog post work in the browser window so everything on the original blog can be accessed from within FlipBoard.

The scraped article with original in browser window below

It works really well and looks really nice. FlipBoard partners with some newspapers and magazines to serve nicely laid out magazine style articles this way, and apparently they will be making the software to lay out content in magazine style available for free (skipping the need to post content to a blog). 

Does presenting content in a more engaging way improve it's educational value? Does serving content on a phased regular basis improve the sense of engagement compared to providing a single big pdf at the start of a course? Serving content this way will obviously pace learning but is it too slow and inefficient for the quick learner? I'd love to know the answers to these questions but for now only one student on the course has an iPad and I don't even know if they are using FlipBoard!

Keynote again

Not so much a post from me but a relay of my wife's recent experiences.She has had difficulty projecting from Keynote after connecting to projectors, particularly where the projector has been powered off prior to her using it.

Keynote revisited

Better late than never I'm back to Keynote. I think I mentioned before that it was much better than Powerpoint and my views haven't changed - in fact I prefer Keynote even more since a recent update.

Nice Mac!

After eventually getting through to Apple I am in the process of getting the faulty keyboard replaced. I am looking forward to seeing whether the iMac is any better than a PC, and whether using one is as positive an experience as using the iPad.

On the iPad front, my wife is also a lecturer and she is going to use hers at work as well. The WiFi infrastructure at her place isn't great so it will be interesting to hear what her experience with the iPad will be. She will also be learning to use Keynote, Pages and Numbers (just as I am) and some of what I will post here will actually be an amalgam of our experiences.

Later this month I begin lecturing on a distance learning course, and as an experiment I am going to try to deliver content to and formatted for the iOS. Delivery will involve a Twitter feed, a blog and maybe even FaceBook (!) and I'll report on it here.

Mac Off!

Two hardware developments over Christmas. I got a new iPad for my wife so my guilt level about taking hers is assuaged (and I get to use the word assuaged!).

Secondly, I crossed to the dark side and got an iMac. Looks nice but doesn't work because the keyboard doesn't work. Called Compu B on Grafton Street where I bought it and they weren't that interested. They said bring it in and they would look at it. So I would have to take a day and travel to Dublin as they won't accept it back by mail or courier!
I tried to contact apple but it is virtually impossible as apple will not permit me to register the iMac (can't register an iMac bought on that date!). Without registering I cannot access proper technical support.

And these guys are supposed to be promoting their brand in education!