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!