Liked Facebook’s Laughable Campaign Against Apple Is Really Against Users and Small Businesses (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Overall, AppTrackingTransparency is a great step forward for Apple. When a company does the right thing for its users, EFF will stand with it, just as we will come down hard on companies that do the wrong thing. Here, Apple is right and Facebook is wrong. Next step: Android should follow with the same protections. Your move, Google.

In reality, a number of studies have shown that most of the money made from targeted advertising does not reach the creators of the content—the app developers and the content they host.  Instead, the majority of any extra money earned by targeted ads ends up in the pockets of these data brokers.

Replied to Re: History Will Not Be Kind to Jony Ive by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)
I wonder what the outcome would be if the design process started with sustainability and developed from there?

Aaron, That would be wonderful, but I’d guess not good for Apple, or many other tech companies in the short term.

I knee-jerking a response here, I’ve used macs since my first computer in 1995.

Macs have been more sustainable for me than PCs for most folk I know. I don’t get a new one often and they have lasted me a long time.

I dislike the barriers to geekiness that are developing everywhere, both in hardware and, of more import to me, software. It seems harder to play around in an amateur way. Security stops scripts from less professional folk from working. Web APIs move out of reach or are shut down. (I exempt Flickrand OpenSteetMaps). I’d like to see more sustainability there too. Probably not going to.

Liked Sign In with Apple (manton.org)
This is one of the most interesting announcements from WWDC for me. Aaron Parecki wrote a detailed technical post for Okta about it, as well as a post on his blog: Sign In with Apple is a good thing for users! This means apps will no longer be able to force you to log in with your Facebook account t...

iMovie, Numbers, Keynote, Pages, and GarageBand for both Mac and iOS devices have been updated and are now listed in the App Store for free.

Apple Makes iMovie, GarageBand, and iWork Apps for Mac and iOS Free for All Users – Mac Rumors

Worth noting, although these are free already on new devices. This will help classes like mine whose iOS devices are on their second Apple ID.

Also good for distributing through MDM, which seems to be the idea.

Also Clips

Basically because they were the first computers I use. In addition I’ve years worth of shortcuts, kludge and scripts that help my workflow.

But I’ve often discussed this with other educators and often suggested that macs are cheaper. This is usually scoffed at, not too surprising given the shelf price. They do last a long time though.

I was pretty disappointed when North Lanarkshire decided to mostly switch away from macs a couple of years ago.

I saw this in my feed reader today:

IBM found that not only do PCs drive twice the amount of support calls, they’re also three times more expensive. That’s right, depending on the model, IBM is saving anywhere from $273 – $543 per Mac compared to a PC, over a four-year lifespan
Debate over: IBM confirms that Macs are $535 less expensive than PCs | Jamf

The range is a little less impressive than the headline but enough to keep me on the mac track for my next purchase.

featured image: my own. Color Classic, run through some filtering app long enough ago so that I’ve forgotten. 

Pulp o Mizer rtc Nuggets

TL:DR or Highlights

  • A chat with Jenni Robertson about meraki and VPP
  • John Hurst’s talk, a flavour of which is in this boo: Audioboo / An open approach to web filters
  • Ian Wilson‘s demo bossjock
  • OscarStringer: making iMovie title screens with Explain Everything
  • Joe Moretti Showbie, looks like the best thing on the iPad for handing out and gathering in work from pupils.
  • Dalry Primary School

I’ve spent the last couple of days at Dalry Primary School for the Apple Regional Training Centre Conference. I’ve been to two or three ADE events but this was my first RTC.

Apart from the obvious focus on pedagogy and learning other than tech, the main subject was the iPad, not much about macs other than as content creators, iBook Author, for the iPads.

The school itself was a pretty amazing building. The school is a ‘flagship’ building and worth looking at inside and out (pictures here).

Day One

The first day consisted of a series of half hour presentations, the stand outs, for me, were:

  • Jenni Robertson from Edinburgh talking about how they delivered courses on the other side of Scotland. Afterwards, in conversation, Jenni explained how they use Meraki and volume purchasing . some of the North Lanarkshire schools already use Meraki, but Jenni had a good model for covering a whole authority. They way Edinburgh has accessed VPP sounds as if it might be possible in other LAs too.
  • Torstan B Stauch, demoed AppShed which allows you to Build HTML5, iPhone and Android apps online for schools, education and business, and looks like it is worth following up.
  • John Hurst HT of Lever House Primary School tyalked about his schools approach to education, having taken control of their networking from the LA without Going Academy; risk assessment, outdoor fun, starting fires, getting mud between your toes and more. This was a great presentation and I managed to get a quick audioboo with John later for edutalk talking about filters:

    We hope to have John as a guest on Radio #EDUtalk next session.

  • Babar Baig and Kim Byrding talked about an app WriteReader, but their Danish approach to getting very young children to record their activities was fascinating. A combination of taking photos and have a go writing was great.
  • Ian Wilson, Mark Bunyan and Mike Watson gave a quick fire Golden Nuggets section with some great app suggestions and ideas for using them.

    Many of these are captured on twitter, and I’ve bundled a lot of the tweets I made or liked during the first day into Storify #AppleRTC Thursday 13 June 2013..

    One of the most interesting was Ian Wilson‘s demo of bossjock, I’d looked at that before but turned it down due to price. If I had a class I’d buy it in an instant now. Really good for audio storytelling with sound effects.

    Another goodie was sent to me from my NLC colleague Ian, PULP-O-MIZER: the custom pulp magazine cover generator with which I knocked up a quick cover(works on an ipad) in a couple of minutes and tweeted as a golden nugget.

This last activity was the only audience participation in the first day via twitter. This would be my only criticism, given that one of the themes was: Conversations, collaboration and community, a semi-formalised sharing for all participants, would I am sure, have produced some interesting stuff. But there is only some much time and almost everything we heard was of value, a good day.

Day Two

Most of day two was spent in three different workshop sessions, in order I took them:

  1. Oscar Stringer covered the workflow for Keynote to Explain Everything to iMovie and iBooks Author.

    One great tip was to use Explain Everything to create, credit or the end animations for import into iMovie, dead simple and very effective, this example took about 2 minutes to make

    Although I used iBook Author a bit last year it was nice to have a refresh of the basics and to hear the answer to our problem of importing books over Wifi to ipad: don’t make the books so big. iTunes U would seem to be the way to go, splitting the books up into chapters. The guy siting next to me in the session had a nice example of this.

    We also saw a new version of wallwisher, Padlet which works really well on the iPad for classroom collaboration.

  2. Next Dalry Primary HT Maureen Denningberg talked to the, mostly english, attendees giving an overview of Scottish Education and CfE. A few english folk now seem to be looking for a job in Scotland.

    We then were allowed to tour the school and chat to the pupils. Given the unique design of the school and the integration of technology I think the pupils are used to this. There are some interesting reviews on the school website.

  3. My final workshop of the day was with Joe Moretti. After a discussion of how to introduce iPads to staff, most of the session was dedicated to Showbie which badges itself Assignment workflow for iPad. This was the best piece of information I got in the whole show. Joe went through the basic features of the app, giving us the chance to act as pupils. We:

    1. Joined a Class
    2. Received Tasks
    3. Submitted work (from any app that can use ‘open in’ or from the camera roll, camera or via direct text or audio)
    4. Got feedback, in lots of different ways, stand out was by the teacher recording direct audio. how quick and easy it that!

    All this with the free version of Showbie which the devs have assured us will always be around and keep at least the same feature set. Although nothing lasts forever 1, showbie takes so little effort to set up for such valuable results it would be daft not to use it if you have a few ipads in class.

Joe has an iPad app Teaching With ICT which covers Essential Settings, Book Creator, Showbie, Pages, Explain Everything, Puppet Pals and iFiles. This would be a good starter selection for any classroom, based on this session would be well worth getting. I’ve certainly bought it as a thank you for the intro to Showbie.

The PirateBox

After the piratebox’s first non appearance, I was hoping that here might be an opportunity to give it a wee go. A previous ADE conference I had attended made me think the Golden Nugget session would be a bit like TeachMeet nano presentations so I packed the box. Turned out this was not so.

So on the second day I just plugged the box in and tweeted out an invitation or 3.

I must not have been inviting enough, or there was more interest official stuff going on or perhaps apple fans lack a pirate attitude? My only disappointment of the two days. I did see the lights on the box flicker a connection or two, but no one uploaded anything or left a note in the chat. I still hope that the pirate box will one day sail distributing and gathering booty. I am also wondering about using it to distribute content, say iBooks to a class without slowing the main network down.

RTC Stuff

There was also a fair bit of information on the Apple Regional Training Centres setup and it was good to clap eyes on the folk supporting the program and find out what is going on in other centres.

1.podcast producer, posterous, google reader, I am looking at you.

An introduction to Apple’s Hypercard. Guests include Apple Fellow and Hypercard creator Bill Atkinson, Hypercard senior engineer Dan Winkler, author of “The Complete Hypercard Handbook” Danny Goodman, and Robert Stein, Publisher of Voyager Company. Demonstrations include Hypercard 1.0, Complete Car Cost Guide, Focal Point, Laserstacks, and National Galllery of Art. Originally broadcast in 1987.

HyperCard: One of my favourite things.