Tag: iphone

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A while back I blogged about a simple iPod touch/iPhone web app I was working on for creating images with lunes tamped on them (iPod Touch Poems). Over the last week or two I’ve seen a couple of classes using it:

Both classes had a little problem with the app working properly when add to the iPod Touch home screen. It seems that:

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />

Had crept back into the html. I’d found earlier that if this is present it stops he download of an image, and hence the poem, to an iPhone or iPod Touch’s Photos.

Please let me know if you use the lunes app and any problems (or success) you have. leave a comment here or tweet @johnjohnston.

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Last session I was lucky enough to be involved with a small ipod touch pilot; Glencairn iPod and blogged about it and various iPod Touch things several times.

10ipodtouch FtgroupImage Courtesy of Apple

A few things have made me think about iPod touches in class recently that I though might be worth a blog post.

I’ve been using some new, to me, bits of software on my iPhone which have either classroom potential or some concepts that could be transferred to the classroom.

Wifi Photo Transfer (App Store) is a simple application that turns your iPhone or ipod touch into a web server which displays the photos on the device on a web browser on any computer (or iPad) on the same WiFi network:

Wifi Photo Transfer

The photos can easily be downloaded to the computers. The application show a single screen on the phone with an IP address that can be typed into your browser to see the photos. Even better with Safari you just click Bookmarks and then Bonjour where you will see your phone listed:

Bonjour

A click opens the webpage with out any tricky typing.

I imagine photos taken with a new camera equipped iPod being distributed to a class full of children without resort to cables or pen drives.

I mentioned The UK SoundMap in the previous post this mashup which adds Audioboo audio to a google map could be replicated for all sorts of sound recording in class. A map full of music recorded in classrooms around the world or some language swapping springs to mind.

I’ve also been using mappiness, the happiness mapping app to record how I am feeling when the app on my phone prompts me twice a day. This sort of collaborative data logging could be done through a google form on a touch.

The other stimlus for this post is the new ipod touch, this adds the long awaited still and video camera and in my mind turns the iPod touch into one of the most useful bits of tech you could have in a classroom.

A few possibilities:

  • A replacement of your camera and easy photo distribution. The low res (960×720) is not any sort of problem for classroom use when huge digital camera images can slow things down.
  • A replacement Flip (you can use Wifi Photo Transfer to download videos).
  • A video editor, I’ve tested ReelDirector (App Store) briefly and it seems as good a video editor as you would get for £2.39.
  • Air mouse, pass a touch around the class to control the computer connected to a projector for a Whiteboard substitute.
  • With the right software and a class set you have a response kit.
  • Nintendos lots of brain training type apps.
  • Many tasks that are normally carried out on desktops or laptops.

Comparing the £159 before vat price of iPods with the cost of a smartboard or a couple of laptops makes these a real option for expanding technology in the classroom.

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An interesting crowd sourced data project UK Sound Map answers the question: ‘What does Britain sound like?’

All you do is record some sound with Audioboo and tag it uksm the boos are moderated and added to the The UK SoundMap. This, of course, reminds me of our EDUtalk project.

Discussing social media and this sort of thing with my daughter Christine we recorded a quick boo of the rather quiet traffic outside our flat.

Listen!

This could be a nice classroom activity for iPhone equipped teachers and I intend giving it a wee try next time I am working with a class, perhaps a playtime recording would be a good idea.

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Strip designer

This week I have added five new apps to my iPad and thought I’d post them here. 

The whole post was made on the iPad all text ‘written’ with Dragon Dictation.

The first is BBC News and this is just a translation of the BBC’s new site for the iPad that it works very nicely. It’s pretty slick there is a series of all news feeds on the left and you could see the articles on the right. You can customise the feeds so I’ve already remove sport and added the Scottish news  it seems very iPad friendly and like quite a few  designed read and access media in an attractive way.

Another media viewer I’ve  installed is FlipBoard which has been getting a lot of attention on the Internet and on twitter. This app pulls information from different sources, Facebook or twitter and from collections and about different things, say technology or entertainment.the app presents these streams in an attractive way.   You can to flip through the pages with some pretty effects.   What I think is really impressive that is with the tweets from your twitter stream it doesn’t just to show the tweets, if a tweet has an article linked it will present some of the article, with a photograph that will present the photograph.  FlipBoard has been a little controversial as it is pulling in content by scraping rather than they’re getting it from RSS feeds. To me this doesn’t seem too much of a problem most of the longer articles are shortened so you need to display the source along with any adverts and branding to read the whole thing. This viewing is done in the app rather than in safari. 

The next  app is regexecutioner which is an app  to help learn about regular expressions.   I do occasionally attempting to learn and to  use snippets of regular expressions. Hopefully this may  get me up to speed.  It is a pretty straightforward app were you can see  examples and you can take a regular expression and  a text block instantly see it’s result.

StripDesigner  is more of a creative app.  You can see from the screen shots that are  illustrating  this post that I have used it to present and annotate some screenshots of these application.  It’s a really nice ComicLife clone.  I tried on the iPhone first there the screen space is a wee bit limited but on the iPad and it just works very nicely indeed.  You can choose different layouts of up to five pictures.  You can add texts and the other things, adjusting fonts, text size and drop shadows in an easy and intuitive way.  I think it would be a great application to use in a classroom and I imagine I’ll be using it quite a lot.

The final application I’ve installed this week is Dragon Dictation which is an amazing application.  I have recorded all of this post and it turned into text using Dragon Dictation  it is very straightforward to use: you press a record button, you talk, you hit the Screen to stop.  Dragon  then analyses this (I imagine it sens the audio to a server) and brings back the text. You can quickly clean up and edit the text.   I tried it first on my iPhone you can tweet straight from Speech.  I then they tried on the iPad  and had one crash so made sure  to a copy of each section of this post as i  recorded six different sections. I had to do a little cleaning up, but given my accent and the fact that there is no training period make this application seem like magic.

    

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ipod_Map_comics

As a bit of a google maps enthusiast I love Tom Barrett’s Maths Maps ideas. It looks to me like a nice way to show some ‘real’ application of maths in an engaging way.

I am still supporting/interfering with an ipod touch project (site gone but not forgotten on the Internet archive). This gave me the excuse a few weekends ago to spend some time messing about with the jQTouch — jQuery plugin which simplifies developing webpages for mobile devices. I am experimenting with building some sort of base site/web app for the touch.

One of the nice things about the iPod Touch is that you can add webpages as ‘applications’ to your home screen. Apple provide a way which jQTouch supports of giving a webpage an icon the idea with the site I am working on, the iPod Playground, is that it should provide an easy way to present links etc to the children this avoids typing long urls into the touch, the webpage could be edited

A couple of weeks ago I went over to Glencairn to give the maps a try out. The task I gave the pupils was presented on one of the ‘pages’ of a jQTouch page. Based on one of Tom’s shape problems, the children visited the Jardin du Luxembourg and collected screenshots of different 2D shapes, these were then built into Comics with Comic Touch. We encouraged the children to work in pairs to collect shapes, one child to keep the instructions open the other to click on the link to the map. Then bump the images from the image gatherer to the one with the instructions on his/her screen. The lesson seemed to go pretty well the children accessing the maps, taking pictures and creating comics with out a problem.

I am hoping to get the children to try a Street View problem soon. The Slides from flickr show some of the screens of the jQTouch webpage and a couple of street view images on the touch.

Creating the Tasks

The jQtouch setup is very easy to work with, everything in a ‘site’ is really one page, jQtouch provides a nice standard interface, navigation and animation for that navigation.

It took me a while to figure out how to link to the maps so that I dropped a pin where I wanted it and that pin would have a name on it using the Name and the location in the query seems to work:
Street View Shapes 1

Weeorgangeguy

You need to have a pin on the map to get street view to work. On the iPod touch or iPhone you click on the Wee Orange Guy to switch to street view. As an aside I think street view on a browser uses flash, obviously not on the iPod but it is a very smooth experience.

Apple provide quite a few nice tricks to help web app development. You can set an icon for your webpage, so that if folk add it to their home screen it looks like a ‘real’ app. You can also set a splash screen image which will show until the page has loaded when opened as a web app. I have a wee problem with the Flickr Lunes site I blogged about recently if I set: to run in full screen users cannot hold on an image to copy it to their photos, pretty much killing the functionality of the app, so I have had to lose the splash screen. I’ve been working on an ipod/phone version of my A flickr CC search toy called Flickr Search and Stamp this just lets you stamp a flickr photo with attribution. Like Flickr Lunes it only find photos you are allowed to alter so should keep you on the right side of the copyright fairy.

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It has taken me a while to get round to the second post based on a morning at Glencairn primary working on the ipod touch project. In fact the pupils have beat me to it: Comic Twist.

After syncing the ipods I did a wee bit of work with the class on their new apps.

The first app was Comic Twist which allows you to create comics with up to 3 panes a little like Comic Touch, the Comic Life for the ipod/phone. I went for comic touch as it is cheaper that Comic Touch and does 3 panes in a comic.

The second app is i think going to be a great one, it has been sitting in front of my nose for quite while, firstClass. FirstClass is the email and communication systems used in North Lanarkshire Education and I have been rather slow to realise its potential for all sort of things. It is a great way to have discussions, share files etc. I’ve used the mobile client on my iPhone a lot mostly for email, it is amazingly quick even in an area with a very poor mobile connection.

I just had not thought of using it with pupils. The weekend before the iPod touch conference it suddenly dawned on me that we could use it to pass files around the classroom, messaging etc. At the conference the children from the Friezland iPod Project were using firstClass in this way. So when I got to return to Glencairn I synced the iPods with new software and showed the pupils their new firstClass account. We are only using one account for all the ipods to share but the children could easily upload images (created with comic touch) and join in a discussion. The images and discussions can of course be accessed on a desktop or via the web. This makes it very easy to get text images and files onto and off the iPods. We could add movies to a file store in firstClass on the desktop and access it on the touches. We even quickly tested exporting a keynote presentation that some pupils were working on and uploading it, it worked a treat.

Click on the thumbnails to see bigger versions of desktop and iPod views.


I think FirstClass is going to be very useful for working with iPod touches in the classroom.

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Parasync

This is the first of a few posts based on my morning today at Glencairn primary helping with their ipod touch project.

I started syncing and adding a few apps to the iPods. When I had originally set up the ipods with apps it took an age, syncing them two by two to my macbook and I was not looking forward to repeating the exercise. In the meantimne I’ve become a middle man between the Consolarium and a north Lanarkshire school to trial Taptale, this involves LTS lending the school sone ipod touches and a parasync. While we are waiting to get that project up and running I borrowed the parasync to update the Glencairn iPods. It took about 20 minutes to sync all of the iPods. The only glitch was the fact that I had turned of installing apps in the iPods restrictions. Once I had reset them all the update went flawlessly.

A parasync costs about £800 which is probably outside most school budgets in current times, but when weighed agains the time that it takes to sync 20 ipods two by two it is to my mind worth considering. It might be worth several schools owning one together using it for major updates and just recharging the ipods with 4-Port USB Chargers.

I was delighted to see that most of the children had personalised their ‘screensavers’ with drawings, photos and even lunes!

More about the apps I’ve added to the touches soon.

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Recently I’ve been thinking about ipod touches quite a bit. As well as giving some support to the Glencairn ipod project and being the middle man for a wee Consolarium trial of TapTale which will start soon, I am just back from Oldham and Blackpool CLC’s iPodTouch Conference.

The conference was a great success and there is a lot of interesting chatter on the ning site and on Twitter #ipod2010

Last weekend I started playing with an idea for a wee web app. The idea is to provide an interface for searching flickr and creating images combining flickr photos and text. Using only photos that can be adapted and incorporating attribution.

shark_touch_poem

As a sort of proof of concept I made a web app that makes lunes. A Lune is a fixed-form variant haiku created for the English language. It has three words on the first line, five on the second and three on the third. I’ve used lune writing as a classroom activity on several occasions, they are simple and fun to write. (Lune (poetry) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

The web app works like this:

Touch Poem Screens

  1. Pupils load the webpage int oSafari on their ipods and type in a search.
  2. The app retrieves and displays a list of creative commons photos that you are allowed to make derivations of.
  3. Pupils select a photo by clicking on it. This opens the photo with a 3 line form over it.
  4. Pupils type in poem and click Go.
  5. The image and text is sent to the server where it is stamped with the text and attribution and sent back to browser.
  6. Pupil presses on image, save dialog opens and image can be saved to photos.

I am using the phpFlickr to search and GD to stamp the photos

I tried the app out with the Glencairn primary six class on tuesday, we then bumped the photos to my phone, transferred them to a mac and added voice in iMovie: Animal Lunes, all in 90 minutes.

I though the app ran fairly smoothly except for quotes ’ which came back escaped with a slash ’, some text ran off the pictures and the problem with not being able to fix spelling mistakes. I should be able to fix the escapes and hopefully alter the font size to suit the picture width.

Of course the whole thing was put together in an afternoon, the code is rough and the interface rougher. The plan might be to make it a bit more ajaxy and add a few different poem types, proper haiku, kennngs, Cinquains etc. I am wondering if it would be worthwhile developing? Is it too much of a one off to be really useful? I’d love to know what you think?

You can see the webpage in a quick and dirty Lunes Simulator or directly Flickr Lunes.

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SconicPics is an iPhone/ipod touch application that allows you to create custom slideshow movies. The movies are made from still photos which you can add from the photo library or take with the iPhone’s camera. You can then narrate a voice over and create and enhanced m4v video with chapters.

In this example I’ve just used some pictures from classrooms I’ve been teaching in recently. It only took a few minutes to create and I am sure taking a little more time would have produced a more professional result and few plosives. I exported the 4v to reduce the size which removed the chapters too.

This looks like it could be a useful app in a classroom equipped with iphones or iPod touches. With touches pupils could use images downloaded from webpages or screenshots.

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I’ve had this installed for a few days now, but the flurry of snow tweets (the #uksnow Map 2.0 is looking great) reminded me to try the live streaming from my iPhone to USTREAM.

I must say I was surprised at how well it went. This was using a wireless connection and a G3 not G3s iPhone. I think the quality is not too bad especially after I turned the phone the right way up. A stand would have helped rather than a pile of videos(sic), dvds and books. The twitter integration is good too.