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How Apple changed the face of education

January 19, 2012, will go down in the history books as one of the greatest days for education. Big call, I know, but Apple’s launch of iBooks 2 and iBooks Author heralds a new era in not only textbook production, but, more importantly, in how students embrace learning. In November last year I wrote a post about why publishers of eTextbooks were getting it all wrong. This paragraph summarises the crux of my disappointment:

Where were the embedded videos? Audio narration? Progress check quizzes with immediate feedback to a student? Animations? Animations students can modify to see different results? (obviously it does depend on what the subject matter is). Click and drag exercises? A dictionary? Or at least a glossary of the chapter’s key terminology? I could go on for a while…

In iBooks Author there is now a user-friendly yet sophisticated tool to create interactive and rich content; exactly what I envisaged above! Some of this content includes:

interactive images / diagrams
embedded movies
entire Keynote presentations
quizzes (called ‘reviews’)
3D objects
glossary tool
image gallery

In addition, iBooks 2 adds a slicker way to highlight text (compared with regular ePub files) and automatically creates ‘study cards’ from this highlighted text and any notes a user (e.g. student) writes.

I’ve been playing around with iBooks Author for the past few hours and I’m absolutely amazed by how easy this software is to use. Apple have created a very slick program that can be used by people of all ages. Teachers, students and school management could all make use of this free software.

The simplicity of the program is created via templates. The template chooser (shown above) opens when you first create a project. Each template is very similar in terms of offering different types of page layouts, including chapter overviews, one-two-three column spreads, dedication, forward, copyright pages and so on, but you can still change features like the font, fill color and overall layout. Placeholders are automatically included and inserting images is simply a drag and drop affair. The location of these placeholders can be changed in an instant. Likewise, special widgets are included and these also employ the drag and drop functionality. It’s the widgets that create the interactivity – additional notes on images, embedded movies and quizzes, image galleries, 3D objects that can be rotated and even whole Keynote presentations. It’s the widgets that no other ePub creation tool has managed to integrate successfully into the development environment (Creative Book Builder has come close, but is, unfortunately, left in the wake of iBooks Author). For techie people there’s even a feature whereby developers can create their own widgets using HTML 5 and Javascript. And you’re not going to believe how good the result is when importing text documents from Pages or Word (.docx included, not just .doc). Tables, bulleted and numbered lists, and paragraph styles are, for once, actually retained!

In fact, constructing an interactive book in iBooks Author is a ~~walk~~ stroll in the park! The only ‘hard’ aspect to the process is in planning and developing your content – this includes preparing your images, Keynote files and movies etc. The majority of this would be done outside of iBooks Author. It’s very similar to creating a website; 80% of your time is spent in developing content and resources and only 20% of the time is needed to combine said resources to construct the final product. Although I haven’t tried this yet, I’m fairly sure that iBooks Author doesn’t turn a 2D image into a 3D object – you’d have to have some other means of doing this and it’s an area in which I’m a bit vague at present. That is likely to be the topic of a future post…

This video demonstrates how to use iBooks Author. In fact, this was all I needed to get started with the program!

Now despite my excitement (I have the same feeling I experienced when I first got my iPad 18 months ago) some readers may think I’m being paid by Apple and/or hate Windows (or other platforms). I can assure you that I’m not (on all counts) and I do think that despite my enthusiasm for these new tools, especially iBooks Author, there are a number of concerns and limitations.

You must have a Mac to run iBooks Author. Schools running Windows have no access to this software.
Apple restrict your distribution of your iBook. Everything goes through an iTunes Connect account and for books where you charge (up to $14.99) Apple take their 30% cut. Even if you’re not worried about this, I’m not sure if it’s possible to create an in-house book in iBooks Author and then upload this to your school’s LMS for students and staff to download to their iPads. More investigation is needed to see if this is possible or not with interactive ePub files that you want to distribute for free.
The new Textbooks category is not supported by the New Zealand iBookstore. In fact, we can’t purchase any books through iBookstore. We only have the option to download Gutenberg books from a very small selection. The interactive books created in iBooks Author are published to the Textbooks category (which also distinguishes them from plain ePub books). There’s a real worry here that students outside the USA won’t benefit from these tools!

My childhood fantasy of living on the Starship Enterprise can actually be a reality albeit with a slightly different look. In my case, the ship is ‘Titoki Street’, the technology is an iPad and the fascination, inspiration and love of learning is encapsulated in a interactive, rich-media book.

Bring it on, yet fingers crossed New Zealand students don’t miss out!!

I only have one question – why oh why didn’t this software come out at the start of the summer holidays?!

Xcode for beginners 02 – Hello World

16 Jan

As is traditional in programming courses, your first app will be a Hello World example. Specifically, the words “Hello World” will appear at the touch of a button on screen.

The screencast below walks you through what you need to do in Xcode, from creating a new project to running your app in the iOS simulator. The code itself is explained in more detail afterwards.

THE CODE…

(ViewController) Header file

.h file extension
Establishes the controls used in the app’s interface, in this example the label and the button controls. It kind of serves as the link between your user interface (i.e. what you created in the xib file) and the app’s main code (i.e. in the implementation file)
Sets the name of the controls used and their ‘event’ (to put it into Visual Basic terms), in this case: outlet and action
Outlet is tagged with the label. Think of outlet being another way of saying output - the control that we called ‘label’ is designed to display or ‘output’ text
Action is tagged with the button. This tells Objective-C that when a button is clicked something will occur – this is the ‘action’

Note that other than the setup of controls in this project, no other code goes into the header file. How these controls will be used is written in the implementation file.

IBOutlet UILabel *label; creates an instance of a label object in the header file.

IBOutlet is short for Interface Builder Outlet - that is, what follows is related to an object that you clicked and dragged from the utilities panel (in Xcode) to the xib file (i.e. iPhone mockup screen).
UILabel states that the outlet object being linked from the xib (interface) file to the header file is a label
*label; is the name of the instance of a label object. In this example our label instance is also called label, but we could have called it anything we wanted to…

In short, IBOutlet UILabel *label; is making a connection between the iPhone interface created in the xib file and the project’s code setup in the header file. Thus…

Create an instance of a label object called (in this particular example), ‘label’

- (IBAction)button:(id)sender; creates an instance of a button object.

- (IBAction)button: indicates that the object created will perform some kind or behaviour or ‘action’. In this example, a button object (called ‘button’ in this case) is being instantiated.
(id)sender; tells Xcode that the button will send messages, when clicked, to the button’s method, which we’ll create next in the implementation file.

(View Controller) Implementation file

.m file extension
Contains the majority of the code in a project
Indicates what will happen, exactly, when the end-user touches the button

So this code is within a method (that is, one or more statements that outline what will happen when the method is executed).
A method encloses it’s statements within curly braces { }
One or more statements can be written inside the curly braces
Each statement is like a one line instruction to the compiler
Each statement ends with a semi-colon ;

Finally, what we’re adding to the end of the implementation file in this project is the button’s method (i.e. the code that will run (yes, even if it is only one line!) when the button is clicked.

Objective-C says - (IBAction)button:(id)sender {

Visual Basic .Net says something like Private Sub myButton_Click… etc

Objective-C says label.text = @”Hello World”;

Visual Basic .Net says something like lblOutput.Text = “Hello World”

We’ll extend the Hello World example to include capturing user input in the next tutorial, Xcode for beginners 03 – Using a text box to input data

Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog, so that you can follow each tutorial as they’re posted!

6 Comments

Posted by Jenny on January 16, 2012 in iDevices, iOS, Programming, Software, Xcode

Tags: Apple, iOS, programming, Xcode 4

Xcode for beginners 01 – Getting Started

04 Jan

Trying to develop apps for iOS devices is a HUGE learning curve. I wouldn’t like to attempt this unless I had some programming experience, that’s for sure! Over the past few weeks I’ve been teaching myself ANSI C in preparation for the move to Objective-C, but then I hit a snag. There’s so much to Xcode, Apple’s free IDE for developing iOS and Mac OSX apps, when you first open it that I was having difficulty finding appropriate resources for where I was at – right at the bottom – wanting to learn new coding skills, but also wanting to see my results in a visual interface. Most of the resources I found were focused entirely on code and/or were way beyond my present skill set with Xcode and Objective-C.

Then I found the book iPhone and iPad Apps for Absolute Beginners by Rory Lewis. His approach is to get non-engineering students into programming, so unlike other resources I’ve come across, Lewis doesn’t attempt to explain all the nitty gritty of what code is doing. Instead his aim is to tell you what you need to know only when you need to know it. The trick is to just accept this premise and have faith that things will become clearer in the long-term. I’ve ordered the print edition from Amazon and also have the ebook on my iPad as well. So far, so good! It’s the one resource that hasn’t completely lost my interest after chapter one at this stage!

In my series, Xcode for beginners, I’m going to use this blog as an outlet for putting things into my own words. I’m already thinking that I’ll make comparisons with Visual Basic .NET when necessary as that’s been my main programming focus of late. We’ll see how it goes…

What you need to get started

An Intel-based Mac. Any Mac laptop or desktop 2006 or later
To run the latest version of Xcode you need Lion OSX
Signup as an Apple developer. You can either register as a developer (no $$ needed) or pay about $100 per year. The latter option is needed to be able to submit apps to the App Store, but when you’re first starting out it isn’t a requirement. Either way, this gives you access to Apple’s Developer Center
Xcode – login to the Developer Center and download the latest version. This is the programming environment (IDE) that you’ll use to write code, develop a user interface and run simulations.

Once you’ve got all this setup you’re ready for your next tutorial, Xcode for beginners 02 – Hello World coming soon!

Essential back-to-school iPad kit

14 Jan

Are you a middle or high school student? Do you want to use your iPad at school instead of carrying a heavy laptop? If you answered YES to either of these questions, read on to discover 11 must-have apps for 2011 – it’ll be worth it, guaranteed!

11 essential back-to-school apps for students

I don’t have any affiliations to the developers of these apps, so I can give an objective point of view. I have however, played around with each app listed and have tried to view them from a student’s perspective in particular. Each app listed here is intended for students ranging in ages from about 10 to 18. Many can in fact be used by other ages as well, but that’s the age range I deal with, so it’s natural to start there. All the apps can be considered worthy for general education support. It doesn’t matter whether you’re into the sciences, humanities, languages or technology – I’ve chosen to present these apps in particular because I think they would really help ALL students rather than a specific subject area.

Well, that’s enough preamble…let’s get to it. I’ve grouped the apps into 5 categories based on how students might use them:

Organisation
Reference
Note-taking
File management
Revision

1. Organisation

iStudiez Pro ($4.19)

This app is great for organising your timetable, homework and when assignments are due.

You won’t need one of those A5, clunky diaries any more and you’ll never be late for class!

2. Reference

Dictionary.com (FREE)

Of all the dictionary apps available, this has to be one of the best – it combines more features than other apps, and it uses a clean and intuitive interface.

You’re given word family, different meanings clearly defined, and etymology (word origins) of the words you look up. The thesaurus combines both synonyms AND antonyms, many of which are also hyperlinked to additional pages.

iTranslate (FREE)

This app would be particularly useful if English is not your first language. In fact, it allows you to choose which language you want to translate from and which language you would like to translate to, so it’s a worthy app for all students.

It’s another example of an app that utilises a clean user interface and is therefore straightforward to use. As the adage suggests, sometimes less is more…

Word Study & Grammar ($2.59)

So you’ve got your English essay back and the teacher’s comment mentions that you use split infinitives, double negatives and keep ending sentences with prepositions. Think of this app as a grammar reference book that will help you fix problems with your written syntax. Even if you’re unsure of the basics such as the purpose of nouns, verbs and adjectives, this guide will help you to become informed of all things ‘grammar’.

3. Note taking

inClass (FREE)

This app is the perfect tool for taking notes in class AND organising your schedule.

Better still, you can organise your notes into separate notebooks (say, a notebook for each subject) and even add sub topics within each notebook. It’s also possible to record your homework, prioritise tasks and list your teacher’s contact details/office hours. It’s a delight to use and isn’t bogged down with gimicky features that are found in many productivity apps,

I have to say that this is one of my favourite apps. You have to try it out for yourself!

MyScratchWork (FREE)

Use this app when you’re taking notes from online sources.

When your iPad is in landscape, half the screen is a notepad and the other half is a browser window. It’s the app you’d use when you’re taking notes while researching a topic, yet you don’t have to have a separate pen and paper, or keep switching back and forth between two apps. You can read online material AND take notes at the same time in the one app!

Pages ($13.99)

You’ve probably heard of Apple’s word processing app even if you haven’t downloaded it yet. The reason it’s in this list is because at the end of the day, all students (regardless of subjects taken) have to write essays, book reports and so on.

Pages is a word processing tool that is incredibly simple to use and is not ‘fiddly’ like other apps of a similar nature. Use Pages when you’re writing your final English essay or History report and then email it to your teacher, all from the app.

4. File management

Downloads HD ($4.19)

A lot of apps allow you to view documents online, but few allow you to quickly and easily download files AND organise them in folders. If your school uses an online system such as Blackboard or Moodle to post resources, Downloads HD is a fail-safe app to use.

I found that many other apps either took far too long to download even fairly small documents and/or stopped working when I tried it in Blackboard. I’ve had no problems with this app at all though. You can also transfer downloaded files to your computer at home if you want as well.

The free version of Downloads HD has all the features of the paid version, but you can only store up to 7 files at a time. This could become annoying, especially if you’re used to teachers posting PDF and PPT files etc online, so the paid version is well worth it.

5. Revision

FlashCards Plus Pro ($6.49)

This app’s user interface has a high visual appeal and it’s very intuitive. The Pro version allows you to create your own flash cards within the app, including images on the cards, so it’s worth the small investment. You can also download card sets from Quizlet.com.

It’s what I’d call one of the more advanced flash cards apps available because it uses the Leitner system of spaced repetition – huh? What this means is that the app keeps track of the cards you get right and the ones you get wrong. The cards you get incorrect will be shown to you on a more regular basis than the cards you already know. The advantage here is that the app really helps you to commit key terms and concepts to memory rather than repeatedly showing you things you already know.

iStudyAlarm ($1.29)

Most people have trouble studying for long periods of time and iStudyAlarm is designed to help you. Using research that suggests that the optimum study time is 20 minutes, you can set the alarm for intervals of this length. When the alarm sounds you’ll know it’s time to have a 5 minute break before hitting the books again.

The app also includes some really useful information about how to get the most out of your study time and also lots of tips for sitting exams.

Popplet Lite (FREE)

This is one of the easiest mind mapping tools I’ve come across.

It fits well with using the iPad’s touch screen to enter data and it’s user interface is very intuitive. Other mind mapping apps I’ve tried are just too fiddly in comparison. When you’ve created your mind map you have the option to send it in an email as a JPG. This can then be saved to the iPad’s camera roll. If you want to keep the mind map yourself rather than share it with others, the easiest way would be to take an image of it by pressing the on/off button and the Home button at the same time. This way the mind map goes straight into the Photos app (i.e. camera roll) and bypasses the email step.

The Lite version is fairly basic and only appears to let you work on one mind map at a time, but I figured that you can get an image of your map to use elsewhere anyway. Upgrade to the paid version ($12.99) if you regularly use mind maps as part of your revision process though.

Finally, one more tip to enhance your research, note taking and learning…

Diigo is an online tool for highlighting text and creating sticky notes, among other things. You can download a plugin for iPad’s Safari browser which allows you to highlight text from documents and web pages that you’re viewing online rather than downloading. It syncs to your free Diigo.com account, which records the article/web page on which you’ve highlighted text (and the text you’ve highlighted, of course!)

Imagine critiquing an author’s work, researching the origins of WW1, or commentaries on the latest economic crisis. Using your iPad, you can collect important quotes, identify recurring themes and write your own thoughts on the fly using Safari and Diigo’s web highlighter tool.

Now you (and your iPad) are armed with a software kit ready for the start of a new academic year – and all for less than $35!

1 Comment

Posted by Jenny on January 14, 2011 in iDevices, iPad, mLearning, Software

Tags: @edublogs, Apple, apps, back-to-school, Blackboard, File management, iPad, K-12, Learning, note-taking, organisation, reference, revision, Software

Why the iPad doesn't need a USB port…

04 Jan

There’s been much speculation in the media over the last couple of weeks about the iPad 2, reportedly due for release early in 2011. Two of the many rumours I agree with – 2 cameras and retina display – because they are already present in the iPhone 4 and latest iPod Touch. HD video recording is also a real possibility in the next generation of iPads because again, this ability already exists in the aforementioned iDevices. Talk of the iPad 2 having a USB port however is leading people down the wrong path, IMHO.

The iPad doesn’t need a USB port. The camera connection kit that already exists as an accessory provides a USB connection with your camera, but only that – your camera. You can’t plugin a memory stick as the iPad’s operating system (OS) only recognises signals from a camera; the ‘universal’ part of USB doesn’t apply to the iPad like it does to your laptop. Instead, if you try and access data on a pen drive, you’re presented with the following error message:

Camera connection kit USB error message

So unless you’re transferring photos from a camera, the kit’s USB connector is a no-go zone.

The iPad doesn’t need a USB port. The other connector in the current camera connection kit supports SD cards. Great you say, but again, like the USB connector, this is inextricably linked to the iPad’s camera roll, so it’s another example of only being able to transfer photos. I like the SD connector though as it means no cables are needed (I don’t even use cables when transferring photos to a laptop – haven’t done so in several years! – always use the SD slot instead). When the iPad’s OS registers the SD card, the camera roll opens and you can download any or all of the photos that you wish.

Transferring photos with the camera connection kit's SD connector

Too bad if your camera uses compact flash though…

The iPad doesn’t need a USB port. There are already heaps of apps, paid and free, that allow you to transfer photos between iPhone, iPod, iPad and computer. Some of these focus on transfer between iDevices only, some are just Mac and others support PC as well. Some use WiFi whilst others use Bluetooth. The point is, it’s already possible to transfer photos between different devices using apps AND wirelessly. What then, does a USB port offer users, really?

The iPad doesn’t need a USB port – and this is the clincher! The iPad uses the iPhone OS. Given the nature of the OS it’s easy to identify that the iPad is NOT a full replacement for a laptop or desktop – not yet, anyway. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE my iPad (and will likely be first in line for iPad 2), but I’ve found that the iPad’s biggest area of weakness is related to file management. I lot of people seem to assume that the iPad can be a replacement for a laptop, but don’t understand the implications of the menu-based OS that controls how users interact with the hardware and application software.

The iPad doesn’t need a USB port because the OS dictates that all file management is app-based only. Sure, you can import and export Word documents etc to and from apps, although I’ve found this to have a high failure rate. Developers have made some improvements, but there’s still much work to be done in this respect. The ‘open in…’ feature seen in Safari even doesn’t respond particularly well to Apple’s own Pages app. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve tried to view a document from the Internet in Pages, Goodreader, ReaddleDocs and many other (generally good) productivity tools only to have it fail. It works about 10% of the time, which quite frankly is unacceptable. The iPad’s OS doesn’t have a My Documents/Library (PC) or Finder (Mac) component built into it, unlike the operating systems we’re familiar with on our computers.

Seeing a quick view of a document in Safari works, but trying to download this document into another app is a different ball game and one in which is the most frustrating thing about the iPad. I’ve had students wanting to download documents from their Blackboard courses onto their iPad, only to discover that they can only ‘view’ the file, not ‘download’ it. Even Pages doesn’t allow you to organise documents into folders. If you’ve only got a limited number of files then fine, but imagine being a student trying to organise potentially hundreds of files across all of your courses in even one academic year. How many files do you have on your laptop or desktop right now? How do you organise these files? Could you replicate that file/folder structure in the iPad? If you’re a student or teacher, my answer to that would be probably not.

The iPad doesn’t need a USB port because the OS precludes it’s use. Wireless technologies mean users can transfer photos and files (sometimes!) from one iPad to another (or iDevice), or from computer to iPad. I have so many productivity apps on my iPad that it’s a bit embarrassing to count them all! Yet I haven’t found the one killer app, mainly because whilst each have advantages, they all seem to fall down in how they manage files (documents such as PDF, Word, PPT or equivalents etc, not photos) and/or in what type of files they allow users to transfer (especially without having to use iTunes, which is bloated and horrid on a PC!) There’s no coincidence that it’s photos that seem to be the easiest to transfer rather than documents. That’s because at the end of the day the iPad, being a consumer device, was designed for media rather than file management. There’s much potential in this hardware, but there’s still some way to go before we all ditch laptops and desktops in favour of a slate – teachers, students and businesses alike. And until we get to that point, there’s really no clear reason why the iPad needs a USB port at all.

Jenny

Flexible Learning with Mobile Devices

Tag Archives: Apple

How Apple changed the face of education

Xcode for beginners 02 – Hello World

Xcode for beginners 01 – Getting Started