Blogging with the iTouch part 1

At an Apple event organised by the Sheffield College on 26 Nov 2009 and sponsored by http://www.krcs.co.uk, I was lucky enough to learn a lot more about using Macs generally (Dave Foster's session was particularly good. He's the manager of the Leeds West CLC) and some new things about the iTouch that I didn't know about as a newcomer to these devices.

Quite a few of my eCPD PDAs and MoLeNET projects are using or going to use iTouches so I thought I'd mention a couple of useful things here.

First of all, if you buy a small mic for your iTouch, you can use it as a voice recorder. Better still, set up an Audioboo.fm account and you can create podcasts on the fly. Here's my first audioboo: http://audioboo.fm/boos/92908-mic-for-itouch

The first mic I saw for the iTouch was the thumb tack-like mic at the Sheffield event: http://tinyurl.com/ybptuge

This is nice and small (and easily mistaken for a real thumb tack!) and works simply by inserting it in the headphone socket of the iTouch. However, the disadvantage is that you have to remove the mic in order to hear the recording (since you have inserted it in the headphone socket, the iTouch will try to play it back through the mic).

I went on Amazon.co.uk and bought this one instead: http://tinyurl.com/y8vcn9a

This is much bigger than the thumb tack so less aesthetically pleasing, but

allows you to simply record and then playback without having to remove it from the headphone socket. There is a slightly different model on Amazon and if anyone has any other models and experiences, it would be good to find out what you think to your mic for the iTouch.

The iTouch does not have a camera which makes it somewhat limited in capturing what you see. I learned to do a screen grab of the iTouch screen by clicking the on/off button at the top and the button below the screen at the same time. Whatever you are viewing at the time is then added to the camera roll and you can use the image in your blog or podcast. You can browse to a picture using Safari on the iTouch and screen capture it (ensure you are staying legal in terms of copyright, of course).

Other ways of getting photos to your iTouch without having to sync to iTunes would be to email pictures to yourself. Tap the picture in the email and a menu comes up with options to save your image.

Thanks to Dave Foster and James Clay for their ideas and introductions to the hardware/software.

Evernote and Dropbox have revolutionised my life

Just a quick post to say how excited I am about the possibilities of
using Evernote and Dropbox with learners to communicate and share
resources.

Set up an Evernote (evernote.com) account and download the app to your
pc, your mac, and your phone. Any note you create on your pc
automatically syncs to your phone (so reminders, to dos, directions
etc are easy to access).

So if you have an account that you have set up to share with learners,
and they use the same account details for their phone/computers, any
note that you create can be accessed on their phones. Use it to share
lesson summaries, curriculum factoids, to dos, deadlines etc. Learners
can create new notes (text, voice, photos) on their mobiles or at
their computers and these sync to the same account. At the next
lesson, you have access to rich media resources created by the
learners to explore! You can set up 'notebooks' for each learner to
help sort the notes.

Dropbox (dropbox.com) does the syncing thing but with files. Create an
account that you are willing to share with learners and download and
install dropbox on your pc. (Dropbox doesn't work on mobiles). It
appears as a folder in My Documents. You simply put files in there
that you want to share with learners, and if they have downloaded and
installed dropbox using the same account details, they will
automatically have the same files on their computer. Also a good way
for the learner to share files with the whole class. You can also put
files in the public folder and copy a link - this is useful if you
have a large file to share with people - instead of emailing it, put
it in a dropbox and send the link to the file.

I know tutors who are going to try this out with learners so I'll
report on their findings when we have something to report.

Making a paper box

Thanks to Dave Sugden for making the video on the spur of the moment and Di Dawson for showing me how to make the box in the first place!

One 'Web 2.0' site to rule them all

I've been on the search for one ultimate site that will do all that I want it to do, and I still haven't found it. So either someone out there can suggest something for me to try, or I'll have to create it myself!

The site has to be able to:
1. Accept email input of text, photos, videos, audio and other files like PowerPoint etc. (Posterous is good for this, will even convert ppt to iPaper)
2. Provide one or more email addresses that people can post to, regardless of their email address (Vox.com is good for this. Posterous requires you to enter all contributors' email addresses. I suppose this is good for protecting your site, but needs setting up at the start of an academic year)
3. Allow commenting on the post.
4. Be chronological
5. Allow tagging (tags are preferably added as part of the email)
6. Accept RSS feeds and display them in the same part of the window as a post to the blog (so kind of like Twitter. Blogger allows you to add RSS feeds on the side, separate to your blog posts.)
7. Option to be notified by email of contributions to the site.

I probably have a few more requirements but the above are the key ones for now. Can anyone step up to the challenge?

Posterous.com would be my recommendation for education at the minute and although you would have to set up all your learners as contributors to the site by adding their email address (or ask them to do this themselves!), this is one way of protecting the site from 'spam'. Posterous also allows you to set up a password in order to view the site, another advantage from a teaching and learning point of view.

Using email to blog to support learning

I had a fruitful session with a placement manager at Sheffield College yesterday - we discussed what she wanted the learners to be able to do:
1. Easily upload pictures and videos that they had taken with the XDA Flints or their own phones to one place so they could view them in class or in their own time.
2. Comment on each other's pictures and videos
3. Rate them

I was going to use FriendFeed but this only allows you to upload from your own email address, rather than providing you with a generic email address that everyone can use, so we decided to go with Vox.com which has a generous upload limit.

I discovered another great thing about Vox - you can generate additional email addresses to send stuff to. With each email address that you generate, you can add specific tags, so learners could email to one address and have their pictures automatically tagged with certain key words. This will become very useful if you want pictures to be searchable by assignment for instance.

Of course learners can also go online and add additional tags to the photos and videos, as well as the comments.

One thing we haven't yet worked out is the best way to socially share PowerPoint. Slideshare took its time and I wonder if anyone can point me to another good PowerPoint sharing site?

The downside to Vox is that I couldn't update it through an RSS feed. Only certain other blogs are supported.

I guess the one ultimate site that we want to use hasn't yet been invented!

BT 1571

I used to find the BT 1571 service handy for recording to my home phone while I was out and about, then picking up the mp3 from the website (kind of like a poor man's Gabcast or Ipadio). However, on checking it recently, they've removed this feature from their website! Boo hiss!
Wonder if anyone out there knows of other phone to web recording services?

Great social use of blog sites

I'd suggested to a tutor that they set up a blog site and give out the email to blog address to the learners so they could all add photos and reflections on one blog site. We're going to try this from Sept with a group so I'll update my blog later in the year with the outcomes of this.
I was chatting to some friends in a kitchen today and people are already using this function in their everyday lives: after a wedding, the bride and groom have given out a blog/photo site email address so that everyone can upload their photos of the event to one site for everyone else to look at. That's a great idea! And the fact that this is becoming everyday practice is all the more reason for us teachers to be adopting it in teaching, don't you think?