Category: Apps

May 24, 2013

App of the Week: Notability

What is it?

Notability is one of the best note-taking apps on the market. Notability allows you to do handwriting, typing and audio recording. It also has the ability to annotate imported or new pictures and PDFs.

What does it do?

Notability is a multi-functional note taking app. Features include: full-featured handwriting, PDF annotation, word processing, audio recording and media insertion. You can enhance your notes by adding pictures from your photo stream or taken with iPad camera, insert web clips, figures and drawing. You can crop, resize and draw on images to make them the way you want.

The app allows auto-sync with cloud service such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Box. This way you can always be sure that your noted are backed up. With the library organisation feature you can keep your note organised and protected. Notes can be imported as PDFs and RTFs from the cloud servers or web. Also, as .doc, .ppt, and .xls files as PDFs using Google Drive.

How can I use it in my teaching?

The apps is great for note taking during lectures, seminars and meetings. At York St John University we have also successfully used Notability to provide electronic peer feedback on each groups science display.

How much does it cost?

The app costs £1.49 and is available on the App Store.

May 17, 2013

App of the Week: iMovie

What is it?

iMovie allows you to create professional movies and trailers with ease from your iPad.

What does it do?

iMovie allows you to shoot and edit your video to produce HD quality (1080p) movies. You can record directly from the app or import video clips from the camera roll. The app has all the common functionality for video creation and editing including:

The ability to import sound, video and photos
The ability to set transitions
The ability to record audio (for voice overs)
The ability to add cast and credit pages
and built in theme for professional video production

Once you movie is complete you can share in on popular video platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. You can also save the movie to your iPads camera roll – this can be opened in Fuse and uploaded directly to the institutions media library. If you are fortunate to have Apple TV available in your classroom you can use Airplay to stream the movie to a HDTV.

How can I use it in my teaching?

If you want your students to create professional videos using iPads then you should definitely consider using iMovie. Here are two examples of how students have used iMovie to create videos.

The first is by two video is by two Initial Teacher Education students (Joshua Burnell and Frances Sladen). They used iMovie on the iPhone to produce a video for there science related class assembly.

The second video was created by a Emma Crosby who used iMovie to film and edit her BSL portfolio.

The creation and sharing of video content is something that can be embedded across many subject areas. The use of video provides students with the opportunity to further develop there digital literacy skills, an essential attribute that all students should leave university with.

How much does it cost?

iMovie is only available on iOS devices. It can be purchased from the app store for £2.99.

The windows equivalent is Windows Movie Maker, and Android users should check out WeVideo.

May 10, 2013

App of the Week: Dragon Dictation

What is it?

Dragon is a voice recognition application that allows you to speak and instantly converts your speech into text. It’s a quick and easy way of getting words “on the screen”. The app is available on iPhone, iPad and on second and third generation iPod Touch.

What does it do?

The app is very simple and easy to use. Just tap on the screen and start dictating. The app will provide a voice-to-text transcription of your speech. Using existing sharing features within the app you can easily use the text to message, email, facebook, tweet or just copy and paste wherever you need to.

For best result, you need to speak calmly and clearly. Dragon Dictation supports a number of foreign languages, as well as British and American Englishes.

How can I use it?

Dragon app is great for capturing ideas and dictating thoughts. It can be helpful for students who struggle with writing or typing. It’s also useful for hands-free text input for when you’re on the go. Note that Dragon Dictation requires network connection, wifi or 3G.

There is also a more advanced desktop dictation software available from the same developers, like Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 Premium for Windows. Although the Dragon app can be used for dictating essays and longer texts, the desktop version is definitely better for it, is more accurate with voice recognition. However, it is more pricey ranging from £39.99 to over £100.

How much does it cost?

The app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch is FREE.

May 3, 2013

App of the Week: ReferenceME

What is it?

ReferenceME is an incredibly simple app that allows you create a bibliography by simply scanning barcodes of books and organise the list in in an alphabetical order.

What does it do?

ReferenceME app lets you scan ISBN book barcodes using a mobile phone camera and converts it into a bibliography. You can also manually enter journal articles and the app will format the information for you into a bibliographical entry. The app supports the major of referencing styles used by universities and libraries so that you can convert your bibliography within seconds. The referencing styles include: Harvard , Vancouver, Oxford, Chicago Arts, Chicago Science, MLA, MHRA, APA.

The app is great for maintaining your reference list up-to-date in an easy and effective way. The app will automatically organise the list in an alphabetical order. When you have logged in all the references you can simply email the list to yourself and copy-paste it into a Word Document. With an option of creating multiple projects, the app allows you organise your references within different folders. The app requires internet access for the scanning function; however you can always enter all details manually.

How can I use it?

Keeping an up-to-date reference list for multiply assignments or when writing academic papers.

How much does it cost?

The app costs £0.69 and is available from the following online stores:

May 2, 2013

Our first iPad Cafe!

The iPad project team thought it would be a great idea to have a place for us to meet students from York St John and discuss:

how they currently use their mobile devices
apps that we use
what they think about iPads.

All students that had a device, be it a smart phone, iPad or other tablets were welcome to our meeting. We firstly spoke about the apps that we have discovered as a result of being part of the iPad project:

ReferenceMe - this is a great app for students who need to include a variety of references in their assignments. Students simply scan the barcode of a book using their devices, and the app will create the bibliography and citations in moments. You can also manually enter journal articles. ReferenceME then enables you to email all your references straight to your email account to then copy-paste into your assignment.

Pages - this is another great app for students. It works just like a word document where you can edit and create documents to record notes, write assignments, etc. However, as we discussed in the iPad Cafe, students with a smartphone may find it limiting to use this app due to the small screen. Pages is a lot more useful on a bigger screen such as an iPad.

Wunderlist - this is a very good organisational app that allows you to manage and share your daily to-do lists. For example, if you are doing a group presentation you can share tasks and sub-tasks with everyone within your group so they all know what they have to do as part of their contribution.

Socrative - the app allows teachers to create quizzes with multiple choice or short answer questions so that the class is more engaged in seminars. This app is available to use on the smartphone as well. It’s a great app for teachers to monitor whether students have understood the content of the seminar. There are a student and teacher apps.

The other students then spoke about the apps they use:

Skitch - one of the students mentioned that she uses Skitch a lot for her studies. She uses it to annotate PDF files. She said it was very visual, colorful and easy to use. This app is also a great one to use in the classroom for students to annotate fellow peers’ posters/presentations.

Evernote - another student spoke about how she uses Evernote. She uses this app to document her financial data, save her ideas for assignments and take notes on her lectures. She spoke about how she shares her ideas with her fellow peers.

Bible – a theology student mentioned how she uses a Bible app to aid her studies. She finds reading through it on her smartphone an easier way than reading an actual book.

We also discussed how they would feel about having an iPad for their lectures/seminars. Some said that they would find it a distraction and would end up going on social media sites and playing on games. Others said that they were used to multi-tasking and didn’t get too distracted by technology. They said that they would most likely check their Facebook/Twitter account but then be able to get straight back onto concentrating with their work. It depends on the person to whether they would be easily distracted by an iPad or not.

What students said they liked about iPads:

Light and can easily fit in your bag;
Great for reading books/journals;
Fast;
Amazing for organizing yourself;
So many apps to suit your needs.

One of the students mentioned that she had a an iPad session as part of the iPad project, and she found iPads very useful. She said they were very convenient for looking up information online whilst typing up notes onto the computer. It saved her from having to open loads of tabs on her computer and flicking backwards and forwards to different windows.

Overall, out first iPad Cafe was a success and we very much enjoyed interacting with students and finding out what they found useful about their own mobile devices. When we asked whether the students if they would like to use iPads in their lectures/seminars they all said they would love to!

We are looking forward to our next iPad cafe!

April 30, 2013

First Business School iPad Session

Last Thursday, 25th April was the first time the iPad project team has been involved in the classroom with the Business School students. It was a session taught by Brendan Paddison on the Tourism and Industries module and facilitated by Lena Henderson from Learning & Teaching Development and myself, a 2nd year Research Assistant for the iPad project.

1st first year Business Management students worked in the groups using iPads to do a collaborative research online and then creating a presentation using Keynote app. When presenting, students filmed each other using a Fuse app that allows us to upload the videos on the YSJ Helix Media Library. This meant students can now view their presentations and review their performance in preparation for their presentation assessment.

Being a second year Business Management student myself, this session gave me a unique perspective into this classroom scenario, as I have previously completed the tourism module which the students were taking part in. It made me aware that something like this would have been so helpful to me when I was in the same situation as they are now. It would have given me the chance to really improve my presentation skills so that when it came to second year I would have been more practised.

The following day me and Lena Henderson ran the same session with a different group of students from the same course. Instead of recording the presentations through Fuse app we decided it would be better to first record through the iPad video recorder and then upload it to Fuse later. This meant we could play back some of the videos straight away in the classroom and discuss and analyse their performance immediately. At the end of the session we used an quiz app called Socrative. The quiz allowed us to gain instantaneous student feedback about the use of iPads in their session. Examples of student feedback attained:

“Quick and easy, very effective.”

“They gave access to multimedia facilities previously unavailable in these sessions.”

There have been so many ways in which my iPad has helped me in my classes, from my calendar to ‘office HD‘ for note taking. I think during the second year of the course when you have more work to manage and more pressure with the assignments starting to count towards your final degree mark you can appreciate everything the iPad has to offer and utilise it.

April 26, 2013

App of the Week: Nearpod

What is it?

Nearpod is an interactive educational app that enables teachers to use their iPads to manage content on students’ iPads, iPhones or iPods. It combines presentation, collaboration, and real-time assessment tools into one integrated solution. It is reviewed to be one of the first teacher’s apps on the market.

What does it do?

This app has a multimedia platform which allows teachers create new presentations using built-in templates or upload existing slides, and add video, text, images or web pages for their lessons. Then using a Teacher app version, teachers share their slides with students, who connect to a Student app version on their devices. Teachers have control over the pace of the lesson and they can monitor and collate students’ responses to quizzes and polls.

How can I use it in my teaching?

1. Create Interactive Content: Use features such as quizzes, videos, polls, drawing tools, and more.
2. Engage: In the classroom teachers can share content with their students and manage the flow of the lecture.
3. Assess: Teachers can assess learning in real time, and personalize instruction for students. Additionally, teachers can log in to www.nearpod.com to access post-session data and obtain detailed activity reports.

How much does it cost?

Nearpod app is free and available only on Apple store for iPad, iPhone and iPod. Paid subscriptions are also available: ‘Gold’ with extended features ($10 per month) and ‘School’ with extensive support provided.

You can watch some case studies on Vimeo – http://vimeo.com/nearpod.

April 19, 2013

App of the Week: MyScript Calculator

What is it?

MyScript Calculator is a freehand writing calculator available on both iOS and Android devices. The app is very accurate in converting free handwriting and operates a large number of mathematical operations.

What does it do?

MyScript Calculator converts hand written numbers and symbols into digital and instantaneously shows you the results. You can add further numbers and symbols to your calculations or erase what you don’t want. The app can add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Moreover, you it can perform trigonometric functions such as sin, cos, tan, and the degree of the angle on the screen. Among other functions is ability to draw square roots, add exponents, and draw a line to divide by another number. The app has a useful palm rejection option which will ignore the part of the hand that touches the screen. It is useful for those who rest their hand on the writing surface when drawing.

How can I use it?

The app could be useful for math students and teachers. Or indeed, anyone who wants to make a quick calculation.

How much does it cost?

MyScript Calculator is a free app. It can be downloaded from the following online stores:

April 12, 2013

App of the Week: Office² HD

Recently, we had an enquiry about a good word processing app for students to use in the classroom in order to make notes within a pre-created template which will be loaded onto iPads prior to the class. So, the app of the week I am going to write about is a Microsoft Word document processing app called Office² HD.

What is it?

Office² HD allows you to open, view, create and edit Microsoft Word (doc & docs), Excel (exl & xlsx), and PowerPoint (ppt & pptx) files right from your iPad. The app also makes it possible to to do document tracked changes on your iPad. And there is always an option of creating simple text files for making quick notes. With Office² HD you can stay organised by creating folders and moving documents easily. Tthe app also lets you email or print docs right from the app.

Office2 HD PrtScn — Office2 HD Document Editing Tools

What does it do?

Office 2 HD is very intuitive. After you create or open a document the editing tools appear, which are very similar to your standard ones you get in Word, Excel, etc. As far as word documents are concerned your options are: text and paragraph formatting, table creation, images and real-time spelling correction, etc. Spread sheet support includes multiple worksheets, sorting, formatting, cell merging, to name a few. Office² HD allows you to set up access to a cloud service such as DropBox, Google Docs or others, if you want to use your own files instead of creating new within Office² HD.

How can I use it in my teaching?

The app is useful for creating and editing word documents on the go or in class. For example, you can create a template of a document and let the students fill it in. It could be a table to help structure an analysis or a list of questions that students are required to answer during a seminar.

How much does it cost?

It’s £5.49 and is only available from the app store.

You could also check the Quickoffice Pro app, which is probably a more advanced and expensive world processing app and is available on both iOS and Android devices.

April 5, 2013

App of the Week: TED

TED brings together talks from some of the world’s most fascinating people: education radicals, tech geniuses, medical mavericks, business gurus, and music legends. TED is devoted to ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’.

As well as informative, inspiring and fascinating presentations there is also a new beta section called TED Ed: Lessons Worth Sharing, which aims to bring together carefully curated educational videos.

I asked the Technology Enhanced Learning team to select their favourite TED videos for sharing in the post, and this is what they have chosen:

Phil – William Kamkwamba: How I harnessed the wind

Daniel – Kevin Allocca: Why videos go viral

Mark – Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense

TED is available to download from:

Windows Store: http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/ted-app/02ee19ae-d910-47d5-80e0-435f9b3c1852

What is your favourite TED video, and why? Let us know in the comments section below…

Phil