DIIA Blog

With over 10 million devices now out in people’s hands and over 10,000 applications available on Apple’s iPhone/iPod Touch AppStore, there is way around ignoring this new device and the impact it is having on mobile technology and technology in general. Where this device may begin to have some specific impact is on the college campus. Already universities like Abliene Christian, Stanford and others are rolling out applications and webapps for the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

This is a several part in depth look at some applications that I have found helpful or intriguing from an educational perspective (the list seems to grow by itself!). Feel free to comment on others because with 10,000 apps out there its hard to look at them all! I will be posting this list/review in several parts on the blog. If you have used these or know of others, please let me know. I have tried to include as many free apps as possible, but some are not free but are worth the price of admission. Many are just 99 cents and other just a few dollars so they are hardly extravagantly expensive.

One of the biggest advantages, if not the biggest advantage of the iPhone platform, is the Mobile Safari web browser. This app alone has made the device by far the best mobile web experience on any handheld device (despite lack of Flash support for now). This coupled with Apple’s revolutionary and seamless touch screen technology makes web browsing a breeze on the devices. Consequently, now students have access to a world of information in their hands and this changes things for the learner (and teacher). So with this in mind, here we go…the apps that I have found compelling so far…

To find these apps do a search through iTunes Store (click on App Store once in the iTunes store) on your laptop or desktop or search through the AppStore app on your iPhone or Touch. You may find you need a good Wifi connection to download apps. You will also need a free iTunes Store account whether you download free or paid apps. Also its worth checking out apps via the Top 25 paid and free apps and also by category. I’ve tried to provide links to the developer websites when possible.

WIKIPEDIA

While Wikipedia is still on the fringes of being an acceptable source in academia, it is a great starting point for general research or to find more specific sources. There is no shortage of apps that hook into the breadth of Wikipedia’s offerings. Here are a few that can help a student find ideas for deeper research.

WikiMe (99 cents)- Shows Wiki entries based upon your location. Slick interface and great concept. There is a similar free app called GeoPedia also worth looking at if 99 cents is outside the budget.

WikiTap (Free)- Unique approach allows video annotation. Also allows access to a dictionary. You can add photos and videos tin the MyMedia area or associate these with Wikipedia entries which is nice for students collecting initial information.

Wikipanion (Free) and Wikipanion Plus ($4.99) (Free) – Offers one of the better Wikipedia browsing experiences. Save images to your library, look up words with Wiktionary, listen to audio files, browse viewing history and more. The paid for Plus version offers download que for offline browsing plus viewing in landscape mode which is nice.

Encyclopedia ($7.99) – Downloads ALL of the English Wikipedia to your device for offline access. Handy for fieldwork away from cell or WiFi connections.

OTHER INFORMATION and REFERENCE RESOURCES

Dictionaire (Free) – A dictionary in your pocket. It simple and does one thing: looks up words.

Dictionary ($4.99) – Includes spell check, bookmarks, text to speech, pronunciation guide, history and more. But, its $4.99. Great if you really use a dictionary a great deal, but other offerings such as Dictionaire are free and do the trick most of the time.

NetNewsWire (Free) – One of the best Mac RSS readers for the desktop is now on the iPhone. It is nicely implemented and can sync with your RSS feeds kept online through NewsGator and the RSS desktop app. IMPORTANT: You can create just a subset of your feeds for the iPhone if you have lots of RSS feeds. My advice: Pick your top 10 or 12 and look at them on your device. Otherwise it is very slow to load dozens or hundreds of feeds which is something you will see criticized on the reviews.

MyDelicious ($1.99) – There are several Del.icio.us account managers/readers available, some are free and some are very bare bones. Delicious and Red Delicious are two others. But MyDelicious is nice because it allows you to search multiple tags, toggle info about your bookmarks and best of all, it allows you to see the link website without leaving the application. You do also have the option of loading the bookmark into mobile Safari too. Features coming down the pipe include the ability to see other’s Delicious accounts, saving for offline browsing and editing bookmarks from an iPhone/Touch

STORING AND SHARING DOCUMENTS/FILES/MEDIA

ReaddleDocs ($14.99) – While its not free and is the most expensive on the list, it is a very nice app for document management, probably one of the best out there. It has a number of features that may not be apparent of first use, so its worth reading more about it here. It uses a companion online storage service to store and transfer files among devices.

Stanza (Free) – Becoming one of the defacto e-book readers on the iPhone/Touch. You can grab loads of free books, news and magazine content with Stanza. The desktop version can even reformat documents for uploading to a Kindle.

AirSharing ($4.99)- While not free, it is worth it if you want to use the device for file storage. You just type in the URL given in the app into your desktop browser and you can download or upload any files to folders that you create via a local network or WebDAV suppported server . Its very easy to use and quite useful for moving files around between your device and your desktop machine.

DataCase ($6.99) – Similar to AirSharing but allows you to create and mount different volumes on device and desktop/laptop machine. It also can filter our files based on type so you can quickly see what type of files you have stored on your device such as Documents, Photos, Audio, Video, etc. Note: this uses your device as a hard drive so it won’t tell you that you have 12 podcasts in iTunes for instance.

TextGuru ($4.99)- One of the only apps that actual supports cut and paste. Yes, Virginia, there is cut and paste on the iPhone/Touch (sort of). Mainly document viewer, but has a text editor that allows for cutting and pasting, copying and more. It has some very good file sharing capabilities as well. It is a sister application to MediaShare below.

MediaShare
(99 cents) – Media Share lets you share media between iphones/Touches using the built-in bluetooth. It is a sister application to TextGuru listed above.

PART 2 to follow…

Keene

Tags: Apple, education, iphone

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 at 6:48 pm and is filed under Apple, Uncategorized, education, iphone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.