DIIA Blog

Many people thought that the iPhone and iPod Touch would not be good e-readers - too small many said. Well, I thought this too. But, I bit the bullet and downloaded both the free iPhone Kindle app and the free Barnes and Noble Reader bought some relatively inexpensive titles and found myself actually reading more than I have in a good while (books at least). Entire books. I find the screen actually perfectly adequate for reading, but the killer feature is that device is usually with me all the time, so I can read whenever the time or notion hits me. This convenience outweighs many of the drawbacks including screen size. I don’t want to drag an e-reader around with me all the time, but a smartphone is a necessity. My wife sometimes leaves hers at home and I always look at her with a look of incomprehension. “Are you SURE you don’t want to bring that with you?” I ask.

The same can be said for educational apps for the iPhone. Ahhh… what good will are they? Kids just use the thing for Wikipedia, social networking and IM’ing… all distractions and inaccurate. And who needs another rote memorization app that many of the iPhone “education” apps offer? Well, it appears that one company has thought a little deeper about what an educational app should be and have released an app for essay writing. Yes, essay writing. On an iPhone no less. How or why would one want to do this you might ask? Well, it turns out that plenty of college age kids think its a pretty good idea. The application is called the Essay Writing Wizard (I know, sort of a mouthful). What this app does that no other one does right now is help students to THINK about how to put together their thoughts into a carefully constructed essay. The app offers a number of features and tips for writing good essays and then guides the student through the process without dumbing things down or hand holding. Its really a tool for collecting ideas and the formalizing these into an essay. Similar in spirit to the e-readers on the iPhone, but for writing, EWW allows one to capture ideas and notes on the go, wherever they are. This little feature turns out to be quite powerful as we all have discovered with our iPhones and 100,000 plus available apps. So finally, in this large mix of iPhone Apps, a tool emerges that can truly help college kids get going on one tried and true part of academic life in higher education, the essay, and do it write away.

For an in depth review of this app, check out the Edu-In-Review review. It is comprehensive gives you the details on the app which is $3.99. You can buy add ons for particular writing areas as well which prices varying.   

The App is made by Niles Technology Group which you can read more about here.

Keene Haywood

To say its a mobile computing world is an understatement. Its a tidal wave that is flooding the tech universe and to gain some perspective on just what this means, its worth checking out this video. The stats say it all and make for a very compelling case. The world is going mobile and its up to educators to figure out how this is going to affect students, teachers and the entire education and learning process.

Did You Know 4.0 video

Keene

So what happens when you reach the maximum number of apps you can install on your iPhone? Does Steve Jobs congratulate you with a phone call? Do bells go off next time you log onto your iTunes Store account? Just what the heck happens? Well, dear readers, I pushed the limit to find out and here is what happened. But first some numbers… There are 16 apps installed by default (and cannot be removed) on an iPhone/iPod Touch. You can install an additional 128 apps plus the 4 in the app bar at the bottom of your screen (the dock, if you will, of the iPhone). This brings the grand total to: 148 apps on 9 screens (this is the max number of screens you can have). This is the most apps can have installed at the moment (OS upgrades may allow more in the future). And yes, I have succeeded in completely filling my iPhone with apps. Perhaps in 2019 there will be an iPhone that can store all 100,000 apps that may be out by then. I just hope they come up with some other way to find and organize them as flipping through screen after screen does get a bit old, even with just 9 screens. But I digress…

Anyway, I was wondering what happens when you go over the digital threshold into the unknown. What happens is this - Your app will install but it won’t show up anywhere on your screens because they are full. When you go back to the App download page in the AppStore on your phone, it shows that the app was installed but of course you can’t see it on your device and you can’t re-download it. The trick is to delete an app and then restart your iPhone/iPod Touch. Then when the device boots up again the app will finally install and will be seen in the space where you deleted a previous app. Whew! I thought my iPhone might start smoking or worse, but alas its not too bad to go over the limit, but it would be nice to get some sort of an alert screen to give you a heads up.

Also, don’t worry about deleting an app. The iTunes Store keeps track of what apps you have downloaded, either free or paid, and will allow you to download the app again if it senses that the app is gone from your phone when you next sync it with iTunes. You must be logged into your iTunes account in order for this to work.

Just in case anyone out there is wondering… in the words of The Marathon Man, “Is it safe?” Yes, it is safe so download away.

Keene

Building online databases is a foundation of Web 2.0 (a term that is starting to feel a bit long in the tooth) applications. Just about every web app has a backend database usually running mySQL and connecting to the browser through PHP which performs the heavy lifting of retrieving data from the SQL database and serving it to the user on the fly. Creating these web apps requires a programmer with some decent skills in SQL and PHP to make all this happen. But now, a new application called ModelBaker may change this. While the app claims no coding is required, its really not that simple. One does need to understand how databases work and are put together in order to fully appreciate this application and what it can do. However, for small departments that need webapps but can’t afford a programmer, or for programmers who want to quickly deploy an app for testing or protyping, ModelBaker may be a great tool to use. A nifty feature of the program is the ability to create iPhone, iPod Touch and Android compatible web apps on the fly which turns your web app into something that looks good on these devices rather than just viewing a traditional web page on a mobile’s rather small screen. There is a 30 day free demo and academic pricing is available at very good discounts for approved colleges and universities. The standard version is $399 for a single license and $99 for an academic license. Multiple licenses are available.

Happy New Year everyone!

Keene