Tech 5/14
1. I worked with the Keynote app and I was very impressed with how user friendly and accessible it was. I am familiar with PowerPoint as I have used it for pretty much all of my presentations and I believe the Keynote app on the iPad may be better in some ways. However I have to say that I am not really able to compare apples to apples here because the version of PowerPoint that I have used is fairly old and I do not know how PowerPoint works on MicroSoft tablets such as the Surface, which I believe would provide a fairer comparison. Nevertheless I was very impressed with Keynote.
To begin with, Keynote was similar to PowerPoint in at least three ways. First, just like PowerPoint, Keynote provides a way of creating presentations that appear on a series of slides. Second, just like PowerPoint, Keynote provides templates that the user can use as a starting point for their presentation. Third, Keynote has the same general layout as PowerPoint, with the slides appearing in on the left of the screen and the slide being edited appearing in the middle.
There are two major ways that Keynote is different from PowerPoint. These two differences are that Keynote is much simpler and more accessible than PowerPoint. Keynote is made to be on a tablet and PowerPoint is generally accessed from a desktop so simplicity and accessibility are certainly points of divergence for these two apps.
Simplicity: There is not a large toolbar or a bunch of lists of themes in Keynote, just a simple list of templates from which to choose. This makes it easy to operate even for someone who is new to this kind of technology. The flip-side of this though, is that there are not as many options available as there are in PowerPoint.
Accessibility: Apple offers an app that can be put on the iPhone for Keynote. Once the app is downloaded, the presentation can be edited and controlled through the phone. There is no need to have a person sitting at the computer clicking the mouse at a signal, just the presenter with their phone or iPad is enough.
I believe the existence of the iPad is the major reason for these differences. Without it Apple would have not had the need to make the layout as simple or as accessible.
2. I don't see a prompt on this activity to reflect on Box.net but I want to say that I like this cloud service. The free version holds plenty of data for documents and it is very easy to organize the folders. My favorite part is how easy it is to make something available offline. There is now need to download a whole extra app to do this, it is a part of the app already.
3. There are a ton of ways that iThoughts might be used in the classroom. I will name three uses for iThoughts. First, it could be used as a lecture guide. If the teacher made one of these for each of their lectures they would have a very logical and flowing presentation where all of their points are tied together. Second, it could be used to help students decide on a research topic by asking a question that leads to another question and so on until there is a web of ideas and topics to choose researching. Lastly, as a history graduate, I can see the potential to use Thoughts in showing the cause and effect nature of history. The teacher might make a mind map per unit that shows the course of events or they could have the students make one for a graded assignment. That would be a much more engaging way of looking at history rather than just thinking of it as a static set of statistics.
4. Safari and Rover
It is hard to compare these two apps because Safari is head and shoulders above Rover as far as being a browser. Safari gives the user a satisfying level of control over their browsing experience, offering a search bar and offline viewing among its assortment of features. Rover is an attempt by apple to provide Flash services through a proxy server that streams live footage from a computer that has Flash. So it is not an alternative to Flash, it is not a true browser, it is Flash through a middleman that is slower and uses loads of data. What makes it worse is that Rover is marketed to schools. If a school used Rover, they would eat through their data plan and use all of their bandwidth on a couple of devices using wikipedia. The only thing that Rover does that Safari cannot do is show Flash content, but I could just never justify that use of data for a school that has budget obligations. There is really no way I can see a school choosing to use Rover if they understand the implications of it.
Safari on the other hand is a very useful and efficient. I can imagine a teacher in a 1:1 system using it very handily by giving students assignments on the internet that they can access offline through the Safari offline viewing function.
So to summarize, Rover is an inefficient and slow app that will eat bandwidth and data. Safari is a clean and efficient browser that offers features relevant to teachers.
Good job!
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