Educreations & ShowMe

Lately, I have been creating videos for instruction using my iPad. The two apps that I’ve been using are Educreations and ShowMe. I would love to use the Smart Notebook app, unfortunately it does not have recording functionality. I really loved using Educreation app, until I posted a few videos on my website for my students to access. Apparently you cannot view the videos on the iPad/iPod devices because Flash is required. So, now I am forced to use the ShowMe app. Anyway, I will be patient until Notability have a video recording feature. I guess I I shouldn’t hold my breath…

Dear Apple… You’ve won me over with Safari… Sike!

For the past few months as I have been enjoying my iPad, I have been growing more acclimated in using the Apple’s premier browser, Safari. I liked it so much, I had the audacity to install it on my Windows 7 laptizzle. I really thought that I could synch my Reading List items on all of my devices, but this was only a dream, until now…. with Chrome, gets the job done.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to verify to see if I can see my favorites from my iPad on my PC. It’s terrible times with my PC. It is suffering from a severe case of the BSOD (blue screen of death). I tried all measures to restore it, and even tried to upgrade it to the preview version of Windows 8, but still arrived to no solution.

Anyway, I’m going to keep rocking and rolling with Chrome on my iPad and you all keep my PC in your prayers…

5 yrs from now…

May we have a moment of silence for paper publishing (books & magazines), photo processing, DVDs, CD, flea markets, pawn shops, bootleggers and other pre-millennium stuff.

Digital downloads is replacing what my generation has acquired and traded for years. Sometimes I feel like I am the only person that actually rents CDs from Netflix? Will Red Box be around in 2017? Will bootleggers upgrade to blu-ray by then? Will my iPad 3, iPhone, and laptizzle be obsolete in less than five years? Who knows. As things evolve, so shall we.

iPhone 4G 4me!

Hmmm…. Front facing camera could definately be useful. Wonder if education will ever allow or even REQUIRE such a device for academic use.

I AM A-PAIN iPhone app

Okay… iPhone you win… My BB is certified to be no fun compared to the feature of this autotune app. I am not hating, but…

This app is a great novelty at first, but we don’t need a plethora of T-pain wannabes out here! Hey Jay-Z, I think that this app definetly twists the knife in the death of autotune. (BTW, I meant to replace the the ‘T’ with an ‘A’ in T-Pain of the title of this post.)

barcampCLT 2

I was very fortunate to be in the attendance of BarcampCLT2 at Area 15. It was great being around people that are so much more geeky than me. And to think that I was once on the path of coding righteousness. I don’t regret being an educator but I do miss the joy of debugging code and troubleshooting network/server issues.

I learned few off the wall things, such as Blackberry users felt the shameful of their devices. Also, Oprah seems to be the benchmark of your Twitter Coolness. (Anyone joined after her is to be considered unoffically lame.) Oh, almost forgot to mention that men that knit are way cool.

I will share a few takeaways from the sessions that I attended.

1. iPhone App Dev Roundtable

I received some inspiriation to get on board in creating iPhone
apps for education, however an Apple laptizzle is required.  It was mentioned the iPhone for Dummies book was a good read. The process of getting an app approved for the App Store was communicated as being very difficult. Pushing apps via ad hoc for clients was mentioned as a work around.

• Web Resources referenced:
  http://appceletator.com
  http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php
  http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/

2. Making $$$ Online

This session was a little similar to last year. Here’s a sample from YouTube…

3. 45 Questions in 45 Minutes

Some good info popped up here. Some discussions on Google Wave, FireFox, and Android took the show.

4. Managing Your Social Networks

Long story short, use an RSS new reader aggregator to gather all your Web2.0 sites. Outlook was mention as a good RSS reader becuase it allow you assess RSS feeds behind secure logins.  Also it was discussed the importance of adding value to tweets by linking your social networks.

• Web resources mentioned:
  http://ping.fm
  http://igoogle.com
  http://netvibes.com
  http://pipes.yahoo.com
  http://dizzysoft.com/rss/manage-your-social-networks
  http://feedtwit.com
  http://websitebiz.com

5. Simple Content Management

The presenter actually went through the stage of registering a site domain, hosting, and dumping CMsimple in a directory to making it live. Very nice… especially since CMsimple does not require having to deal with databases where CM packages such as WordPress and Drupal require.

• Web resources mentioned:
  http://dreamhost.com
  http://www.aweber.com/
  http://www.e-junkie.com/
  http://www.myemma.com/
  http://www.mailchimp.com/
  http://dotcomwebdesign.com/

Sessions that I wish I could have attended:

How to create webcasts that don’t suck
The Rabbit Hole
Google Page Ranking

Overall, this was another successful unconference. I highly recommend you to check one out that’s near you.

Apple… You can do better by yourself.

Here is my last blog post dedicated to the good people of Apple Computers, Inc.

ATTENTION – Brother Jobs and the others engineers at Apple: We DO NOT NEED a music player that takes pictures or videos. We NEED a music player that has a radio FM tuner, or even a HD receiver.

 

You were supposed to dominate the mp3/music industry and crush the competition. Please prepare to get your jaw rocked by Micro$oft who is about to launch a much better product the which seems better by comparison.  Also, since I kinda mentioned the iPhone, again… please take notes from the Palm Pre architecture and do a “Apple-spin’ to it. In other words, we need a REAL qwerty-key pad on a REAL touch screen phone. We all know that you are capable in designing such a product.

So, please look at the numbers after a few quarters and go back to the drawing board or just go back to the basics. Be the true juggernaut you were supposed to be.

My upgrade to iPhone quandary

To upgrade or not, that is the question…

I am currently a Blackberry Curve user. I can do a lot on my smart phone already, so… do I really need to hand over my hard earned scrilla to Mr. Jobs? There’s a recession going on, son!

I am quite hesistant to go sans qwerty keypad. Since the 25th officially marks the end of my AT&T year (of 15 months), what will I really gain besides crossing over to the National iPhone Geek Society.

The worst has happened…

Yesterday, believe it or not, I went the whole day with sans Blackberry. This circumstance was due to an issue with my battery (well I thought it was my battery anyway). Every time I attempted to charge it up, it would not recognize that it was plugged up. Hmmmmm… went in to the AT&T store and spoke to a kind gentleman who assisted me in trying to solve my BB Curve issue. Looked like one of the phone’s female micro usb receptical pins were damaged. Warranty was out, and no insurance. Broham is out of luck especially when contract is up on JUNE 25. So until then, I will have to downgrade to my old Motoral Rokr phone. Well, I guess I can work on my iTunes playlists back again.

Anyway… now it is really funny how it so happens that yesterday, Apple announces their new OS version 3 for the iPhone. From the above pic, Apple may have just won me over to the dark side. Great preview found on youtube… Sorry RIM, gotta kick ya to the curve, oops curb…