iPad User Guide

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Tips2012 iPad research in beautiful Cape Town

 

I am in beautiful Cape Town meeting amazing educators from not-for-profit organizations, schools, and universities discussing my research project TPACK iPads in Schools – “tips” and opportunities for further learning and research in this area.

I had great discussions with Karen aka @ICT_Integrator on the importance of professional learning and support for teachers.

This is the core of the “tips” project to empower teachers to use technology effectively for teaching and learning. I am looking forward to doing some exciting work in schools this week, discussing iPads and learning opportunities for further study for teachers at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia.

I welcome South African educators to participate in my research and share their learning with us on this blog.

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Jenny’s iPad Tip: User Guide #4 iPad = document camera+

A while ago I bought a document camera costing about $700, a really useful device to replace the overhead projector. A document camera can be used to capture an image and project the image onto a large screen.

Then I bought a VGA connector to connect my iPad to a data projector or any other screen or monitor, and for just $30 my iPad became a portable document camera with a heap of extra functions.

How To:

Secure the iPad to a small tripod / retort stand to keep it stable. Then select the camera icon to use the the camera function to project and share any image.

There are fantastic ways to use this in education, for example if you are doing a dissection, you can capture the image and project it for the class to view. You can capture images of objects and plants for science experiments. You can even demonstrate mathematical concepts using concrete manipulative.

I would love to hear how you are using this function in your teaching.

 

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Jenny`s iPad Tip – Create your own Digital Texts

Digital textbooks are becoming a highly discussed and contentious issue. I am not a huge fan of textbooks, but where we do use them, they need to be interesting and engaging.

My flight today was delayed due to a cyclone, so I took the time to catch up on my reading. A report on the plans for wide scale introduction of digital textbooks in the USA was very interesting: “Playbook:Digital Textbook direction in the US“. It follows the plans in the USA to use digital textbooks across different states, and describes the huge financial investment by the government in textbook creation, high speed Internet provision, computers and tablets for students.

The launch of iBooks 2 showcases Apple’s new venture in digital textbook publishing. I have reviewed some of the digital textbooks and have found them very disappointing – they are just glorified PDF’s.

The challenge for textbook writers is to exploit the interactivity and engaging nature of ePubs in textbook production. They can be rich multi-modal documents with the embedded multimedia.

Many students don`t approach text in the way we have traditionally, reading pages from top to bottom and left to right. They tend to scan pages with their attention moving to the embedded hyperlinks and multi-media. It is also important that digital texts allow the reader to engage with the text through annotation and highlighting functions.

Digital textbooks can encourage student collaboration through the sharing functions. The e-book “Our Choice” by Al Gore uses some of the engaging, interactive features of digital publications that can be used in textbooks.

There are a number of apps and traditional software that allow you to create your own e-books. You can create an e-Pub in Pages, but you need the full computer version not the iPad app. Book Creator is the best ePub creator for the iPad.

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Tips2012 Project Update – St Paul’s

We welcome the teaching team at St Paul’s to the Tips2012 Project. I spent a great afternoon working with the whole school teaching team.

Research indicates that support from the school leadership team builds the culture of learning in the school and accelerates positive learning outcomes. I’m looking forward to working with these dedicated educators to plan challenge-based learning projects in each class.

The iPads will be used by students K-6 to research the essential questions, and as creative tools to express and share their learning. The camera apps will be used to document the learning journeys of students and staff. Polling apps will be used to gather data for the research.

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Jenny’s Most Useful App Today- A Document-Scanner

Today high in the Japanese Alps, my partner had a skiing injury. The medical insurance wanted copies of airline tickets, passports, receipts and contracts sent through immediately. Fortunately I have a portable document scanner on my iPad. Making it my most useful app of the day!

This is a really useful tool in the classroom, office or when you are traveling. There are a number of scanning applications. Some use OCR optical character recognition, that turn the text or image into digital characters. You can edit these, adjust shades and contrasts to create the text or image that you need. These images can be saved as pdf’s or jpg’s and can be used creatively to create artworks.

My current favorites are Doc Scan HD and Perfect OCR. Doc Scan Hd claims to be able to scan curled or folded documents. You can scan diagrams on the white board,receipts and business cards and pictures from your photo collection. What I like is that you can edit and annotate the scanned images. This is very useful as a teaching tool.

You can save the image as a PDF and email it or place it in ibooks, drop box, evernote or google docs and send the link to share it with a colleague or your students. The free version of Doc Scan Hd allows you to scan a three page document for longer documents upgrade to the paid pro version for $4.49

Perfect OCR works well with high quality script recognition for text in different languages and typefaces.I would like to hear your comments on how you are using these scanning apps in your teaching.

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Let your fingers do the talking on your iPad

The iPad touch screen allows you to use your fingers to interact in multiple ways.You can single tap, double tap, flick, swipe, drag, press and hold. I will give a brief description of the basic finger movements on the touch screen.

TAP: This is a simple soft touch with the tip of your finger.

DRAG: Keep your fingertip pressed on the screen and slide it to move to different sections of the screen. A two finger drag allows you to scroll down in a smaller window within the main window, for example in any floating pop up screens.

SLIDE: The slide action is similar to the drag except that it is usually a horizontal movement from left to right used to unlock the iPad or to wake it from a sleep state.

FLICK: Lightly move your finger across the screen to scroll a page in that direction. The faster you flick your finger the faster the page will move. When you are reading an e- book you can flick you finger across the page to turn the pages.

SPREAD AND PINCH: To zoom in on a picture place three fingers on the item and spread the fingers to expand the item. To reduce an item pull the fingers close together.

DOUBLE TAP: This is a quick way to enlarge or reduce a picture or a piece of text.

SINGLE TAP ON THE ON/ OFF BUTTON: This takes you back to the home screen.
Have fun experiment and experience the power of touch.
Four- or Five-Finger Vertical Swipe Like a double-press on the Home button, a four- or five-finger upward swipe will pull up the multitasking bar along the bottom of the screen. To return it, swipe downward to hide the bar (or single-tap anywhere above it).

FOUR OR FIVE FINGER HORIZONTAL SWIPE:

With a four- or five-finger horizontal swipe, you can quickly move between your most recently used apps. For example, if you’re in Safari and want to switch to another open app, you can perform a four- or five-finger horizontal swipe to move from one app to another; like the the one-finger swipe you use to move between home screens. You can pull up the multitasking bar by double-pressing the Home button or by performing the four- or five-finger vertical swipe.

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Tips2012: Say Hello to your new iPad

If you are a new iPad user, this post will guide you through the basics and help you to get started.

You initially need to use the USB cable (provided) to connect your iPad to a computer, it can be a Mac or a PC. iTunes will automatically load and prompt you to set up and register the iPad and create a unique Apple ID. The Apple ID has a user name and a password, which you will use to access the iTunes Store.

The iTunes Store has a range of books, applications, and music which you can download onto your iPad. Some of the applications, commonly known as “apps” are free, while others are paid. You pay for these apps using a credit card, or a purchased iTunes voucher.

When you set up your iPad for the first time, you will be prompted to set up iCloud. This is an online data storage facility which enables you to back up your iPad data (contacts, apps, photos, songs), and sync them across a number of devices (e.g. your iPhone, iPod Touch), providing they all use the same Apple ID.

On this blog we will be discussing teaching and learning strategies to maximise the effective use of iPads as teaching and learning tools.

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