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Essential iPhone Apps for Students and Educators

MacWorld published the “Ten Essential Back to School iPhone Apps”. While they chose very good apps, they might have left out a few other interesting apps as well. A possible improvement on the “top X apps for students” post idea would be to have different school levels (Pre-school, Middle School, High School, Higher Ed., etc.)  AND different subjects in subcategories (General Apps, History, Math, Politics, Books, etc.) as well and list the apps that pertain to those categories only. This process would probably make it even more useful for students’ specific needs.

I still think that Education iPhone apps have to do a lot of catching-up to do in order to achieve the same level of excellence of other apps such as the games we now see on the iPhone.

However, there are some other good apps out there for Education such as the “100 Words Series” to help you sound smart in that test or paper. The iPhone seems to be a good platform for word lists and dictionaries, thesaurus-like lists, etc. (even Dictionary.com has their own apps).

For Educators, check out this list of “Top 50 Apps for Educators” from the Online Education Database.

Waze, the Driver-generated GPS – Crowdsourcing Navigation – Free GPS for the iPhone

Yeah, the concept of crowdsourcing has been everyone. The wisdom of the crowd is something that has been more in evidence lately and Web 2.0 technologies allow for people to get together and collaborate on products, websites, information gathering, etc.

Now it’s the navigation systems’ turn. With Waze, drivers submit new routes, traffic updates and more on ever-evolving maps.

And it’s free for the iPhone.

From their official website:

“What are waze drivers building?

Waze is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road.
100% powered by users, the more you drive, the better it gets. Join the community of drivers in your area today!”

Adobe recruiting beta testers for Captivate on Mac!

The beta for Captivate on Mac!

Shared via AddThis

Metaverse Roadmap Overview

I just came across a great article from the Metaverse Roadmap Overview with some interesting findings, discussions and survey results around virtual worlds, game-based learning, augmented reality and other innovative ways or using virtual world technologies mixed with “real world” ones to create new realities.

As stated in the article:

“Virtual worlds increasingly augment the economic and social life of physical world communities. The sharpness of many virtual and physical world distinctions will be eroded going forward. In both spaces, issues of identity, trust and reputation, social roles, rules, and interaction remain at the forefront.”

Opera Unite – Sharing Content Directly

Opera Unite launched earlier this week, providing services that make it possible for users to share content seamlessly with one another via the Web with no need for uploads! Many tech blogs like TechCrunch are all over this.

Warning, *dork* attempt at a poetic verse: “The cloud just got lighter and can probably fly higher.”

Read the Introduction to Opera Unite.

Anyways, this is great news (and let’s see how long it lasts before someone makes it a security issue or unscrupulous hackers find a way to take advantage of the system). Right now, most of the applications that let you share content from your computer to the internet require at least an initial upload or are limited to small files, etc. The services offered in the Opera Unite bundle (with more to come since they are letting developers design apps to their service) create a direct connection through the Web to your audience’s computers without the need for an uploads or plugin downloads on the viewers’ side. Basically turning any home computer into powerful Web servers.

I love the idea of sharing with no FTP, no middlemen…

It seems to be a one way road still, meaning I give my friends access to certain folders (or websites) on my computer and they can see access those files. I am still not sure (haven’t done enough testing) to see if they can then put their own files in that folder I shared with them, making it a mutual file repository.

In the future, it would be interesting to see them design something that would allow for file EDITING online for easy simultaneous collaborative authoring, similar to what LiveDrive does with Zoho and iPaper integration.

from TechCrunch

Create Web Apps for you Favorite Sites

Too much information out there to keep up with…

What about creating your own Web Apps (browser-based applications) for your most visited websites?

On Windows, use Mozilla’s Prism. Click “download Prism for Windows on the following page and follow the instructions.

For Mac OSX, use Fluid, which works in a similar fashion to Prism but is made to be compatible and integrated with Mac OSX.

Crowdsourcing eLearning (Feedback)

I understand crowdsourcing courses, lessons and other eLearning-related material can be a tough call for any sector (corporate, K12, etc.). But has anyone had any experience crowdsourcing the development of learning experiences from a user feedback perspective at least? 

One question could be how is crowdsourcing feedback different from simply putting a feedback button on your website or a particular lesson or product? Crowdsourcing seems to be more powerful since instead of relying on static feedback submitted by individual users at a given time, when feedback is given in a community-driven platform, it can much more powerful. Users will spark discussions around one’s content in a dynamic manner, sharing their thoughts and ideas from perspectives others might not have considered if submitting a single “feedback ticket”.

So, again, has anyone used crowdsourcing for engaging the learners in the development process?

Services that use crowdsourcing for feedback and product ideas include (not limited to):

Get Satisfaction 

UserVoice

IdeaScale

SuggestionBox

Spigit

CrowdSound

BrightIdea

Google Moderator

CrowdSpirit

IdeaBlob

OK, I might need to stop here, the “idea/innovation management” crowdsourcing field seems to be the one that suffers the most from “cloning” in the social media era… almost like they ran out of ideas for innovative takes on the same topic… 😉

 

Here is a more comprehensive list of crowdsourcing modalities and websites.

Balsamiq Mockups – WYSIWYG Mockup and Wireframe Tool

I don’t have a tablet PC or a drawing board (electronic or not). I guess I could create wireframes on basic  computer tools like Pencil even using the highlight tools on Microsoft PowerPoint, for instance.

But one tool I discovered recently makes it much easier to come up with mockups very quickly: Balsamiq Mockups. The tools has a small cost ($79 at the time of this posting) but it is worth it.

Features

• Drag and drop interface
• Hand-drawn look and feel (makes the mockups look like just that: mockups, allowing you to communicate your ideas with enough freedom for creativity in the actual development process and without raising too much expectation from the developers since what you are offering is nothing more than a *mockup*)
• Several standard built-in navigation and user interface elements ready to be customized
• Ability to export as PNG
• Ability to create new mockups from an existing one
• Repository of icons and images

 

Features that would be nice to have (at least some I can think of off the top of my head)

• Native “print” functionality
• Custom lines and hands-free drawing. Right now you’re limited to the icons and shapes available in the tool’s repository.
• Collaborative editing possibility – either by sync’ing your local files in real time over the Internet or by providing an online-only version (I’d rather have the first option in case I don’t have internet connection for some reason).
• Sharing capabilities (to services like those covered on ShareThis and AddThis.
• A “website” mentality type of mockup. With “real-time” navigation, allowing a person to navigate through the (mockup) website and have that experience from a user perspective. This would need a mockup to have multiple pages linked to a main index. Similar to FlairBuilder and  Napkin Look & Feel‘s approach.
• As pointed our by StuffThatHappens, a built-in storyboarding feature (storyboarding templates?) would be an asset as well.

Competition

The only similar tool I have found is iPlotz (I do not have this software and can’t make a comparison here) but it does seem to offer an online collaborative version of the tool (a bit overprices if you ask me). Their desktop app costs $75 (as I post this entry). Might also be worth checking out. Here is a post comparing both tools. Beware: it has been written by a competitor, FlairBuilder).

Twitter Clones and their Place?

Twitter is a phenomenon that keeps growing in popularity.  With new developers creating  tools to integrate with it, Twitter keeps getting new features everyday and extra data portability functionality…

Twitter also has many look-alikes out there. Does anyone see advantages to Twitter “clones” such as Rejaw and YouAre, and white label or self-hosted solutions ShoutEm  and Laconi.ca? Especially for academic institutions and corporate learning departments?

Any advantage at all in trying to replicate Twitter’s functionality? Any added features that you may find useful?