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"There is no end to the uses of the iPad in education. I've discussed that ad nauseum on this blog. As a learning tool, it has the potential to make a great positive change to learning. The only problem is Apple designed it for individual use. Schools are designed for ( or budgeted for) shared use. Conventional wisdom is for iPad use to occur in a 1:1 or BYOD Environment. In the best case scenario, I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately, financial realities will often dictate that sharing is the only viable option if we want our students to enjoy the benefits of the iPad. It can be done effectively - I've shared my thoughts early in the year about the pros and cons of shared iPads - but doesn't happen without some time consuming workarounds. What follows is my take on the pains (and remedies) of sharing iPads in a rather large Primary (elementary) school."

"Anna Young helps nurses get creative when treating their patients. In the last year, she's set up two "maker-spaces" inside hospitals and she's continued to document nurse-made fixes and workarounds that make patients' lives a little more bearable. Examples include glow-in-the-dark pill bottles, bed-shower overlays, and a TV remote control for patients with tremors in their fingers. Since Young cofounded MakerNurse in 2013, she's collected more than 50 device ideas from around the country, publishing how-to guides for each online so that others can iterate on the concepts. The first maker-space is up and running at the John Sealy Hospital in Galveston, Texas and another is opening soon at South Shore Hospital, in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Each has an array of pliers, sewing needles, 3-D printers, laser cutters, and medical prototyping equipment like "vital signs" construction sets and biocompatible adhesives. In all, about 1,000 nurses have worked with MakerNurse so far. And, through a related organization, Maker Health, Young now wants to involve other frontline workers, and even patients themselves."

"Guided Access, or what we to call "Kid Mode", is a fantastic addition to iOS that lets you lock an iPhone or iPad into a single app. Well, great when it works as it's intended, but it appears there's a pretty frustrating bug that makes the feature work a little too well once it's enabled in iOS 6 with some apps: triple-clicking the Home button doesn't summon anything and you're stuck in an app! This leaves you unable to leave Guided Access mode, but here's a workaround to get out of it until the bug is resolved:"

"We often get asked by teachers how they can share the books they have made using Book Creator for iPad or any other iBooks with people who don't own an Apple device. A common example might be to share the work of their students with parents, or on the school's blog. Although there are a few workarounds for sharing iBooks, this article explores an excellent way to convert iBooks into video format, which can easily be shared across a number of platforms."

"Here is a great Google Doc tip that helps me a lot with my studies in university. As a graduate student, most of my reading assignments and hand-outs come in the form of PDFs and some of these documents are only scanned versions of the original documents. Often times, these PDFs are low-quality as they are poorly scanned which makes reading them a real pain in the butt. Also, scanned PDFs do not allow you to do much on them: You can not annotate or edit text on them. However, there is a workaround to this using Google Docs OCR(Optical Character Recognition). Optical Character Recognition(OCR) lets you convert scanned PDFs or any image that include text in it into text documents using automated computer algorithms in Google Docs. Once converted, you can then edit and annotate the text as you like. Here is how to activate OCR on your Drive."

"Ever needed to reboot an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch that doesn't have a functioning power button or a Home button? It's tricky if not impossible, right? Even with the Assistive Touch on-screen buttons and variety of workarounds for a failed power button, rebooting an iOS device without working hardware buttons is a challenge, but it turns out that a few indirect tricks can work to get restart any iOS device, even if none of the physical buttons are working."

""What do you want to be when you grow up?" When I was a kid, I dreaded the question. I never had a good answer. Adults always seemed terribly disappointed that I wasn't dreaming of becoming something grand or heroic, like a filmmaker or an astronaut. In college, I finally realized that I didn't want to be one thing. I wanted to do many things. So I found a workaround: I became an organizational psychologist. My job is to fix other people's jobs. I get to experience them vicariously - I've gotten to explore how filmmakers blaze new trails and how astronauts build trust. And I've become convinced that asking youngsters what they want to be does them a disservice."