Group items tagged

IMHO iAnnotate is far superior. There are a couple of areas GoodReader excels (like in the automatic page fit, having two up, etc), but by and large iAnnotate does everything else more effectively. These are just a few reasons why it suits my workflow better than GoodReader: - Tabs. It speaks for itself, but having several documents open with the ability to flick between them is useful. - Sharing features. The ability to email or paste to clipboard a summary of all notes/highlights/annotations you've made is just brilliant, and makes light work of noting the most poignant areas in an academic article. - Annotation tools. They are far quicker to access than in GoodReader. If you want to highlight something in iAnnotate, you just tap the icon in the toolbar and drag it over the text (as much as you want – you can scroll through the document even with the highlight tool selected) before confirming your selection. You can set as many different colour highlighters up as you want. By contrast, in GoodReader you must tap-and-hold, drag the handles to select a continuous chunk of text, then tap highlight from the popup. If you want to change the colour of the highlight you need to tap, choose colour, confirm your choice; using multiple colours is just too time consuming. I prefer the behaviour of notes in iAnnotate too, for reviewing and revision purposes. Tapping every note in GoodReader is tiresome.

''Trying to take all of what is happening on Twitter in is like drinking from a fire hydrant,'' he says. ''So you end up thinking of it as a stream that's flowing past you; you throw your hook in and pull out an idea and if it's good then you let it go and let other people share in it.''

As an online tutor, Watson, a similar messenger-based tool, promises to help students any time they need it while providing insight to professors about how students are learning, according to the companies. Students will be able to ask questions of the tutor, which is capable of responding with hints, feedback and explanations.

“One-on-one tutoring is the Holy Grail of teaching and all educational approaches should be aimed at replicating this model,” Harriet Green, who heads IBM’s Watson Education effort, said in prepared remarks delivered in Las Vegas Tuesday. “Advanced technologies can help us to understand individual interaction patterns and enable us to tailor educational content accordingly.”

Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."

External audiences certainly motivate students to do their best work. But students can also serve as their own authentic audience when asked to create meaningful work to share with one another.

Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and share.