The recent Kindle updates over the past few months have quite a few teachers. In particular, if you have a textbook on Kindle, you can collate notes by color, which is a major enhancement. This article does a nice job of summarizing the features important to educators.
"The update also brings some changes that should be especially helpful for students and teachers, like the ability to highlight long passages that span multiple pages.
In addition, the Notebook feature for textbooks has new filtering options, which should help you more quickly and easily find all your notes, bookmarks, and highlights by colour"
An iOS and Android app from Google designed to scan printed photos to make a digital version using the device's camera, but it is very good for scanner students work too.
Ah, epaper. Digital books. They started as barely a blip but now have become the battleground for the next all out war between tech giants.
"The app update -- which Apple is calling iBooks 2 and is already released to the iOS App Store -- will allow for textbooks to be sold through the popular app, which in the past sold novels, nonfiction and poetry, but not textbooks.
All textbooks sold through the free app, which is available only to Apple's i-devices, will be priced at $14.99 or less -- a stark contrast to the high-priced paper books that fill college bookstores.
But the main allure might not be the price as much as the interactive features iBooks textbooks can offer.
Apple, which announced the iBooks update at a press event in New York at the Guggenheim Museum, said the iBooks textbook exceeds paper texts in terms of engagement, calling it a durable, quickly searchable book that offers easy highlighting and note-taking as well as interactive photo galleries, videos, and 3-D models and diagrams.
So, you want to use digital storytelling in the classroom. Here Beth Sanders writes about what she is doing with the voicethread app. Some great classroom ideas here.
Great resource! Very, very easy to use. And, with just very limited understanding of HTML you can really do quite a bit...including embedding video...or VoiceThreads.
If you're not already using Dropbox - you should. They had a developer conference and will likely end up everywhere in every app. Some very cool things coming. Just like Evernote - who has a powerful "trunk" features where developer work is showcased - Dropbox is going to find that opening up to development opens a whole new marketplace and ingenuity beyond what they have in house.
Some info from the wired article.
"But after all that single-mindedness, Houston and Ferdowsi now want to let their baby sing. Today, at Dropbox's first-ever developers conference, the company is officially launching a new set of coding tools designed to push Dropbox into every corner of your digital life. Not content to stay sequestered inside the box, the company's co-founders are unveiling ways for developers to meld their service with every app on every device you own.
For the first five or so years of its existence, Dropbox was synonymous with its "magic folder." Save your files in the Dropbox folder on your computer, and they "magically" reappear in your Dropbox apps on your phone and tablet and in your Dropbox account on the web. Now, if developers take to the company's new tools, the service will escape the confines of this folder, fusing with third-party apps running on practically every computer and smartphone operating system.
Houston wants Dropbox to become the "spiritual successor to the hard drive." He says the hard drive needs to be replaced because so many of us are doing so much computing on devices that don't fit the traditional paradigm for working with files. Users don't interact with files on iOS, Android, or the web the way they do on PCs. Apps don't have "open" or "save" options that launch a separate window where you tap through a folder tree."
Google's Cyber weekend deals are a serious reason to at least download Google Play for iOS on your ipad. I'm picking up Malcom Gladwell's book for 3.49 and reading it in the app for just this reason.
Book lovers must go over this list, but the chromecast stick is worth a look as it is basically a Roku/ Apple TV on a stick for just $35.
I always like to watch people who are very productive and am deleting apps that don't add to my life. As a writer, I'm always looking for new cool apps and have been loving IndexCard for a while when drafting and writing books. Here's a new app called Editorial that has me intrigued along with one of the best posts on any app I've ever seen from the Mac Drifter. It has increased support for text versions in Dropbox, which intrigues me the most.
An important conversation with interviews and some research about how to deal with multitasking. AS for me, if I could really really turn off notifications on my ios devices, that would suffice and it would for most students.
Canby School District's wiki for iPod and iPad pilot programs, including resources, complete deployment and management strategies, pitfalls, success, and everything else you might want to know about a large scale 1:1 iOS implementation
Well, there's a new and interesting web app called markup.io that can help you here. It instantly turns any web page into a virtual whiteboard where you can add text, draw shapes, arrows or even do some freehand drawings. Here's a quick demo: