Skip to main content

Home/ The Meth Lab/ Group items tagged dropbox

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Cole Camplese

Apple's iPad Officially Passes the Higher Education Test [Exclusive] | Fast Company - 2 views

www.fastcompany.com/...higher-eduction-test-exclusive

ipad education psutlt psuets

shared by Cole Camplese on 17 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • After extensive student interviews throughout the Fall 2010 semester, "The bottom line feeling was that the Amazon Kindle DX was not adequate for use in a higher education curricular setting," Chief Technology Officer Martin Ringle tells Fast Company. "The bottom line for the iPad was exactly the opposite."
  • The silver-medal feature, with only a few strikes against its score, was the highlighting and annotation of text.
  • With the exception of scanned PDF files, the students found "highlighting was easier on th
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Apple’s new favorite child is not without its flaws. The virtual keyboard is a pain for composing anything beyond short notes. The nonexistent file system makes finding important documents difficult and sharing across applications nearly impossible. Finally, managing a large number of readings in PDF format becomes a major time-suck. Syncing PDFs via iTunes was found to be "needlessly complicated," emailing marked-up versions back to oneself was "prohibitively time-consuming," and even the cloud-based storage, Dropbox, "failed to work seamlessly with PDF reading/annotating applications."
  • Perhaps the most impactful discovery was that none of the iPad's strengths are unique to Apple. According to the report, “the new wave of Android-based tablets seems likely to provide an appealing alternative that will result in the coexistence of at least two competing tablet operating systems.”
  • Chris Millet on 18 Feb 11
     
    Annotation is a huge need with these devices, at least how they seem be typically used (as eBook readers). I use Papers to annotate and sync PDF's with my laptop, and the Diigo bookmarklet to annotate web pages, both of which work very well for me. When it comes to iPads, I'd like to see more discussion extending beyond eBook functionality though. This article is obviously comparing the iPad to the Kindle, and only briefly mentioned "more exciting possibilities". But it seems silly to say "iPad officially passes the higher education test" by just talking about documents and annotation.
1 - 2 of 2
Showing 20▼ items per page