Category Archives: Resources

iPad Reflexion – Week 3 – Shady

When I first received the iPad, I told my self, “no way I’m going to be able to use this for writing without a real keyboard”.  After two weeks of in-class writing, I am very impressed at how well the native iPad keyboard works.  The auto-correct makes it a breeze.  I can type without even looking at the on-screen keyboard, with making little to no mistakes.   At this point, I feel I’m better off without a physical keyboard, but I wouldn’t mind giving it a try to see how it might improve the typing experience.  Perhaps good to have when writing long papers.

One thing that I still find hard to do is to move the cursor to the desired position.  Even with the magnifier it can be a challenge.

I really enjoy going to class with just the iPad, no bags, books, notebooks, pens.  I’m able to open all the content for the class, read, browse, and blog.

 

 

Outlook for Mail, Calendar, and More on iOS

Several you complained about the built in Mail app on the iPad in class this past week. I’ve not really used Apple Mail for quite some time, instead leaning heavily on the native Gmail app, especially given our access to Google Apps on campus.

I recently switched to Microsoft Outlook for iOS — a huge change for me. It is a surprisingly great app and is actually saving me time during a typical day. Not only does it do email very well, with modern approaches to quickly managing individual messages. The things I really like is that my calendar is built in as is access to my Google Drive files.

Having all these tools in one place not only saves times and taps, but it allows me to easily replace two apps with one in my dock. I don’t know your workflow, but I have to live all day checking email, referring to my calendar, and sharing files from Drive. The new Outlook lets me do all of that from one place. It might be worth a try for some of you.

The new Outlook app brings together the core tools you need to get things done—your email, calendar, contacts and files—helping you get more done even on the smallest screen.

via A deeper look at Outlook for iOS and Android – Office Blogs.

dock

Modeling Expectations

So next week we start with the team posts. Things are looking to ramp up, and while I wait (not so) patiently to see how you will react to this week’s work with your postings I thought I would share with you a model that can illustrate the kind of substantive work I am expecting starting next week. The first week is very much about setting the stage and getting to know one another, but once the team postings start there is a rigor associated with my expectations that may be a bit beyond what you are used to encountering. You heard me say a few times on Thursday that I will not be giving tests this semester, but I will be assessing your grasp of our material through your conversations in class and your postings here on the blog.

With that in mind I want to share with you a link to the work grad students are doing in this course at Penn State. They are a few weeks ahead of us, so it stands as a good model to the kind of things you will be tackling in the weeks ahead. Now, keep in mind that they are reading multiple chapters of multiple books each week — something I have chosen not to do to you. Even so, I want you to be prepared for what I expect. Here are two examples of team based writing outcomes that you should use as guides for your own attempt at sense-making in your weekly team posts. See both, “Engaging in the Development of Identities” and “The Shapes of our Identity” as examples of team based posts for a week.

Getting Started with Diigo

This semester I plan to make use of Diigo to manage links and resources that I see that I think you will find interesting. I encourage you to learn how to use it for both this class and for helping you organize stuff online. One of the main reasons I like Diigo is the ability to markup and annotate webpages and then allow others to see the annotations. This is really helpful as I share things with you — you get to see what I find important. To take advantage of that you will need to create your own account and be signed in. Here is a decent overview of Diigo … take a look and let me know so I can add you to the course Diigo group.

iPad Apps to Consider

There are a lot of great apps to support all sorts of work flow on the iPad. I will add a few here and try to keep adding to this as you start exposing good ones throughout the semester. Please feel free to add any apps you find useful to the comments of this post as well. The links on the App titles open the iTunes App Store.

Apps I can’t live without:

  • Evernote: I use Evernote to keep nearly everything in order. I use it for so much, I could talk all day about how useful this one service is.
  • Scannable: I use this with Evernote to create very high fidelity photo based “scans” of my handwritten notes.
  • GroupMe: I find this much better than iMessages for lots of reasons. I have groups of all kinds in my GroupMe.
  • Yammer: The mobile app for the Yammer service is really pretty good. It lets me stay connected to all my Yammer groups and messages while on the go.
  • Hangouts: Fantastic for text, audio, and video chat. And with our Google Apps on campus it is a home run.
  • Drive: This is where I keep all my files and collaborative work documents.
  • Docs: Its like Word in a browser, but I like it more. The collaboration features make it a no brainer here at SBU.
  • Pocket: This is my go to “read later” application. I have tons of web articles clipped into Pocket for off and online reading.
  • 1Password: There are a few password managers on the market, but 1Password is my app of choice. I have different passwords for everything … thank goodness for 1Password.
  • Things: Beyond a basic to do list … sure Evernote can handle To Do items, but Things is built for it and I use it a lot.