Category Archives: summary

iPad resources and reviews

The Center has one iPad that the Technical Interns in Education have been busy exploring in the past few weeks for the best free Apps and even some paid Apps for education.  This project will continue throughout the summer with the goal of having a Brown Bag presentation before fall semester or early into fall semester.  While we’d love to have more iPads for College of Education faculty to check out and begin their own exploration, the iPad is in high demand across globe and they are currently on back-order along with the various accessories for the iPad.  Hopefully by the time fall semester starts, we’ll have a couple more floating around for checkout.

In the meantime, we’ve put together some resource links for the iPad including app reviews, app recommendations, and reviews of the iPad.  Also, TIES Andrea and Molly have created a video review of how to use the iPad and some of the apps, including the iBook reader.  Lastly, Mashable.com has an article on Steve Job’s address at the D8 conference in Los Angeles this week addressing the phenomenal growth in the sales of iPad and if tablets (like the iPad) will someday replace the PC.  In it, Jobs is quoted saying, “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.”

NY Times: David Pogue iPad Review

Engadget iPad Review

Mashable – 10 Must Have Apps

iPad Apps for Education from ISTE

Online course accessibility brown bag summary

Earlier this afternoon, Brendan Guenther from Virtual University – Design and Technology, presented on web accessibility resources and standards for online courses in ANGEL or other LMS platforms like Drupal or WordPress. Brendan covered the topics of Universal Design, the scope for faculty, who helps our students, how to assess a course for accessibility, and basic techniques for compliance using HTML headers or alternate text for images. Listed below are some important links for the MSU community and Brendan’s PowerPoint as posted on MSU Google Apps.

RCPD – http://www.rcpd.msu.edu/

MSU Web Accessibility policy – http://webaccess.msu.edu/

vuDAT Breakfast Series Presentation from February 2009, including video how-to links: http://vudat.msu.edu/1541/

Automatic captions in YouTube – http://bit.ly/3TVGES

Brendan’s PowerPoint

2009 Horizon Report

The Horizon Report, published by The New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative, is an annual report summarizing key technologies to watch, trends in instructional technology, critical challenges and examples of leading pioneers in the adoption of new technologies.  Each report covers three time-to-adoption time frames that highlight two technologies to emerge during that period.  The report then provides an overview of each technology, an explanation of the relevance for teaching, learning, research, or creative expression, examples of use and links to further reading.

Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less

  • Mobiles
  • Cloud Computing

Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years

  • Geo-Everything
  • The Personal Web

Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years

  • Semantic-Aware Applications
  • Smart Objects

Key Trends:

  • Increasing globalization
  • Collective intelligence in regards to ambiguity and imprecision
  • Games as learning tools
  • Visualization tools
  • Mobile phone innovation

Critical Challenges:

  • Formal instruction in new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy
  • New learning models to adapt to different learning styles
  • Significant shifts in scholarship and research methods
  • Data collection and mining of student information systems for formal assessment stretching resources
  • Growing expectation of higher education to deliver services, content and media to mobile devices.