In Higher education, professors require their students to read various handouts from pertinent writers of the field of study. Many times professors provide their readings electronically as PDF documents. PDF documents require a reader such as Preview (Mac only) or Adobe’s Acrobat reader (PC or Mac) to be viewed. Many current browsers have a PDF plugin already installed, making PDF a good format to deliver electronic readings for all students to access the content.

Distance learners are many times business travelers or students who are constantly on the go. Many times they are accessing online classes through their laptops or smartphones. Many times the layout of PDFs do not lend themselves for easy reading on small portable devices such as the iPhone or blackberry. A website that I found the other day is www.epub2go.com. This site will allow the student to upload a PDF from their computer or paste in a link to a PDF that is online. The epub2go site will convet the PDF into an EPUB file. The website will either email you a link to download your EPUB or if you are on an iPhone, it will download the file to an app called Stanza. Stanza, which can be downloaded from lexcycle.com, is an e-book reader for the mac or pc with sharing capabilities to the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the Kindle.

EPUB

According to www.openbook.org EPUB is a format for reflowable digital books. These books can be easily read and manipulated by many devices since it is basically an XML format.

STANZA

Provided by lexcycle.com, Stanza can be downloaded on the mac, pc, iPhone or, iPod Touch. With Stanza, a student can change the font styling (face, color and size), background color and brightness to make reading the text on screen easier. Stanza app and epub2go.com allow the on the go student to convert online PDFs to ebooks all on the iPhone or iPod Touch with wi-fi connection; no computer needed. The student can now build their library of journal articles on their Apple mobile device to be read on the train, plane, taxi or other similar situations. Below are screenshots from my iPod Touch of the epub2go to stanza app conersion process

iWebMore allows you to include HTML code from Google Video, Flickr and other websites in your iWeb sites.

Today I have two utilities that will make using a dual boot computer much easier:

•  Apple Mouse Utility: this was designed for using a one-button mouse under Windows.  However, the cool thing about it is that it allows you to use the Control +  Click shortcut you can use in Mac OS to right-click in XP.  To use the utility, save it somewhere on your hard drive then place a shortcut to it in the Startup folder. This is much better than having to do a Shift + F10 each time you need to right-click.
• DoubleCommand: this extension allows you to remap the keys on a Windows keyboard while you’re in OS X. I used it to make my Windows key work as a Command key, and the Alt key to function as the Option key.

This is a great little utility that allows you to quickly change your sound input or output on the Mac.  I’m always switching between my headphones and the built-in sound on my iMac.  Using SoundSource makes the task much easier.  The application sits in the menu bar, right next to the date, etc.  A pulldown menu allows you to switch either the input or output with just one click (no need to open the System Preferences).

Link

I usually write only about Mac applications, but since a lot of people have dual boot machines (or have two machines), I thought I would mention that one of my favorite Windows programs just got even better.  Picasa (as close to iPhoto as you can get on the PC), has added a bunch of new features:

• Labels are now called Albums.  They work the same way, but there is an album called screensaver that is automatically created for you.  Any images you drag to that album will become part of your Windows screensaver.  Nothing spectacular (the Mac has been able to do this for a while), but a nice addition to the program.
• You can create a movie with a bunch of photos and Picasa will use the Album title and description as the title of the movie.  The movie includes the “Ken Burns effect” a la iMovie, but you don’t have as much control over it.  I hope they continue to improve on this feature.
• You can now geotag images with Google Earth from within Picasa.  I will be using this feature quite a bit to add location information to my images.
• I have not had a chance to test this out yet, but it looks like you can send images from your PC to a Tivo using Picasa.  I have the Tivo Desktop installed already, so maybe I’ll give this a shot later this week.

I recently helped one of our students design a test for special education students to be delivered using iPods. The idea was inspired by the Louisa Muscatine iPod Project, even though my approach is a little bit different than theirs. Today, I finally had a chance to look at their site, where they had a short video explaining how they created their tests. I have to commend them on this creative use of the iPod in the classroom. As a visually impaired person, I am always looking for ways that this wonderful device can be used as an assistive technology.

I think their approach has two key advantages:

• It is very easy for teachers to create the test items. They can use Keynote or PowerPoint to create slides that are exported as images, and these slides can include other images such as simple graphs or tables. My approach, which uses the notes feature of the iPod, involves a little more work because each individual test item is an individual note on the ipod and these notes are linked through hyperlinks. I fear that as soon as you mention that hyperlinks and HTML are involved (even if it’s only two tags) this may turn off many teachers from wanting to implement this kind of technology. To get around this, you can provide a template for teachers to follow, as I did with the student I worked with.
• It is also very easy for the students to navigate through the questions once they are on the iPod. They just have to click on the back or forward button to navigate, whereas with my approach they must scroll to a link until it changes color to indicate that it is active, then click on the center button to move to the next note. For younger students, this may be too difficult.

For elementary school students, I would say that their approach is ideal. However, for older students I think my approach has some advantages:

• The notes feature has an advantage when it comes to text. You are not limited by what can be displayed on the screen at one time. For questions where students have to read a short passage (FCAT reading review, etc), the notes method would be ideal because you can scroll to see more content. The text is also more legible when you use notes. This is a limitation of the movie size created by Garageband, which will hopefully be addressed in the next release of the program.
• The use of hyperlinks gives you more flexibility in the types of exhibits you can use with the test items. You can easily link to video clips and images in the same test. When you create the test using the podcast track in Garageband, you can only include still images or video, but not both (unless you create the whole thing as a movie in iMovie and then import into Garageband–but now you’re introducing another program into the equation). This is another limitation that will hopefully be addressed in the next version of iLife.
• The use of “museum mode” allows you to lock down the iPod so that students are not distracted by other content on the iPod. They only have access to the content in the notes folder, which would be your test and any instructions. Obviously, you would not have any music or other content on the iPod before administering a test, but the temptation to click on other things (even if it’s just the settings) is too much of a distraction.

For older students I think the use of the notes is fine. They probably already have some experience with the iPod, so learning the navigation is probably not too much of a problem.  And as I said before, once you create a test once, you can continue to reuse it as a template.  All you have to do is substitute the text for the new items and link to new exhibits.

I can see combining the two approaches as well.  That is, I would have the iPod set to notes mode to “lock it down”, then include a menu for each section of the test (using a .linx note)  and use a podcast (created with Garageband) for each section.  This would work well for a test where you only have text and the items are short.

As they say, there is “more than one way to skin a cat”.  The way in which we both developed a successful iPod test demonstrates that there are several ways to get this done, each with advantages and disadvantages.  The method you choose will depend on the tech savvy of the teachers and the needs of the audience as well as the requirements of the test.

This is a neat program to add a little visual appeal to a blog or wiki. Thumbscrew allows you to quickly rotate an image and add a drop shadow or border. The only controls you have are in the preferences (you can change the rotation angle, etc.) but a nice thing is that you can drop a folder of images and it will go through all of them and create thumbnails. By default, the thumbnails are saved in the same folder as the originals. This is similar to the rotate effect in iWeb.

ImageWell is one of my favorite free programs for the Mac. This is a very easy to use program that I use to edit screenshots by cropping, adding callouts, arrows, etc. I also use it to convert screenshots from the .png default used on the Mac to .jpg and other formats.

If you pay $15 you can get an upgrade that allows you to do batch processing.

I love all things Google and I have used the GMail Drive extension to transfer files on the Windows side. Now, I can use gDisk to do the same on the Mac. Forgot your thumb drive?..No problem. Use gDisk to put the close to 3 GB of space on your GMail to use. Your files will appear as file attachments in GMail.

ImageWell is a free image editor for the Mac.

From their website:

ImageWell is the popular image editing software for quick manipulation and upload to an iDisk (.mac account), FTP server or other web server. Whether you are adding images to your documents, editing offline images, or posting photos to the web for others to see, ImageWell will do the work for you. Drag images in and out of the well, resize, crop, shape, rotate and add a watermark, border, or drop shadow. No need to launch multiple applications to add text, labels, arrows, circles and squares to your image. Add a thought cloud or talking balloon. A few simple clicks, copy, paste, and send them off to your web server instantly. At the click of a button the image is sent and a handy URL is copied to the clipboard. Just like that, it doesn’t get any easier!

I used ImageWell quite a bit this summer to edit screenshots for the Tech-Ease website. I used ImageWell to place arrows, callouts and text boxes on my screenshots (which I took with either the keyboard shortcuts built into OS X or the Grab application found in Applications > Utilities.) ImageWell allows you to take screenshots as well, but I needed the delay feature of Grab to take screenshots of open menus.

The program really is very easy to use. I like how you just have to drag an image into the program’s window to get started with it. Scaling an image is also very easy, all you have to do is use a slider until the image is the size you want.  If you prefer, you can change the save location so that the edited image is saved to any folder on your computer when you click on Send.

ImageWell is a great complement for iPhoto.