Digital Roadtrip

Good Buddy and kinda ICT Rock star Mr Tim Rylands asked me to make a quick list of apps for a school test driving an iPad - here’s 10 (actually I squeezed a couple of extra cheeky ones in) from over 500,000+ on da apps store man.

Ok… So you have borrowed a couple of iPads to test drive at your school.  Where do you start?

This list straddles (ouch!) both Primary and secondary schools. 

1. To explore the touch screen iPad experience Puppet Pals Directors Pass (£1.99) is a great way to start. Pupils can appear as cut outs in the animations and backgrounds /settings could taken from drawings, paintings and even “Street view” from the Maps app.

2. For some interactive problem solving Scribblenauts Remix (69p) is a fun place to start. I have to think quite hard about this!

3. Paper (basic version free) - an ironic name but a beautiful Zen-like experience. A uncluttered toolset for mark-making with digital pen, paintbrush and pencil. It looks just like  real pencil marks. We bought the full version within minutes.

4. Explore some Amazing Physics ( Potential Energy/Kinetic Energy and Speed/Acceleration by creating your own roller coaster ride with Cstr Physics (69p)

5. Create a Film trailer about a favorite subject or even life in your school using iMovie (2.99) For a real world example working with Polish and Romanian students in Turkey last week check this out….

6. Phoster (£1.49) - This app is great for creating Posters that combine images and text. We have used it for creating poster for eSafety and funky eBook covers. Whenever you need a text/Image message this app gets the job done very quickly.

7. Create you own eBook and share it. For Primary schools we tend to go for Book Creator for iPad  (£2.99)and for more complex projects that include video we reach for Creative Book Builder (£2.49)everytime. For the official CBB video tutorial (made on an iPad by Digital Roadtrip) check this out…

Creative Book Builder for CBB from digital roadtrip on Vimeo.

8. Create the most unique presentations (with automatically drawn animations) using Video Scribe (£2.49)

9. For Musicians Garageband complete with smart instruments has to be the once stop shop for tomorrows music makes and producers. The video below shows how you can even jam and record all the parts to one iPad.

If you want to get clever you can copy and paste audio from other music apps into Garageband our current faves are DM1 and iKaossilator. GB is also very good for recording all speaking and listening activities, creating podcasts and radio progs etc.

10. Share some content from the teachers computer to the iPads using the amazing free Groupzap.com collaboration tool. Drag and drop any content into the Groupzap board and invite the iPad via email and you are good to go!

After all this excitement you can add a few well meaning gestures…

The Scrunch - 4 fingers and thumb to close the existing app and arrive by magic at the home screen.

4 Fingers up - to reveal recently used apps (useful when copying and pasting between apps)

4 Fingers across enables you to move from one app to the next adjacent open app.

Finally 1 finger wait for it….to put the iPad to sleep whilst your dreams fizz and pop with ideas for your next creative iPad experience.

I’m quite enjoying this tool that seems to work really well for web based collaboration.

Group Zap isn’t an app. It’s a web service you can find it here.

No doubt there could be some port issues in schools, but it works a treat at home! Text and image can be updated live across multiple devices.  Images need to be uploaded from IOS devices with the free Picup app.

What also got me excited was that on the Mac, I could drop an eBook onto the  Zap board and distribute it. It becomes a downloadable file.

When the iPad was born, I’m sure I wasn’t alone in thinking that Photoshop on an iPad might be interesting, but now I’m not so sure.

I use a whole range of instant gratification apps almost like a tool kit to process an image. These apps include - Snapseed, Phoster, Type drawing, Background Eraser, Tiltshift, Percolater, Pixlromatic amongst others. Maybe I’m sub-consciously rebuilding Photoshop from a bunch of disparate apps? If I keep adding to the tools, the sum total cost could be close to Photoshop Elements @£60 ish! Great for iTunes revenue, but not great for my bank balance.

 So let’s download the beast… 

At £6 it’s not cheap or really expensive (depending on what it offers). It is light in Mbs weighing in at 50Mb - I’d say good job Adobe! on the small footprint. 

You can directly import images from the “Local Photos” option. This is what iPad users would call the Camera Roll. Of course it ran first on Android so the terms of reference mean I don’t feel so at home.

There’s also access to Adobe’s Creative Cloud, the built in camera, Google and your Facebook account. Interestingly, one image I immediately wanted was in my iCloud stream and that wasn’t obviously accessible neither is Dropbox.

On the upside, the Google import is direct from Google images with a search option as opposed to linking with your Google account. It does offer a search by colour! and also by usage rights which is great again for educators. 

With my “Apple head” on I thought “forget the handy tutorial”, I can figure this out!  Guess what? I could load an image, I could add layers and text but I couldn’t intuitively really manipulate anything with ease.

Back to the in built tutorial and hey there’s a whole series of 13 activities. These are very well put together offering a whole range of image editing options. I’ve opted for the clean up background tutorial. Wow! It’s simple and easy to follow with the on screen prompts. I’m not a big lover of a manual with apps. For me things have to be obvious, but I am making an exception here as these tasks are not simple gratification taps, like many iPad Photo apps.

There is some skill involved in this. Skill and the iPad don’t have to mutually exclusive!

Not sure why we need bikini clad babes - but Adobe obviously think it’s a great idea.

More critically for iPad creatives, it does save Transparent PNGs. These will look gorgeous in Keynote, Pages, Explain Everything and Avid Studio as an “overlay” - oops Avid Studio is kind of quirky/cool on the iPad, but that’s another story!

PT does also offer an interesting ”Enable Presentation Mode” in the preferences that creates a red visual laser pointer - this again is great for “Sage on Stage” sessions. My fellow ADE’s are gonna love that “bad boy feature”.

So first impressions were not great, but then RTFM and it all made sense. It was a bit of a snub to Apple by releasing the Photoshop Touch app on Android before iOS. I’d love to know the download stats for the two platforms.  I bet after 1 day IOS is already higher than Android.

As regards workflow it seems iPad bound. In that there is no import and export of .PSD files. Is that an issue? - I’m not sure that it is for most people that are also happy to work within the limits of 1600x1600 pixels!

Overall I think this is a great app for longer and more meaningful digital imaging learning journeys or should that be digital roadtrips? ;-)  It feels very android in terms of interface and a little clunky but it does for and it has got a reasonable set of tools.

I am liking it. It could be improved. I’m thinking secondary/high schools and planning. The 1600x1600 limitation means that some outcomes won’t look good on that new LED you’ve just purchased for the school foyer. 

The content for these tutorials was created on the iPad and then tweaked slightly in iMovie on the Mac. It is possible to do the whole thing on the iPad. I just had some idents that needed to be tweaked, otherwise this would have been a 100% iPad process. 

Because these are screenshots/voice overs, there are some “movement moments” that don’t appear in the video - but hopefully the ebook creation process is clear.

As regards the apps, both have strengths and weaknesses - Book Creator is great for younger kids that need some visual satisfaction. The visual layout approach is fun but there is no contents page, URL links or video embedding. CBB is more abstract but produces a more professional book, but it is a less visually personalised book. 

Both are great tools and the developers are good guys that listen to educator feedback which is great!

Being busy presenting, I didn’t get much of a chance to look around BETT 2012.  For me, the two best things were not actually at BETT.  The first thing was this….

This is about to be launched and I like it a lot! 

This page is a tease. It sign posts a new and FREE way to create interactive question sets with audio and video content. You create on the big screen with an easy to use interface and publish to the devices. I was shown a demo and it is so fast and easy. Every teacher will be able to create great simple but powerful IOS content with this tool. This is without having to be a developer.

It could be massive especially in the primary sector.

The Best 1:1 iOS find at BETT part 2 was… also part visible and invisible. This being the BETT winners of ICT Company of the Year (Less than £1 Million) - Radiowaves.

These guys are true education innovators. They are quick and nimble and make the big guys look a little clueless. The invisible bit is that they have a free stealth iOS app that is about to be launched.  It is in effect an iOS only social publishing tool for learning. Content from the camera roll can be zapped straight into the learners social learning space. Many schools even 1:1 iOS schools don’t actually realise that you can’t post content into a web 2.0 space from Safari.

I blog on Tumblr,  use Posterous spaces for workshops/iPad content distribution (this being one example of “post2publish” carnage)  - but this is different.

The advantage of the new Radiowaves app is the sharing of social iOS content, enabling teachers to explore how socially shared content shapes literacy and of course learning in general. 

I think 1:1 iOS schools are going to love it.

I can’t wait for both of these releases!