Tuesday Tech Tidbit

For your next presentation project, I encourage you to consider having your students create their very own ebook.  Creating ebooks is very easy on the iPad.  Students use the Pages app to create the book.  E-books can contain all kinds of multimedia, including videos and voice-overs.  The resulting ebooks are easy to share with others.  They open in the Books app on your iPad.  Students feel like accomplished authors, and the results are stunning. Please reach out to me if you would plan an ebook project with your students.  I would love to demonstrate to your students how to create an ebook, and I can lend technical support throughout the project.   This video demonstrates how to create and share an ebook.

We are currently operating in two technology ecosystems:  Google and Apple.  Most of our word processing continues to occur in Google Docs, even though our students are working on iPad hardware.  As you might imagine, Google has made no effort to design a brilliant Google Docs app for the iPad.  The Google Docs app on the iPad is Captain Crappy.  I would rate it a solid D.   Why do we continue to use it then?  Apple makes a full-featured word processor called Pages, which lives on everyone's iPads.  Pages has all the document, text, and multimedia formatting of the major PC word processors.   Fun facts about Apple Pages: Pages allows for collaborative document editing.   Documents are automatically saved in iCloud.   Documents can be viewed and edited on any PC web browser using icloud.com . Documents can easily be submitted to Google Classroom.   Pages takes advantage of Apple's multimedia ecosystem, m...

Using the Keynote iPad app, students can create amazing multimedia presentations that put Google Slides to shame. But once these presentations are completed, teachers want to be able to easily open them on their Windows computer and assess them in Google Classroom.  Impossible, you say?  Not at all! The secret to submitting full-featured, multimedia presentations into Google Classroom is for students to submit an iCloud link rather than a physical file.  The video below demonstrates how a student uses an iPad to submit a Keynote presentation (with a video!) to his teacher in Google Classroom.  The teacher then opens the presentation on a Windows PC and plays the full-featured presentation in the Chrome browser, all without leaving Google Classroom.  If you thought this was impossible ... watch on! By demonstrating how easily Keynote can play nicely with Google Classroom and Windows computers, I hope more teachers and students take the plunge and discover the am...

Your school-issued iPad offers 32GB of storage.  This storage can fill quickly if you install a lot of apps or save a lot of media files to your iPad.  Today's tech tidbit will show you a couple of quick actions you can take to free up some of that internal storage.  The video below will walk you through these easy steps.