Category: Tech

Missing tools…

So I’ve been thinking again.

I know, I know. It just gets me in trouble. Whatever.

 

Anyway. Apple’s been kind enough (or hateful enough, depending on your viewpoint, I suppose…) to release some eBook authoring software to us, the unwashed masses. I think it’s pretty cool; there’s already been a bunch of blowback about the EULA. I’ve already written about what I think about that mess over here.

Here’s what I think is missing: Animation software.

It’s great that I can now easily build these eBooks. Actually, I could do that already, via Pages or Sigil or InDesign (cringe) or whatever. Just this morning, in fact, I built a quick ePub for a friend- something like 70 pages long, took me, oh, maybe 30 minutes. Tops. All text, easy.

What I’m missing is the ability, with my meager skills, to build the sort of nice looking animations that seems so common in the media these days. I mean, I know I could try to learn Blender (have you tried, btw? least intuitive interface. ever.) or shell out the money for Maya or Motion or Rhino or some other overkill industrial strength tool. I don’t really want that. I loathe using InDesign, mostly because it’s so wildly overkill and complicated for my needs- Pages or GDocs tend to be a better option for me. As much as I love my Final Cut Pro rig, lots of the time the quick videos I’m making are faster to build in iMovie. I try to avoid Pro Level software unless I really need it. I find the lighter the weight of the tool, the faster and more often I use it.

So what I really want is a nice, well designed, reasonably full-featured 3d animation software that doesn’t require a huge learning curve. I’ve not found one, have you?

Once I’ve got that- whoo-boy! My presentations and eBooks and websites will never be the same.

 

t.

 

Thoughts on BYOD…

I had this revelation this morning, and thought I’d share. I was thinking about my district/school’s eventual move towards a BYOD environment. I’ve talked before about how I don’t think going from a non-1:1 environment to BYOD isn’t a functional reality, but I had always assumed that once that eventual shift was made, I’d be teaching in a school full of varied devices.

Now I’m thinking that’s not the case.

The realization I’ve come to is that a wide variety of devices being self-deployed in a High School is exceptionally unlikely because it would require the majority of my students to have an interest in discovering the device that works best for them. Given my experience this year, and with High School students on the whole I can say this with certainty: That will never happen.

Functioning in High School isn’t about standing out as an individual and making independent choices. High School, for the vast majority of students, is about blending into the crowd. It’s about having the exact same shoes/jeans/fleece that everyone else has.

Beyond that substantial hurdle to clear, there’s this fact to go along with it: people deeply interested in tech will always be a minority. While the people reading this blog might care about tech, the majority of people don’t want to think about the intricacies of that tech- they just want it to work. That that same sort of dynamic exists in high school. Most of my students don’t really care what specific cell phone they have- they just need it to do what they want. Ditto with computers- they want to be able to see the web, check email, message, skype, and the like. That’s it- they’re not really into caring about the display tech or the wireless chipset the maker is using.

I’d guess that in a true BYOD situation, you’d end up with two or maybe three major options being brought, with a small percentage of technophiles/early adopters rounding out a few, other, more obscure options.

Anyway.

 

t.

What I hope Apple’s Jan 19th Event is about…

Let me preface with this: I have no insider information about this. None. No connections with Apple (as if that would help…). No leaked material. Heck I haven’t even been keeping up with the rumor sites. This is what I hope it will be, which may be completely divorced from what it will be.

So. What I hope this is about is providing way for educators to publish their own textbooks. I assume ebooks, and further, I assume ePubs, given that Apple’s put a lot of work into that standard. And, the more I play with it as a standard and understand it’s limitations and strengths, the more I like it for what it is.

In some ways, this would be non-news. Pages already allows you to easily produce ePubs. Sure, it coughs a bit with large files, and sure, it’s an Apple only product, but still. It does a decent job. Actually, I’d pay for a simple app that only does ePubs and does it well. That’s 90% of my output these days, so something optimized for that would be pretty slick. (Know of one? Drop me a line…)

More likely, I think, is that the even is about allowing educators to collaborate on their electronic books and distribute them. A way of bypassing the entire publishing industry the way the iTunes store bypassed much of the music publishing industry. If Apple provides an elegant, easy, and low-cost forum for educators to store and share material and then gives educators a way to output what they’ve created directly as an ePub, well… That’d kill.

I don’t care if there’s a way to monetize it. I suspect there will be, because Apple is a company that needs to make money. I get that. I don’t know what I’d pay for that service as an individual, but I suspect my district would pay for access.

I’ll point out here that I’ve been a huge proponent of educators building their own textbooks. I helped make that happen at my school six years ago- long before ebooks were a reasonable reality for our students. We used (and still use) print on demand to have books that we’ve created printed in small numbers for us. Moving that to an ePub is just the next logical step- and since our student all have iPad’s now… well, it just makes sense. Imperfect, but what isn’t?

My $0.02

t.

How we went 1:1

Been a few days, but January is shaping up to be the busiest month of the year for me yet. Stuff to do all over the place.

Out of all the crazy, a gem has emerged: Some good folks at my work put together a comprehensive ePub of our school’s journey into the land of 1:1. It covers pretty much everything, and is a pretty neat resource/archive of the thinking and work that went into such a big shift. Linkage here.

Also, linkage to the lovely co-worker (and officemate!) Andy Marcinek, for building the thing what looked like one huge pull and having it come out looking so nice.

Also, linkage to Patrick Larkin for pushing all this in the first place. Like he needs the links…

t.