I’ve been playing around with a fascinating website called If This Then That http://ifttt.com.  Think of it as virtual gaffer tape that automatically ties all of your online activities together in a myriad of possible ways.

When you sign up you then need to connect it to as many of your online presences as you choose, there’s an impressive selection of so-called ‘channels’:

ifttt 'channels'

Once you’ve done that you enter the beautifully designed ‘creation’ tool and design you ‘task’, where in essence you choose ‘if this then that’. Choosing ‘if this’ happens in one of your ‘channels’ ‘then that’ automatically happens in another channel.

Rather than twitter on here are some tasks I’ve been experimenting with:

Those are some obvious uses but you can be much more creative with some of the other channels on offer.  The GMail channel allows emails to be sent from your account based upon one of the triggers, although my test of this using the Weather channel to email Mrs Stucke every time it rains in Manchester hasn’t amused her on this wet May weekend!!

You are currently allowed 10 tasks in total – the service is in limited free beta at the moment so I wouldn’t be surprised to see options to expand this for a fee in future.

Overall this is a stunningly designed tool that has massive potential and could prove incredibly useful if you manage many different online tools (and I know most people reading this do!).

I have 5 invites available, if you would like one please leave a message in the comments. And then share your creative uses of ifttt.

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Off topic but incredibly useful!

Noted is a new app that does one thing and one thing well. It opens up, you type a note, you click send and it appears in your inbox.

I’ve used dozens of to-do productivity style apps and with the best will in the world I make big old to-do lists and then quickly stop forget all about them.

90% of my to-do’s seem to come through my inbox, so this incredibly quick way of dumping other things in my inbox might just stop me losing them on little bits of paper!

£1.19 in the App Store.

How do you manage your busy life?

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Google Docs School Newspaper – what a great idea. Laura Chesebro via Jeff Utecht.

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Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.

Another presenter who is challenged by presenting ‘in the round’!

Seeing a massive change in the quality and quantity of informal learning.  Talk about the dream of free knowledge for everyone.  Free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

What is free access?  Free as in speech, not as in beer.  Something more fundamental.  Free to redistribute and re-use all of Wikipedia.

What is the sum of all human knowledge? Wikipedia is not an archive or library, nor a textbook, can be an adjunct to a textbook.  Not designed to lead you through the learning.  Not Youtube, no funny cat videos, try to keep things serious.  Encyclopedia offers a summary of human knowledge.

Joked about being sick of seeing his face on the website calling for donations to the charity.   Around 50 employees and a budget of $21million.  It’s the 100,000 contributors who make it happen.  All design and content is done by the community.

16 million articles across 270 languages.  199 languages have at least 1000 articles.  Over a million in English German and French.  Abandoned China for 3 years due to censorship.  But was made accessible again around the Olympics, just with certain pages e.g. Taiwan, Tianneman being filtered.  But only ranked around no.50 in China as a website.

Showed some funny Chinese menus translated into English and ended up with Stir Fried Wikipedia, probably due to it being first entry for every search on the internet:

Global content comparisons using a graph of % of page hits for the top 100 topics:  Similar written content across countries.  But readers vary more.  Japanese love searching for pop culture.  Germans most interested in Geography!  Sex very popular except in France and Spain - because they are actually having sex while the rest of us just read it on the Internet!

Wikipedia has 408 million unique visitors (per how long?).

Who is writing Wikipedia?  Important to know for young people as it is such a dominant source of information for young people.

• 87% male. Too many computer geeks!  Want to simplify the editing interface.  Excluding women but also elderly and other less confident users.
• Average age 26.
• Double % PhDs – geekier crowd than normal
• People at the intersection between intelligence, obsession and free time!
• Invitation is in the edit button to allow people to take part – nice quote from a ‘user’ in a video Jimmy showed

What is beyond the encyclopedia?  Encyclopedia is just the start.

Library is much much bigger.  Wikia is Jimmy’s next project to take over the rest of the library.  Place for people to dig deeply into, used example of comparing the entries for Twilight the novel.  No need for the ‘source’ in Wikia, more opinions and discussions.  Went on to talk about Lostpedia, which was created on Wikia to write about Lost the TV programme.  Believe that the writers took great inspiration from the fans documenting it, the show was something of a wiki in it’s self.

Jimmy’s final point: How can we get the learners involved in the creation of their learning?

As big a sales pitch as some other talks today, but enthralling.  If only because of the influence it has on our learners, it’s so often their number one source.  Who needs to know the dates of Kings & Queens when it’s a search away?

Final questions with Jimmy, Lord Puttnam & Graham:

Good point in the questions that the whole idea of Wikipedia was seen as complete madness beforehand.  Which feeds into the ideas from Stephen & Lord Puttnam of this next multi-billion making innovation potentially being in the sphere of learning.  Lord Puttnam later added that he thought that great innovation would stem from the games industry.

Great anecdote from Lord Puttnam about someone challenging a member of parliament in parliament as they searched on their phone about a speech from the week before and pointed out that what they were saying was not true and that they were contradicting themselves.  Something that happens more and more in the classroom.

Great question asked of Jimmy as to whether a step by step learning based wiki could be built that would transform free education with a crowd sourced curriculum.  The foundation have tried a variation with wiki-books but it has struggled as software not suited to assessment etc..  But also problems with fragmented educational standards.  One of the big things that inspire people to take part is that they know someone will use their contribution.  Jimmy thinks that people would feel that schools couldn’t use their content in the classroom -I’d disagree with this quite strongly.  So many of us blog about our teaching BECAUSE we hope someone else might find it useful in their classroom.  However he does think it should be possible.

Final question was about what 3 things you’d have in a new school.  Lord Puttnam points out that it’s easy to do great things in a school but it’s really difficult to scale to every school.  Jimmy would want to see increased teaching of media competence and the ability to assess the quality of a source of information, in context of Wikipedia – how do you use it as a starting point to go deeper into a topic.  Fantastic point to finish on.

And that’s it – battery nearly flat on the laptop, and internal batteries exhausted – interesting day of live blogging, will read back later and see if there was any quality to it or if I just missed the salient points through distraction!

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Talk about NUI - Natural User Interfaces (no touch).

Obvious plug for Kinect.  Showed Anybot robot that allows you to attend a meeting without actually being there. Talked through other examples of such tech.

Challenges of creating Kinect: Have to be able to capture body pose.  Come in many shapes, sizes and flexibilities! Depth camera made all this possible.  Prof Blake spent quite some time doing the Professor thing by going into the science of Kinect.

Similar tech that developed from Autism work is now allowing computers to detect emotion in faces.

Big final plug for Computer Science.  Is changing the World.  Seriously concerned about the decline in uptake in schools.  NOT the same as ICT.  Computer Science is about providing the computing and is an exciting intellectual challenge.

Final point is salient from this morning’s last few talks and a good call to arms on what was otherwise a bit too geeky a presentation for my liking!

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The latest software update for the iPad is almost upon us, bringing multi-tasking, folders, air printing, game centre, unified inbox and more to the iPad.  It is currently in ‘Gold Master’ stage which is basically the final version that is released to developers a few weeks before the public.

You can download it from the links on this website – you will also need to download iTunes 10.1 Beta, again from the links on that site.

I’ve been running 4.2GM for most of the last week and it’s great – the iPad is finally more like the machine we knew it could be.

Most of the apps need to be updated by their developers to multi-task properly, but many already do and it makes content creation and manipulation much easier being able to flick from the Mail app to Safari to Twitter and on to Air Sketch for example.

Multi Task App Switching

Just like the iPhone you can now access music controls and the screen lock from the app-switching menu, just slide over to the right.  You can also change the volume and handily the screen brightness from this menu.

App Switching Options Menu

Folders are now available and can contain up to 20 Applications, this is a godsend, all my apps are now neatly organised on one page, rather than spread across 6 as they were before.

iPad Application Folders

The unified inbox is here which makes reading and organising emails far easier.  And as part of this you can have as many Exchange accounts synced to your iPad as you like.  I find this most useful for my calendars.  I can now setup my personal Google account and my school Google Apps accounts as Exchange connections and hence import all of their calendars.  Previously I could only sync one calendar from each account.  I now have calendars galore:

Calendars Galore

This is a great update, hopefully the official version will be out soon and developers will update their apps promptly.

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I’ve been trying to use my iPad in the classroom as much as possible, as a device for use in schools it is close to being perfect.  One of the drawbacks has been working out how to get what’s on the iPad to be projected onto my classroom wall.  You can connect it with the iPad VGA connector to a computer and project that way, but only a handful of apps support this.  This can apparently be expanded somewhat by jail-breaking , but I don’t really want to go there.

Then last week Wes Frier alerted me to an App called Air Sketch.  Air Sketch is a fairly simple drawing application with a killer feature, it will broadcast whatever is on the screen across your network to a webpage.  If you open that webpage in a HTML 5 browser from any machine attached to the same network you will see the iPad screen.  Any updates made on the iPad appear almost instantly on your PC or Mac.  Air Sketch was £1.79 but there is also a free option to try.

So I can walk around my classroom with my iPad and write on it with my Pogo Sketch Pen.  Everything appears as if I was stood at the Interactive Whiteboard using SMART Notebook.  Just being able to do this from anywhere in the room is a great help, I can get pupils to demonstrate work quickly without getting them to the front of the classroom.  We have GCSE exams next week, so spent a lot of Friday working through old exam papers, this meant as soon as I spotted a common problem in the class I could demonstrate a solution from sitting next to whichever child had the issue, but for the whole class to see, or better still get one of the pupils who did understand the answer to demonstrate it to their colleagues.

Air Sketch allows you to import both PDF files and images into the software ready for you to annotate over.  Air Sketch adds itself to your ‘Open In’ menu, so you can open a PDF straight from the Mail app, or Dropbox for example:

The PDF import is a useful feature and a good idea, but I had some issues with the clarity of the documents when they were imported.  Pogo Sketch works in landscape mode, and my PDFs were in portrait, zoomed out they were too small to annotate and too small to read on the projector:

Zoomed in they lacked clarity:

I found the easiest way to work around this was to open the PDF (or indeed Word, Powerpoint etc) document in the standard iPad viewer, zoom into the section I wanted to display then press the Home and Power buttons simultaneously to take a picture.  I could then open Air Sketch back up and open the image from the Picture menu:

The little toolbar along the bottom of that screen allows you to rotate the image and fill the screen with it ready for annotation:

Overall this is a great utility, it’s not perfect but is really exciting.  Surely it’s only a matter of time before other app developers build this technology into their own applications?  I hope Air Sketch itself gets an update soon to allow better importing of other files, more brush options, some hand-writing smoothing and other features that some of the other note-taking apps have been perfecting on the iPad.

Have you got any other apps you couldn’t live without in the classroom?  Do you think the iPad will soon offer a serious alternative to an Interactive Whiteboard?  When you consider the cost of this solution versus an interactive whiteboard or a tablet PC I think the market leaders in those areas must be running scared.

This works beautifully with the new iPad Software 4.2 – the ability to multi-task is a killer. More on that in my next post….

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Facebook recently updated their Groups feature.  Allowing finer control over groups which you set up, who can join, who can post, who can share etc..   Their are also improvements to how you are notified about group updates and a new feature called ‘docs’ that provides a Google Docs-esque shared notepad / document. Group chat is also built in allowing you to talk to everyone in that group at once. For a demonstration head over to Mashable or watch this video:

Our school has had some success in this area, the PE Department have a group for discussing after school teams and clubs and it is slowly growing, with news and sensible moderated discussion. I can see a Year 7 experiment here…..  Big VLE decisions are on the horizon at our school and part of me thinks a mix of free services like this and Google Docs and self hosted blogs may be the way forward.  Whatever decision is made, ease of use and extremely low barriers to entry are vital and Facebook ticks these boxes strongly. Opinions?

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Google released their Parisian Love Story advert for the Superbowl earlier in the year – watch it, it’s ever so clever:

You can now make you own stories with 7 simple search terms.  It couldn’t be easier, you just type in up to 7 search terms and then choose whether the video will show it as a normal search, image search, map search etc.  Try it here: http://www.youtube.com/user/SearchStories

I knocked one up very quickly – took about 5 minutes, you’ll have to excuse the cheese factor of it!

Could be a great tool for pupils telling stories new or old, explaining topics, making revision tips, any other suggestions?

Enjoy

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