Do you need Blogsy? Answer a quick survey to win a free* app!

Rather than handing in paper and killing trees [NOTE: the trees are already dead.], students will be doing the majority of their homework on a class blog. I have in-depth instructions on how to set one up, and I'm always available to tutor you through it as well, but simply setting up a blog is not enough.

A good blog includes pictures and video and interesting formatting, all with the purpose of earning (and keeping) your audience's attention. Typing up the information is really easy to do on your iPad--I mean, with a secret email address, you can even do it on Evernote or QuickOffice or the Mail app. However, if I'm going to give you TOAST points for including all the good elements of a blogpost, you're going to need to include some extra media.

This is where Blogsy, a favorite app of mine, comes into play. With this program, you can easily create a post that includes media, formatting, and clarity, all in a very easy-to-use package. Last semester, I wrote a primer on how to set up your blog with Blogsy, a must-read for TAPA students. We'll do some in-class training, too, for those of you struggling to figure it out. However, before any of that happens, we need to do something important: GET YOU THE APP.

You can just to to the App Store and buy it yourself, or I can purchase it for you and gift it to you in class. It's up to you, but you've got to let me know as soon as possible. This link (and the QR code to the left) will take you to a form you can fill out that will tell me if you need to buy it, if you want me to buy it for you, or if you already have it. This is a required app for Webb classes, and I will be giving you a quiz that includes the question:

DO YOU HAVE BLOGSY INSTALLED?

Those are fake smiles. They're actually angry.

If it's not, you're losing points, your grades will suffer, you'll probably not graduate from high school, and you'll have to spend the rest of your life giving pedicures to crocodiles. For free.

So, one more time:

TAKE THE QUICK 15-SECOND SURVEY TO LET ME KNOW HOW YOU ARE GETTING BLOGSY ONTO YOUR IPAD. RIGHT NOW.

Good.

*The app isn't really free, but I will freely buy it for you with your money. Sorry.

Required Apps for Webb classes

Originally posted 8/4/11.

For our second year, Taipei Adventist Preparatory Academy is going "full-iPad"—thin, electronic tablets instead of heavy paper books. Being that now students will have computing power at their fingertips, they won't simply be expected to use their iPads as textbooks—they'll also be expected to use them for enhancing their learning other ways, as well. There is a set list of apps that are required school-wide, but there's also a special list of (mostly) free apps that will be expected to be used in Mr. Webb's classes:

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GoodReader The "bread-and-butter" app of TAPA, this will be the program that you use the most. You'll use GoodReader to access your textbooks (scanned in as PDFs), but it's more than just a viewing app. You can write notes, highlight text, draw shapes, search text (and notes, and highlights, and anything shape you put in), and, strangely enough, even watch videos that won't play natively on the built-in Movies app.

QuickOffice Pro HD Basically, this is Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, but designed specifically for the iPad. The PowerPoint feature is especially pretty cool, as it allows you to create and display your presentation easily, through the use of the iPad-to-VGA (Projector) adapter AirServer, onto the Mac Minis in every classroom. This has Dropbox and Google Docs integration, too, so sign in to get the most out of it.

Evernote Where do you start? Note-taking abilities? Check; does it better than Notepad, and includes rich text and the ability to add in pictures. Recording audio? Hit the little  icon and easily record your teacher's talk. Remembering what the whiteboard said? Take a photo of the board and put it in, and, later, you can search the picture for text. Add in tagging (the best feature you're not using), and, most importantly, everything backed up to the internet, and you've got a killer app you should be using every period.

Blogsy (Soon...) Most students know about my ginormous crush on Blogsy. I only love it because 1) it's everything I've ever wanted for a mobile blogging app, and 2) it's awesome developer personally has listened to me about a few new features. With all the blogging you're going to be doing in my classes, you'd be silly to not purchase this as soon as possible. ***UPDATE*** Now required! And I'll even buy it for you!

Dropbox I've written the long version before, but, in short, Dropbox is a virtual, internet-based flash drive that updates documents instantly anywhere you have it installed. Install it onto your home computer and your iPad, and log into each account; then, write an essay on your home computer, and it'll show up on your iPad. Edit on the iPad, and it's fixed at home. Best of all, it'll protect you from losing everything if your break your iPad. Required for success.

Scan There's a hundred QR readers on iTunes, and you technically can get any one you want, but Scan is my personal favorite. It's as simple of a program as you can get: just point the camera at any QR code and boom—Information instantly. At the very least, pick up this free app.

Easy QR "BUT MISTAH WEBBAH, WHY WE NEEDAH TWO QR APPSAH?" First off, speak better English. Secondly, occasionally, one of the QR readers won't work as well as the other, so it's smart to have 2. But, most importantly, Easy QR allows you to easily make your own QR codes to distribute any number of ways. Smart to have.

Minu Timer For the most part, the only app that we'll use for Communications class will be the YouTube app, which you will use for uploading your practice speeches. However, if there's another I'd really love to have every student to have, it would be this timer app. Very simple and elegant, Minu Timer is my preferred choice, and what I'll most likely use in timing your speeches during class.

iBooks Soon, in my classes, I'll be releasing a textbook that will contain nearly all of the reading material we'll be using in all my classes throughout the year. Until iTunes approves it, we'll be on standby, but it's not a stupid idea to download this to be ready for when I amaze you.

Stanza While GoodReader is an awesome PDF reader, it lacks a pretty important function: reading other types of files, such as ePub (for eBooks) and CBZs/CBRs (for digital comic books). Whatever GoodReader cannot read, Stanza can and will. Its PDF reader isn't amazing, but the other features it can do will more than make up for it. iBooks will also work, but Stanza is infinitely better.

Shakespeare (Free) An absolute necessity for anyone planning on taking first semester of British Literature, we will read at least 3 plays off this app. The free version is all that's necessary, although the paid app does have a built-in glossary for those tough-to-understand Shakespearean words.

Free Books It's pretty amazing to me that this app designer has been able to get over 23,000 books into his app, all legally, and all for free, but it's true. For my classes, often times, if we're able to get the book for free, I'll just ask you to download them from this app rather than purchase you the book yourself. It'll save you time and money.

Dropbox—Because flash drives are soooo 2007.

Originally posted 8/13/11.

When I first got to TAPA, I was pretty surprised to find out that I wouldn't be able to print of my Macbook. Apparently, with the way the system was set up, only Windows computers plugged in with PaperCut are configured to print, so if I made a worksheet at home on my laptop and I wanted to print it off for class, I pretty much had 2 options:

1. Save the file to the flash drive, unmount the drive, unplug it from my Mac and plug it into my office PC, open up the flash drive, open up the file, and print it out.
2. Email the file to myself from my Mac and open it with my email on my office PC.

This, in a word, was annoying. I wanted to have some type of way of taking a document and working on it on one computer, and then standing up and walking to another computer and finishing that document.

Enter Dropbox.

What I did was install Dropbox to my Mac laptop, my old Windows computer at home, and my office PC at TAPA. When I come home at night and start creating a worksheet on my Mac computer, I save it to my Dropbox folder. As soon as I hit save, it will create the same exact file that I made on my Mac as I did on my home Windows computer and my TAPA office computer. Any change I make to that Mac file will immediately be mirrored on each other computer, almost instantly. 

It gets better. I come to school the next day and turn on my office computer. The file that I made last night on my Mac is already sitting there in the exact place I put it on my Mac, but now, it's on my office computer. And it looks exactly the same as I made it the night before. But wait... I made a mistake. I fix the file on the office computer, and as soon as I hit save, it will immediately update the file on my home Windows computer and my personal Macbook.

Wait, what if I'm not near my own desk but I do have internet access? I can actually still go to Dropbox.com (perhaps on my wife's office computer), log in, and access each of those files I've worked on and updated via the website. At any time. From any computer.

Pretty cool, right? But it'd be better if there was some way of adding that to the iPads, right? Gotcha. In the QuickOffice Pro HD app that all the TAPA staff and students have, there is an option to link your Dropbox account to that program. Now, if I create or edit a document on Dropbox on my iPad, it will immediately reflect those changes on my Mac laptop, my old Windows computer at home, Dropbox.com, and my office PC at TAPA. 

I could go on and on about this and tell you about how I've also tied in my iPod touch and my Android cell phone iPhone to this process, or about how I have shared folder with Lisa where, when she edits a document on her own Dropbox account, I get those changes instantly, too, but I'll stop there. The point is this: if you're working off of more than 1 computing device, this is a pretty required program that will make your life infinitely easier. Go check it out, please!

HINT: Students ought to check out a couple of cool iPad screencasting apps!

So, I've been looking for some cool new iPad apps lately, and I stumbled across two (free!) that I think are pretty interesting: Show Me Whiteboard and Screen Chomp. Both of these apps are designed for screencasting, which is essentially make a video of something actually happening on your iPad and putting it online to share. With each app, you can click record, draw on the screen, add pictures, and even talk out loud (to explain what you're doing), and then upload that to the internet and post it on your blog or web site or whatever. This would be a pretty cool technology to have if you were going to show your teacher how to do something, like making diagrams, explaining maps, or, I don't know, how about explaining poetry (?).

Both of these apps work about the same way, but I think that Screen Chomp is, frankly, a little more aimed for elementary school students. Show Me has a bit more options and comes across as a little bit more "grown up," so I'm going to show you really quick how to use it.

To the right is what the main app screen for Show Me looks like. To use it, you click the little record button, which is the 2nd to the bottom. (It would be where the F is, but it will look like instead of .) Then... you just start drawing. And talking. And it gets it all down. When you're finished, you click the  F button again (which should be in a shape), and it will stop.

A rundown of the buttons:

A: The pen. For drawing (obviously). You can click on any color and then the pen, and it will draw in that color.
B: The eraser. Clicking on that and "drawing" will erase individual sections of the drawing.
C: Full eraser. Clicking on that will erase the entire screen.
D: Undo.
E: Change the background from all-white (default) to any picture in your photo library.
F: The aforementioned Record/Play/Stop recording button.
G: Export. Once you create an account, you can get the embed code and put your video into your blog!

To prove how easy it is, check this out:



From my experimentation, Screen Chomp works essentially the same way. Another reason I don't like it as much, though, is it only gives you, like, 3 colors for drawing. And again, just seems waaay more childish. My opinion, though.

So, try it out Show Me a few times—who knows, you might need it soon! (HINT HINT)

Verb tenses: The Bane of Sophomores

In reading English II assignments this semester, I'm seeing a pretty common trend: students are really struggling with verb tenses. For this reason, I want to spend some time focusing on this easy-to-cure problem, once and for all. During Wednesday and Thursday English II classes, we'll spend some time focusing on verb tenses and what makes them work. Students would be smart to download the above chart to their iPads to use offline.

The assignment will be to EnglishPage.com's Verb Tenses Tutorial page and complete each of the 30 exercises and tests by Noon on Sunday, October 16th. Once you have completed each test successfully, you will take a screenshot of the score (like below).

If you don't know how to screenshot on an iPad, its really easy. All you do is click the home button (basically, the only button on the front of the iPad, near the bottom) and the power button at the same time. (You don't hold them down—only click.) When you do it correctly, your screen will flash and you'll hear the camera shutter sound. You can then go to the Photos app and see the picture you just clicked.

As proof that you did all 30 exercises, I will ask you to make a blog post by October 16th with all 30 screenshots labeled, and in order. Make sure that the width of the images is not greater than 400px—otherwise, no points!*

*The easiest way to do this is to go to the Edit HTML of the blog post, find your image HTML, remove the part that says "height=333px", and then change "width=333px" to 400px. See me if you need more help with this.

Clouding gets better: Access shared TAPA calendars off your iPad

***UPDATE*** So, apparently, this doesn't work all the time. If you're finding that the following process doesn't work for you, there is one more thing you can do. On your iPad's Settings app, go under Mail, Contacts, Calendar. Click Add Account... and, instead of hitting Gmail, hit Other. Then, under Calendars, click Add CalDav Account. Then, type in the following settings:

If something pops up for allowing SSL, click Continue to accept. Now you can go ahead and skip to Step 2 below.

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About 75% of the reason I fell in love with my first iPod touch was because it was more than simply a music player; it was because the iPad was the kind of device that you could utilize to enhance your life. Mail? Awesome. Contacts? Great. Notes? Not the best by Apple, but excellent alternatives like Evernote (writeup on that one to come soon) make it great. But greatest of these: Apple's almighty Calendar app.

If you know the greatness of Calendar, good for you, but you're likely not using it to its fullest if you're not incorporating TAPA's Google-Apps-enhanced Cloud into it. For example, let's say something happens and instead of being a B-Day, tomorrow is an A-Day. An administrator can change what type of day it is on their iPads, and it will update onto yours as soon as you connect to the internet. Want to know if SA Day is being moved, and to when? As the SA sponsor, I can change the date on Google Calendar and you'll see the changes immediately. Want the entire school year's schedule on your iPad without having to put in anything? Do the following steps, and ever TAPA event, deadline, and vacation will appear on your device in seconds:

1. Add your TAPA Google Apps account to your iPad. (You might have already done part of this, but make sure you have everything set to make sure the entire process works.) Under your iPad's Settings app, go under Mail, Contacts, Calendar.
   
   
   
   
   
   • If you already receiving your TAPA mail on your iPad, you can just click on whatever your TAPA email account is (usually labeled yourname@tapa.tp.edu.tw) and make sure that Calendars is turned  ON .
• If you do not already receive your TAPA mail on your iPad, click Add Account..., , and enter in your TAPA email information (i.e. your Name, TAPA email Address, and TAPA email Password). Once it successfully loads, you can turn  ON  your Calendars and, optionally, your Mail.
2. Turn on your shared calendars. There are a series of shared calendars that, as someone else updates them on their iPad, will reflect changes instantly onto your iPad.* To gain access to those, on your iPad, make sure you are signed into your TAPA email account and go to the following link:
   

   https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/tapa.tp.edu.tw/iphoneselect

   There will be a series of calendars with checkmarks you can select.
   
   
   
   
   Click any and all you would like to be a part of (all are suggested!) and hit save.
3. Verify that your calendars have shown up on your Calendar app. Click on the Calendar app and actually hit the  button (in the top left). There will be a list of calendars that show up. Underneath your TAPA email address, you should see a few school calendars. Make sure that they are all checked On, as such:
   
   
   
   
   If you close the program down and re-open, your new calendar events should load.

And there it is! Let me know if you have any problems with this process!

For formal docs (like the Beowulf essay), use Scribd.

When you're writing an analysis about your personality, composing kenning-filled poems about your epicness, or showing video of the important elements of your life, a blog post is a great format for sharing your work. However, if you're doing something a bit more formal, a blog post just isn't the right format. This is where Scribd comes in. It's a website that allows you to display PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint presentations, and a variety of other documents with a more professional feel to it. For these Beowulf essays, Scribd is a great place to store these papers. There are three parts to this process: the initial signup, an on-iPad part and an on-a-real-computer part:

1. Sign up for Scribd. You can sign up by connecting to your Facebook account, if you want, or you can just sign up separately without Facebook. However, if you sign up with Facebook, I've found that your password acts a bit funny, so you'll have to add in a separate one. To do this, at the top of the page, click, underneath your name, on Settings.
   
   
   
   
   A bit below on that page, you'll have the option to add or change a password. Click on that and change the password to whatever you want. Even if you just change it to what your Facebook password is, that's ok—you just have to change/add/re-add the password to the account.
   
2. Write the essay. Obviously. Hopefully, you've already connected your Quickoffice App to your Dropbox account. Either way, make sure you, somehow, add your completed, finalized essay to your Quickoffice app.
3. Upload to Scribd. Drag your essay to the Document icon (to the right of the Trashcan and the Email icons) the bottom of the page.
   
   
   
   
   Once you do that, it'll pop up an option to upload it to Slideshare, Scribd, and .docstoc. Obviously, you'll go for the middle option.
   
   
   
   
   Add in a description of what you're uploading to Comments and then click  Upload . It'll then tell you once it has it uploaded. From here, you'll need to go to a real computer.
4. Get that Scribd document.  Now that you're logged into Scribd on your computer, go to your document Shelf. Your recently-uploaded document should now appear on the screen. Click on that document.
   
   
   
   
   Your document will show up now in the middle of the screen, but at the bottom of the screen, there will be a black bar. To the right of the bar will be an icon that looks like < / >, for Share and Embed. Click on that, and then, on the popup, press Embed >>.
   
   
   
   
   The screen above will pop up. Make sure, under Embed this document (in the middle) that Auto is checked for Width. Then, where it says Copy, click that to automatically copy down the HTML code for your document into your computer's clipboard.
5. Add it into your blog post. Now, create a New Post in your Blogger. I'd write a short introduction to what the paper is supposed to be about, etc, and then click on Edit HTML. Then, towards the bottom, paste in your code. It'll be awfully long and will look like this:
   

   <a title="View Test Document on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/63726099/Test-Document" style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none; display: block; text-decoration: underline;">Test Document</a><iframe class="scribd_iframe_embed" src="http://www.scribd.com/embeds/63726099/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-qvz5w4c4vy6yvv6c7tk" data-auto-height="true" data-aspect-ratio="0.772727272727273" scrolling="no" id="doc_44069" width="100%" height="600" frameborder="0"></iframe><script type="text/javascript">(function() { var scribd = document.createElement("script"); scribd.type = "text/javascript"; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = "http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js"; var s = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();</script>

   Finally, publish your post. 

Embedded into your blog will be a little something like this:

Test Document

Pretty cool, right? And so much more professional. Now, when you're trying to share formal documents or Powerpoint presentations, use this little trick, and it'll be perfect!