Basics for Education

I chose the iWork's app Pages, which is the iPad version of Microsoft Word. After playing around with the Pages app, I have come to the conclusion that it is just like Microsoft Word...on steroids. It is, like Word, a place where you can create word documents. They have the same editing techniques, such as font styles and sizes. One similarity that I was surprised with was the page scale at the top of the paper. When I noticed it, the first thing that popped into my mind was the scale on Word. One of the more noticeable similarities is the option when Pages opens up as to what kind of document you what to work on. While with Word, you have to go to File and specify what kind of document, the option is still there. Now onto a couple of differences...one major difference is the way to add data to your document, such as a graph or a chart. There is a lot more variety of data additions than with Word. The neatest difference to me was the fact that with Pages, you can add a picture from your camera roll to the document. That would be very helpful with screenshots and other material that you could take from your iPad into your document.

iThought is an awesome way to organize thoughts and materials. It reminds me a lot of the "idea webs" my teachers used to make me do back in elementary and middle school. We would write our topic in the middle of the paper and draw a web of ideas, points, and information to back our arguments up. iThought is just like this, but in extreme form. I love how there really isn't a limit as to how big you make your "map." This allows students to not be limited but to explore their topic and really let their thoughts run wild. If you don't like one area of your map, it is easy to erase one point, several points, and the entire cluster of that thought. It is also helpful that you can put links and other resources you used within your map. I know that is a big advantage because you can click on a link that goes to what your wanting to talk about, instead of having to transmit material word-for-word from the source you used. The same goes with photos. I was able to paste a picture to my map, which would allow me to easily discuss its point in the cluster I put it in. iThought is a GREAT tool for education, specifically with an English class or in any class when one would have to do a project or a research paper. You could start at a fairly young age, just teaching them how to use it, and by the time they reach the upper levels of education, they would use it as a pre-writing resource for their paper or project. You could turn using iThought into an assignment itself, or show the students how it is used in the planning process of a paper/project. iThought is a very neat and useful tool that both students and teachers can learn from.

There are numerous similarities and difference when comparing Safari and Rover. They are both web browsers and appear to look as such. One difference with Rover is the use of multi-touch gestures to navigate through a page of a website. With safari, you cannot do these gestures to scroll a webpage or drag and drop an object from one location to another, but with Rover you can. In the Rover tutorial, the guy shows that with a internet app like Safari, you can surf a website and stream videos and not use a whole lot of data on your server. However, with Rover, internet access is connected to a different server (middle man) and then streams to your iPad, which causes your data to spike continuously. When you get onto a website using Rover, you are not actually going to the website; rather, you are seeing a full screen image of the website from the "middle man" server and Rover webstie, which makes the picture look pixelated. There is a slight delay in the commands you use and when they are performed. Rover uses a lot of internet bandwidth, which would cause a strong delay in other computers and iPads in the same network. However, the big thing that sales Rover is its ability to use Flash, which in Safari, you often times have to install Flash or update Flash constantly. After watching the tutorials and using the different apps, I prefer Safari. I may be a little biased because I have much more experience with Safari, but I think that it accomplishes more without using a deal of resources, like Rover. I think Rover's use of the "middle man" server hurts its productivity, even if it able to stream Flash videos. In a school system that uses the same network, just using a couple of Rover apps simultaneously would cause a crawl of data for the entire system connected to that network. I feel that Safari makes more sense in a school atmosphere, even if Flash is not readily available.