That'SLife

A post by Paul Maglione examines where ELT textbooks may be going in the not-too-distant future, with references to relevance, weight and other issues. In his post Paul links to another post by Graham Stanley in which, among other things, he talks of the wide availability of published material on illegal download sites. I’ve also not avoided this subject in the past on this blog, and copyright was also the subject of a cafe-style debate at the British Council Moscow Unconference at the weekend (more soon). I also set out some of my thinking about the future of publishing in a post last year: On Books, Publishers and Teachers. I haven’t much changed my mind, but a few things do occur to me…

Teachers here in Catalonia are preparing to return to school tomorrow, and to teaching on Monday. Some of them will be forced to take part in the new ‘laptops in the classroom‘ (or whatever it’s called) project and use new electronic coursebooks provided by publishers such as OUP, Burlington, etc. The teachers I know have had no training, and have had the summer to peruse a half-working demo of one unit copied from a USB stick. Now I suspect the kids will be excited not to be carrying the heavy coursebooks, and even to be allowed to touch a piece of gadgetry more exciting than a pen, but I have to say I feel sorry for the teachers. Without training, this is shaping up to be an unmitigated disaster of a teaching experiment. Read the rest of this entry »

Aside from my post reviewing some iPad apps I’m using a lot, and the one on getting audio into Keynote on the iPad (and on the joys of jailbreaking…), I keep coming across new things which I think someone else out there must be interested in, so here’s another short post with a couple of tips…

The first goes back to Keynote, and it’s to do with fonts. I have a template which uses Calibri as the main (almost only) font for presentations. On transferring it to the iPad the fonts were all a little too big. I’ve been experimenting with this sporadically over the past few days and my conclusion is this: if you want to send a Keynote presentation over to the iPad, reduce all your fonts by one size in the font size drop-down (so, 18 becomes 14, etc.). This seems to work consistently for me and makes the presentations look perfect on the iPad. Coupled with the video and audio tricks in the post referenced above, I can now pretty much use the iPad as a conference talk device.

The other tip goes back to reasons for jailbreaking Read the rest of this entry »

There was quite a bit of fuss earlier this week about the ‘fact’ that multitasking is impossible and destroys our attention and means we don’t actually do anything properly… even the claim that no significant learning can take place if people are not 100% concentrated on the teacher and/or material. Ironically, of course, much of the fuss was made by people flitting between webpages supporting their beliefs, and Twitter, where they posted these opinions.

Now, forgive me my ignorance, but isn’t that good, useful and effective multitasking? And isn’t that, really, what most people mean when they speak of multitasking, rather than the supposed (theoretical? imagined?) image of young people surfing porn, answering emails, chatting on Messenger and listening to music in lectures – you know, the kind of image that gives real multitasking a bad name. Clearly trying to cook a gourmet meal, watch a film, listen to Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 and fix the car at the same time is not going to work. But, equally clearly, most of us multitask (in the normal sense of the word) quite effectively throughout most days. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just finished filling in the online registration form for the IATEFL Annual Conference 2011, to be held in Brighton. I’m going to do a talk on mLearning as this coincides nicely with a new book that Nicky Hockly and I are currently researching, and also with a new course (mLearning in Practice) which we’re launching in October of this year. Take a look at the talk abstract below, if you’re interested – any thoughts?

TITLE: Location, Location, Location: mLearning in Practice

ABSTRACT: In this workshop I will be looking at recent developments in mobile and handheld learning (mLearning) and the rationale for bringing connected, mobile devices into the classroom. The workshop will look at various applications which can be blended into classroom teaching as well as ways of incorporating mLearning into homework and extra-class study.

(A longer summary is viewable after the fold…) Read the rest of this entry »

Picture the scene… it’s about five years ago, pre-iPhone and iPad, pre-smartphone (more or less) and WiFi is still expensive in most places. You go into your local coffee chain on Sunday morning with your loved one or perhaps a group of friends, armed with the Sunday papers. Everyone pays an outrageous amount of money for a coffee with a name longer than it takes to drink it, they sit down and they start reading the papers. Nobody’s talking much…. Occasionally someone pops their head out of a broadsheet to comment on Tony Blair or someone, but generally it’s a nice quiet Sunday morning in company… the odd laugh….

Now, transpose it to today and I’m sitting in the same coffee bar with a friend. He’s reading a dead-tree paper and I’m reading mine on the iPad. The scene is the same, really – and so is the interaction. Except, of course, that since there’s free WiFi, I can also check related articles, clear up discussions when we don’t agree, etc., etc. Except that’s about to change – see this article from The Economist.

Now I don’t know about you, but I do so hate it when people tell me I can’t do something in public. It wasn’t rude five years ago when we were all reading dead-tree versions, so why is it rude now? Is it… no, say it’s not true…. is it because technology is involved? And that’s bad, obviously… Read the rest of this entry »

Just a short one…

A few people seem to be having problems with embedded audio and video in Keynote on the iPad. The truth is that it’s not as advanced as it could be, and audio is a little tricky, video itself works fine. The trick is to prepare the presentation on the Mac and embed the audio and video in the presentation. When you save the presentation, make sure in the General Preferences of Keynote you have a check mark next to ‘Copy audio and movies into document’, which will package everything into the keynote presentation itself. So far, so good.

Using iTunes (the App tab of your iPad) you can then transfer the presentation to the iPad and import it into Keynote. This works perfectly well for video, but audio disappears – you’ll find in edit mode you can play the audio, but in presentation mode it’s nowhere to be seen.  Until Apple sort this little issue out, there’s a pretty easy workaround that ocurred to me today: turn your audio files into video files. I’ve been doing this by importing them into Camtasia and adding a blank title screen to the video. This means when you export the video, you get a white box as the picture and your original audio, and can add it to a slide where the audio plays quite nicely, fooling Keynote into thinking it’s actually playing a video.

That’s a bit of a bother for a lot of people, probably, so try the following: open the audio with QuickTime on a Mac, do a ‘Save as’, choose a video format and (though I haven’t tried this method) theoretically it should export a video-compatible file which will work just as well. Now none of this is particularly elegant, but it’s a workaround that works, and cures one of the little issues I’ve had with Keynote on the iPad. Hope it helps…

Having written more than enough about my love affair with my new iPad, I duly noted that the lack of multi-tasking was beginning to bore me, particularly as I was using the machine so much. And then I stopped and thought… now that jailbreaking is legal, and since my Ipad is only WiFi and not wedded to a 3G contract with an operator (which can be a bit tricky), why shouldn’t I just go ahead and jailbreak the damn thing and get multi-tasking and all the rest. So I did..

The jailbreak took approximately four minutes, nothing happened to my machine, all apps and data still present and correct and nothing amiss. And, of course, I ended up with the Cydia app installed. The Cydia app is the ‘alternative app store’ (in case you don’t know…). I then duly fired that up, downloaded free apps to add multi-tasking and app cycling and another to get more icons per screen and since then it’s been an absolute joy. Battery life is unaffected and it’s great to be able to stick the radio on in Pocket Tunes while the day’s newspapers are downloading in PressReader and I’m catching up with what’s happening on Twitter and in my Inbox.

So that’s it really – cracked, stable, serene and multi-tasking. Now it really is a beast of a gadget and I’m spending more and more time on it each day…

p.s. If you do jailbreak, don’t forget to back up your blobs and change the root password. Or, as Monty Python might say, “my hovercraft is full of eels” – this sentence probably makes as much sense if you’re normally human…

I’ve had the iPad for nearly three weeks now, and I’m having second thoughts, so I am… My second thoughts mainly revolve around the feeling of “Blimey, I quite liked it for the first few days, but now I love the thing“. Not in any sort of rude or unsavoury way, you understand, more in a platonic and cerebral fashion.

In terms of usage, it’s become my number one gadget both at home and away from home (be it in town, or on longer trips). There are a lot of reasons for that, but primarily it all revolves around ease of use, always on, convenience, battery life and the array of apps I’ve installed. Plus, yesterday, I tried the VGA out for the first time on a flat-screen HDTV and it looked stunning. So what exactly am I doing with it?

Well, at the moment it’s more a case of what am I not doing with it. Here’s the software I’m currently making most use of: Read the rest of this entry »

ELTAS Tech Tools Day

Just got in from Stuttgart and the ELTAS Tech Tools Day yesterday. Stuttgart turns out to be a mostly very pretty city with some lovely squares and a very busy nightlife and it was good to see people out enjoying themselves last night in the centre… plenty of drinking, laughing and all the rest, but no sign of any yobbism or anything of the sort. This came on the back of a very surreal dinner in a garden populated by a men’s singing club and featuring DJ Hans, the octogenarian disco wizard who spins the discs and sings along to them. All most odd, but very pleasing.

The Tech Tools Day, superbly-organised by Karenne Sylvester (@kalinagoenglish) for ELTAS was a resounding success, with Karenne pulling in a great collection of speakers and making sure the day went off without a hitch. It was a heavy day for the participants, I think – plenty of input in hot rooms, but there is a host of backup options including a Ning, so they’ll all get a chance to go over the materials again in the coming days.

Highlights for me were… Read the rest of this entry »

Actually, I’m a bit busy at the moment. Can I get back to you later, please?

When I looked at the programme for the IATEFL conference in Harrogate I was delighted to see just how many technology-related talks there were this year: over 50 out of a programme of around 400 talks. It seemed to me that technology had finally become manistream and that was a real pleasure for me. Apart from those talks there were signature events such as the Longman one run by my dear friend and colleague Nicky Hockly, the LTechs SIG pre-conference event which blended Twitter, Second Life and ‘real’ life perfectly and also the online conference, which featured live TV, recorded sessions, forums and the ever-present Twitter backchannel.

For those who see no purpose in – or need for – technology in learning, just try the recorded conference and have a think… Read the rest of this entry »

Just back from a six day trip to Turkey. My Macbook crashed on the plane on the way home and seems to be irreparable without a reformat and reinstall. Have lost five days of email due to my fixation with using Outlook in Parallels on the Mac. If you’ve mailed me since last Friday morning, please resend…

The British Council IATEFL Harrogate Online site is now open for business. Sign up free to join in with the discussions and watch live TV from the venue, as well as the usual mix of live plenaries, over forty recorded video sessions, the Pecha Kucha and more.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a ridiculous posting over here in the Washington Post about college lecturers banning laptops in their classrooms. I haven’t got a lot of time to dissect the gross stupidity in this action, but here are a couple of points from the article:

Georgetown had only recently begun requiring that first-year law students own laptops, after painstakingly upgrading the campus for wireless Internet access.

So everyone’s obliged to buy one, but nobody’s allowed to use one… go figure, as I believe they say over there… Then there’s:

“This is like putting on every student’s desk, when you walk into class, five different magazines, several television shows, some shopping opportunities and a phone, and saying, ‘Look, if your mind wanders, feel free to pick any of these up and go with it,’ ” Cole said. Read the rest of this entry »