Sometimes you wonder what is the point.
I'm annoyed that a set of tools that I love using on my laptop and chromebook are useless on my device of preference, an iPad.
Google today released Slides for iOS and an updated Docs for iOS. They are both pretty much unusable for anything serious on an iDevice. I've waited for ages for Google to deliver some useful editing of Docs on iPad. Because I have a big investment in Docs, Forms and Sheets. On my laptop they have been my goto apps because of the ease of sharing and collaboration; and the functionality (except a table of contents that makes sense) was sufficient for my needs.
But my device of preference is an iPad. And now I'm tired of waiting for the functionality I want. I'm going to ditch Google's mobile apps. They just don't deliver any value.
The way I see it now I have 2 options for creation of documents - Apple's iLife or Microsoft's Office for iPad. Both are far more functional. Neither are what I would like. In reality I'll probably end up using Pages from Apple and Excel from Microsoft. I don't use slide shows much, so I'll probably use Apple's KeyNote if I have to.
You know what would be really cool?
A desktop version of Notability.
Showing posts with label Google Docs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google Docs. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Extending Google Drive functionality - Lucid software - a great addition to Google Drive/Apps
One of the really cool things about Google Apps for Education (and other versions) is its ability to integrate with other web based applications. You can add applications to your GAFE or Drive account using the "Connect More Apps" button from the Create dialog box.
Earlier this year I stared using LucidChart with some of my senior students as they started to formalise their work around flow charting and programming. What surprised me was how quickly those that had a solid foundation of using GAFE became quite sophisticated users of Lucid Chart. (though in hindsight I probably shouldn't have been surprised)
Functionality is somewhat crippled in the free version - you are limited to 60 items, but you can always break the flowchart into several sections if you need to.
Of course, Lucid Chart does far more than just flowcharts - as the next item shows.
Summary - Lucid Chart is well worth a look. And there is an iOS app for it too!
Now - just a couple of days ago an email arrived announcing LucidPress. It looks very cool, its in Beta at the moment, but I have had a quick look and this is certainly a tool that I'll try and use for an interactive newsletter in the next week or so. Check it out here.
As you can see in the above image, two Lucid products are connected to my Google Drive account, Lucid Chart and Lucid Express. (More about Lucid Express shortly)
Functionality is somewhat crippled in the free version - you are limited to 60 items, but you can always break the flowchart into several sections if you need to.
Of course, Lucid Chart does far more than just flowcharts - as the next item shows.
Summary - Lucid Chart is well worth a look. And there is an iOS app for it too!
Now - just a couple of days ago an email arrived announcing LucidPress. It looks very cool, its in Beta at the moment, but I have had a quick look and this is certainly a tool that I'll try and use for an interactive newsletter in the next week or so. Check it out here.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Two Months with an iPad - the journey continues
Ok - two months in and what can I add to the mix.
Well, firstly I can report that the lack of multitasking is in fact a bigger pain than I'd like - the fact that it is pretty quick to change between applications makes it bearable - but only just.
The lack of corporate tools to manage and navigate through firewalls and filtering systems is a pain - made more so by the fact that my office on the ground floor is beautifully sheltered from any sign of significant 3G coverage by the concrete that surrounds me - so heading out over 3G needs me to move location.
Last gripe is Vodafone's 3G coverage - prone to drop out far too often for my complete liking - might investigate Telecom or 2Degrees in another few months. That said, I have been surprised at the fact that I have not used the full 3GB of data I pay for each month ...
Blogging tools (that I've found so far) are average - they allow me to do some basic stuff like text and images, but I want more.
But that's about it for the negatives ... the positives are ....
I can access my Google account via Google's mobile app - email, docs, etc. The shame is that I can't edit or create Docs or Presentations - but at least I can edit Spreadsheets if I need to ... but that's where ...
The mobile version of Google Earth is awesome - we used it to find our way to places we had no idea about during a recent motorhome holiday - the awesome detail coupled with 3G access was brilliant - don't need a GPS in the truck to do this!!
And while I am still not overly happy with the file structure and management the iPad offers (maybe I just need to accept there is another way of arranging stuff than my untidy way of filing on my other computing devices!) But DropBox works well for me shifting stuff between my PC, Mac and iPad - so this all works OK.
My worst purchase to date is the Apple Keyboard doc - thought I'd need it - haven't used it since the day I bought it.
Best purchase - the iPad itself, the Apple case for it and everything else I have installed.
Best use to date - recording feedback directly onto a Google Doc (via Docs to Go) as the students were presenting their research - laptop and tablet both too heavy and awkward to do this - iPod Touch too small, iPad - just purrfick!
Next best app - Feedler - my RSS feed (or my way of a reading my Google Reader account at the moment). there is still something missing from what I think I want - just haven't found a better way yet.
Basically I love the iPad (well, love is a bit strong ... but it is way cool) - haven't even thought about trying to print anything from it - no need to. Just add the document to my iBooks library and read it when I want.
My next exploration will be to sign up for some digital magazines via Zinio - have resisted the temptation so far, but can see that is where I'm heading.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
A Month with an iPad
So, 1 month in to my iPad journey - some thoughts. I started this exercise with an objective of trying to replace my laptop as my prime computing tool. That's a big ask - because in my role as an IT director at a large independent school I have a number of different functions that I need a computing device to do.
In no particular order I need to
1. Provide pd to staff at all levels
2. Presentations to staff, students and parents
3. Research into new and emerging technologies
4. Teach - I teach ICT to middle school students and we do anything from web design to 3D modeling. So I need applications to do video editing, photo manipulation and animation.
5. Interact with our various administration systems, including how we manage these devices in a large deployment.
6. Maintain my blog and other websites.
7. Have full editing access to Google Docs or other such cloud tools.
8. Must be capable of projecting via a data projector.
We run pretty much a Windows environment for our students - they have laptops running either Vista or XP - and while we are almost clear of running Windows only software, there are still a couple of areas where we have a dependence on that platform.
So, in my explorations over the last few weeks I've been asking myself the question - "can we introduce an iPad as the student device at our junior levels?" All of this while being mindful of the fact that the absence of support for Flash will make an impact?
Some findings so far ...
1. While the iPad doesn't support most applications via a data projector, if you jailbreak it and install TVOut2 you can get pretty reasonable projection capabilities - enough to satisfy me that this aspect of presentation and teaching is well enough covered.
2. It would be fair to say that while I can manually configure proxy connections for the iPad and Safari works quite happily over our network, none of the other applications that use the network by default currently work. For example I can not access the App Store or mail etc. Now, we do have an issue with iTunes on our PCs too - unless you have Safari installed on a PC and have it configured, then iTunes doesn't connect properly - this is a relatively new phenomenon for us and as yet we have not spent any serious time trying to resolve this issue. So, this is looming as an increasing priority if I can satisfy myself that other issues of multimedia creation are doable for students.
3. I have found the lack of Flash support more annoying than frustrating. That said, there are a couple of apps that we are currently deploying that make use of Flash - MyPortfolio.school.nz is one, and the Aviary suite of tools is another that I was planning to introduce but will now have to find an alternative to.
4. I must that when I spoke with a couple of our DPs a week or so ago I made the comment that perhaps we may be a year away from an iPad type device in our environment. I based this on not having found a video editing package or a 3D modeling tool. I now have - at least at a superficial level - but enough to make me not too concerned about this.
5. Google currently have an issue that they only allow editing of spreadsheets through their mobile application - this is a pain. In addition, there is a bug in the new Google Docs that stops you being able to download and edit documents created in Docs through such tools as Docs To Go - I understand that several attempts have been made to fix this issue but it remains unresolved as far as I can tell.
6. If we can get a web front end to our main admin system sort then we should be ok with our various admin connectivity for teachers - the rest of our stuff is based around SharePoint and Moodle - there is a mobile app for Moodle should straight web connectivity prove an issue. We are still very early in our Moodle stages with no deployment yet, so if we manage this component with our developers it should not prove an issue.
7. Maintaining blogs and websites is proving a bit more problematical. The likes of Yola and Weebly make extensive use of Flash and so are not a happening thing. I've yet to try the likes of Google sites or other tools, so have a little more work to go here. Maintaining my this blog with BlogPress (as I'm doing now) is OK for basic stuff, but not really a good enough editor for my liking. I'll explore the WordPress app for some new blogs we're setting up for a couple of classes and see how they go.
8. At this stage the iPad still relies on having access to another computer of some type for various functions - the extent of this for a school environment has yet to be considered (by us) to any extent.
9. The "instant on" is a huge benefit to a mobile student population.
10. The battery life is awesome. Easily get a day without a charge - so students won't need to bring a charger to school.
That's about enough for the moment - more to come as the exploration continues, but suffice it to say that I am getting happier with the iPad as a primary computing device by the day. Sure there are some big issues still to resolve, but with functionality in other areas (application wise) seemingly clo to being resolved, at least we can look at the big issues with a purpose.
More as we continue our journey.
In no particular order I need to
1. Provide pd to staff at all levels
2. Presentations to staff, students and parents
3. Research into new and emerging technologies
4. Teach - I teach ICT to middle school students and we do anything from web design to 3D modeling. So I need applications to do video editing, photo manipulation and animation.
5. Interact with our various administration systems, including how we manage these devices in a large deployment.
6. Maintain my blog and other websites.
7. Have full editing access to Google Docs or other such cloud tools.
8. Must be capable of projecting via a data projector.
We run pretty much a Windows environment for our students - they have laptops running either Vista or XP - and while we are almost clear of running Windows only software, there are still a couple of areas where we have a dependence on that platform.
So, in my explorations over the last few weeks I've been asking myself the question - "can we introduce an iPad as the student device at our junior levels?" All of this while being mindful of the fact that the absence of support for Flash will make an impact?
Some findings so far ...
1. While the iPad doesn't support most applications via a data projector, if you jailbreak it and install TVOut2 you can get pretty reasonable projection capabilities - enough to satisfy me that this aspect of presentation and teaching is well enough covered.
2. It would be fair to say that while I can manually configure proxy connections for the iPad and Safari works quite happily over our network, none of the other applications that use the network by default currently work. For example I can not access the App Store or mail etc. Now, we do have an issue with iTunes on our PCs too - unless you have Safari installed on a PC and have it configured, then iTunes doesn't connect properly - this is a relatively new phenomenon for us and as yet we have not spent any serious time trying to resolve this issue. So, this is looming as an increasing priority if I can satisfy myself that other issues of multimedia creation are doable for students.
3. I have found the lack of Flash support more annoying than frustrating. That said, there are a couple of apps that we are currently deploying that make use of Flash - MyPortfolio.school.nz is one, and the Aviary suite of tools is another that I was planning to introduce but will now have to find an alternative to.
4. I must that when I spoke with a couple of our DPs a week or so ago I made the comment that perhaps we may be a year away from an iPad type device in our environment. I based this on not having found a video editing package or a 3D modeling tool. I now have - at least at a superficial level - but enough to make me not too concerned about this.
5. Google currently have an issue that they only allow editing of spreadsheets through their mobile application - this is a pain. In addition, there is a bug in the new Google Docs that stops you being able to download and edit documents created in Docs through such tools as Docs To Go - I understand that several attempts have been made to fix this issue but it remains unresolved as far as I can tell.
6. If we can get a web front end to our main admin system sort then we should be ok with our various admin connectivity for teachers - the rest of our stuff is based around SharePoint and Moodle - there is a mobile app for Moodle should straight web connectivity prove an issue. We are still very early in our Moodle stages with no deployment yet, so if we manage this component with our developers it should not prove an issue.
7. Maintaining blogs and websites is proving a bit more problematical. The likes of Yola and Weebly make extensive use of Flash and so are not a happening thing. I've yet to try the likes of Google sites or other tools, so have a little more work to go here. Maintaining my this blog with BlogPress (as I'm doing now) is OK for basic stuff, but not really a good enough editor for my liking. I'll explore the WordPress app for some new blogs we're setting up for a couple of classes and see how they go.
8. At this stage the iPad still relies on having access to another computer of some type for various functions - the extent of this for a school environment has yet to be considered (by us) to any extent.
9. The "instant on" is a huge benefit to a mobile student population.
10. The battery life is awesome. Easily get a day without a charge - so students won't need to bring a charger to school.
That's about enough for the moment - more to come as the exploration continues, but suffice it to say that I am getting happier with the iPad as a primary computing device by the day. Sure there are some big issues still to resolve, but with functionality in other areas (application wise) seemingly clo to being resolved, at least we can look at the big issues with a purpose.
More as we continue our journey.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Google Apps, Video, Sites, Reader and Gears
We've trialled Google Apps for one of our Horizon Projects at school recently. Our projects run for four weeks and over this time our students explore the K-12 2009 Horizon Report and work with a number of outside experts in design and education to design a school for the future.
One of our motivations for setting up our own Google Apps domain rather than allow individual students to set up their own Google Docs account was to make life easier for students and teachers in collaboration and communicating. From this basis, Google Apps is quite good. It allows simple collaboration and sharing of documents well. The ability to upload Office documents is good. Unfortunately it doesn't allow sharing of Acrobat documents in an easy way, but this too can be done if you are prepared to spend the time typing individual email addresses. To date, haven't found a solution to publishing in foreign languages - haven't looked that hard, but if anyone reads this and has a solution, then please let me know!
Perhaps two of the unheralded features of Google Apps are Google Sites and Google Video. Google Sites gives you an excellent tool for building web sites, similar in some ways to the likes of Wikispaces. It integrates well with YouTube (as you'd expect) and it is pretty simple for students to build a nice looking site without much help. Google Video as part of the Apps suite allows you to upload video of any length (up to 1 GB), and this gets over YouTube's 10 minute limit and Fliggo's 25 minute limit. We video our outside experts so that students and staff can look back at the presentations for information they may have missed - and several of the presentations are 45 minutes in length, so not having to break them up into 2 sections is a real bonus.
But using Google Apps has not been without difficulty. We have a pretty strong bandwidth available (supposedly), but at times with as few as 30 students connecting simultaneously to our Google Apps site, the response has been not much short of atrocious. As anyone teaching will know, letting kids loose on laptops when they have to wait minutes for relatively short documents to load is asking for trouble. Further investigation has involved our ISP and at present we still await the results of a number of trials which from where I sit seem to indicate that our bandwidth within NZ and across to Australia is OK, but we are missing out badly with traffic from the USA and Europe. We will certainly need to get more response to the desktop than that we have had till now if we are to seriously consider Google's cloud offering.
As an RSS aggregator or subscription reader, Google Reader is my tool of preference for a couple of reasons. Firstly it has a gadget for iGoogle making it easy to see what is new, and secondly, the ability to take it offline via Google Gears makes it easy to catch up on reading when away from a network - like we were last week when away on holiday in the motorhome. In the middle of nowhere (well, Waingaro Springs to be exact) there is no cell coverage and no wireless, but I was able to deal to 50 or so blogs that I was behind in once the kids were asleep.
One of our motivations for setting up our own Google Apps domain rather than allow individual students to set up their own Google Docs account was to make life easier for students and teachers in collaboration and communicating. From this basis, Google Apps is quite good. It allows simple collaboration and sharing of documents well. The ability to upload Office documents is good. Unfortunately it doesn't allow sharing of Acrobat documents in an easy way, but this too can be done if you are prepared to spend the time typing individual email addresses. To date, haven't found a solution to publishing in foreign languages - haven't looked that hard, but if anyone reads this and has a solution, then please let me know!
Perhaps two of the unheralded features of Google Apps are Google Sites and Google Video. Google Sites gives you an excellent tool for building web sites, similar in some ways to the likes of Wikispaces. It integrates well with YouTube (as you'd expect) and it is pretty simple for students to build a nice looking site without much help. Google Video as part of the Apps suite allows you to upload video of any length (up to 1 GB), and this gets over YouTube's 10 minute limit and Fliggo's 25 minute limit. We video our outside experts so that students and staff can look back at the presentations for information they may have missed - and several of the presentations are 45 minutes in length, so not having to break them up into 2 sections is a real bonus.
But using Google Apps has not been without difficulty. We have a pretty strong bandwidth available (supposedly), but at times with as few as 30 students connecting simultaneously to our Google Apps site, the response has been not much short of atrocious. As anyone teaching will know, letting kids loose on laptops when they have to wait minutes for relatively short documents to load is asking for trouble. Further investigation has involved our ISP and at present we still await the results of a number of trials which from where I sit seem to indicate that our bandwidth within NZ and across to Australia is OK, but we are missing out badly with traffic from the USA and Europe. We will certainly need to get more response to the desktop than that we have had till now if we are to seriously consider Google's cloud offering.
As an RSS aggregator or subscription reader, Google Reader is my tool of preference for a couple of reasons. Firstly it has a gadget for iGoogle making it easy to see what is new, and secondly, the ability to take it offline via Google Gears makes it easy to catch up on reading when away from a network - like we were last week when away on holiday in the motorhome. In the middle of nowhere (well, Waingaro Springs to be exact) there is no cell coverage and no wireless, but I was able to deal to 50 or so blogs that I was behind in once the kids were asleep.
Google Gears also makes it easy to read documents from some of the applications in Google Apps - most notably word processor docs. So, if you have student work shared in this manner you can read and comment back offline, and once reconnected, can synchronise back to the cloud and everything is as it should be. But Gears needs to offer more functionality in relation to creating new documents and editing existing ones, plus it would be good to have Blogger compatibility built in.
So, at this stage in our trials, its a big thumbs up for Google Sites and Reader, limited thumbs up for Google Docs and Gears. If we can resolve our bandwidth issues and Gears allows a little more interaction, then Docs will be useful contender for replacement of Office applications for students.
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