For our first ed tech class we were asked to pick an Apple program and compare it to a similar program published by Microsoft. For this entry I chose to compare Power Point and Keynote.
First off I noticed several similarities between Power Point and Keynote, the most obvious of them being that they are both designed to display and present information. Another similarity that I noticed is the features, both applications have ways to add animations and transitions into a presentation to make it more visually appealing. and the last similarity that I noticed is that both of these programs is that on the iPad you can link them up to save directly into cloud servers to save your presentations so that you do not take up the storage on your device.
I also noticed a few differences between the programs. the first of which is that Keynote is much more user friendly than Power Point. It had a very intuitive feel that made manipulating the aspects of the presentation much easier. It also was able to sync up between devices and make presenting the work much more streamlined and easier.
We were also asked to make a Box.net account and use it and respond. Box.net is a cloud storage site, one of the biggest flaws I saw when dealing with the app was that when I tried to upload a pages file from the iPad it would not let me access the device's storage. It would only let me access other cloud storage options such as Dropbox or iCloud. I have used Dropbox for several years and prefer it to Box.net.
We also used an app called iThought which is used for brainstorming, we were asked what kind of application this would have in the classroom. the main perk that I can see for using this in the classroom would be during whole class discussions when talking about a single topic and getting feedback from the students. In this scenario a teacher would be able to help the students create a visual representation of their thoughts.
lastly we were asked to compare two different Browsing apps for the iPad. One being safari and the other being Rover. The design and feel for the both of these was very similar. I felt like they would both be comparable, save for the fact that rover is streamed to the iPad from an outside server. Because of this, Rover uses much more bandwidth than the regular safari app. I believe that i would prefer to use the safari browsing app over the Rover app, simply because of he fact that there are more possibilities for problems to arise with the rover app, such as the server needing to work properly, data usage, and bandwidth consumption.
Regarding Box, if you are using your own iPad, that probably would be so. Unfortunately, in the schools students will not be using their own iPads. It is difficult switch out Dropbox accounts and often students do not have access to iCloud, either - thus the need to consider Box.
ReplyDeleteAlso, your coverage of iThought is pretty meager. Please put a little more into these exercises in the future.