Alright, I'll talk about apps

It started off innocently enough. A simple question from the woman behind the counter at The Learning Gear Plus store in Pepperell Massachusetts this weekend inquiring as to whether or not I was a teacher when I placed a package of pencil erasures and some very cool addition/subtraction function dice on the counter. The question was simply was I a teacher. I replied no I was a special ed aide.
"So am I" said the woman whose name I don't recall getting and if I did I have forgotten, please forgive me.

Conversation followed and we ended up talking about iPads and technology in our little spheres of influence. She mentioned that at her school they had written a grant and purchased a bunch of iPads for the staff. They hadn't deployed them yet, they were still working out the logistics, but the staff was excited to start using them.

I mentioned that I was using a borrowed iPad, my wife's, to see what I could use to empower/excite my "clients" to create work (actually I also use my Windows Phone 7.5 as well). She asked what apps I was using and this post is the result but before we start a few expectation management notes:

1. I will list all the apps I have downloaded for use with my students and why.
2. I do not suppose to be a certified expert in this stuff. 
3. These are just real-world examples.

Evernote

Evernote is basically a cloud-synced notepad. First you install the app on your devices; iPad, iPhone, Windows Phone, Android, Mac or Windows computer or as a plugin for Google Chrome or all of them. Now when you write a note on any of your devices it is synced to all of your other devices. You can also collect your notes into notebooks that you can share with others.

So in the case of one student who didn't like to write, the client's personal narrative that the client dictated to me and that I input into my Windows Phone's instance of Evernote is shared with the client's classroom teacher, the case manager and the other professionals that work with the client. The client wrote it with me and we walked down to the case-manager's room where she was already reading it on her computer. I got another story out of the client as well with little prodding.

Mindo
Mindo is an idea mapping software. You start with a blank slate, you double click or tap and a box appears. You edit the type in the box and double tap again. Another box appears but is connected to the first box. By repeating the steps you create a mind map. A map of an idea with thoughts grouped together that should be grouped together. You can move things around too, Grab a a box and everything grouped with that box is movable to nest under a different box. It's a great tool.

I have a client who has trouble organizing thoughts while writing. It is difficult for the client to put thoughts and events in any form of a timeline. I decided to use Mindo. The client did basically free association within the subject he had chosen. He told me all kinds of details, none in order, about the event and I created a random mind map. Then I read it back to him and he started to move things around and organize his story in correct order. By the time we got done, the story almost wrote itself and he completed the assignment with little struggle.

A quick mind map using Mindo. The subject? This column.

ShowMe
ShowMe in it's most basic form is whiteboard you can narrate. You open it, hit the record button and start drawing and talking. We have a writing unit in second grade on writing instructions in order. I have used ShowMe to introduce the process to clients. How that works is that they tell the viewer how to draw something while narrating the process.

One client loves ShowMe. We ask for it as a reward for doing other work. That's great for me because we think we are playing on the iPad but we are really having a whole writing experience practicing narration.

Above I use ShowMe to explain a new kind of poetry.

Jungle Time

I needed an app to use to teach/practice telling time with a specific client. Jungle Time was it. You can either have the app set the time and have you guess or tell you the time and have you set it on the  the clock. The face of the clock has animal faces on it that look happy when you get the answer right and unhappy when you don't.

Adobe Ideas

Yes, that Adobe. Adobe Ideas is a very light version of Photoshop that has layers and adjustable brushes, transparency, custom colors etc. The pictures are saved to your pictures on the iPad and so you can use them in other programs to illustrate your writing. It's free so just download it and play with it.

Penultimate

Another free app that is basically a sketchpad that you can draw and type on. A great place for students to write and draw. I use it for having them correct spelling, write number sentences and take notes.

So what's the point?

The point of all this I think is that the iPad should be used to teach, not as a game platform for rewarding behavior by allowing 10 minutes of Angry Birds. The reward of the iPad is to doing work on the iPad and that to our clients is exciting.

How Drop Box Aided the Hun Invasion of China

In my self-proclaimed guise of "tech pusher" I am always seeking out real world examples where collaborative technology, mostly web based, is used to change a process for the better.

One of my favorite non-tech "gigs" is that of the fall director for Wilton Children's Theater. We start in September with 55 4th through 8th graders and, by the week before Thanksgiving, put on a musical. I have been involved in community and youth theater for over 20 years now and it is always a collaborative exercise.

The collaborative aspect of producing any show involves balancing schedules, who's in what scene, costumes, props etc. When I started this was all done on paper with pen and pencil but has, over the years, moved to emailing Excel spreadsheets around to the various people. This is great except now you have multiple versions floating around and you are never sure where or who has the latest version. For this falls' production of Disney's Mulan Jr. I saw an opportunity to try something different.

This year I introduced the production team, producers, props and sets people, and high school staff to DropBox, the smash-hit, save-to-the-cloud resource that Forbes Magazine reported was seen as such a game changer that Steve Jobs wanted to buy, for a rumored 9 figure price tag, it for Apple (They said no so he built iCloud).

How it works in it's simplest form is that you install Dropbox on your computer and you get a folder in myDocuments called, well, dropbox. then you get the app for your iPhone or your iPad. Anything that you save to your Dropbox folder on either device is available on the other devices as long as they have access to the internet.

When you take this simple yet elegant functionality and then couple it with a team things get amazing. You can invite people via their email addresses to join a folder in your dropbox. They can add and edit items there.

What this meant for us this fall is that there was one spreadsheet. That whenever someone made changes, the rest of the team was notified and could see the changes. The management of the paperwork involved in the production of a musical with 55 actors became a whole lot easier. The Huns were where they needed to be and dressed appropriately Hun-ny for their big invasion every night, the Chinese army under Shang was were it needed to be with it's correct weaponry and Mulan and Mushu were on cue to save the day.

How Facebook Changed the End of Mom's Life

A year ago last August my mother was diagnosed with matasticized breast cancer and was told that we were treating not curing.

To say that is a devastating thing for anyone to hear is an understatement. But we all rallied around the person who had given so much of herself to raise us three kids.

My brother, who lives in Oregon, suggested a book. A book comprised of messages to her, relayed through us, from those people on whose lives mom had made an impact. Me, being a self-proclaimed techie with delusions of grandeur, suggested a group on Facebook since I had reconnected there with many people from my earlier life in New Canaan.

So we created "Messages to Peg", an invitation only Facebook Group and populated it with everyone we could think of who had known mom.

To be cliche and say that the response was overwhelming would be an understatement. Kids who I we grew up with, now in their 40's and 50's, telling mom how she'd had effected their lives growing up in profound ways. Word got out and her co-workers at New Canaan High School, Boy Scouts from our old troop, staff and alumni from The Daycare Center of New Canaan where she also worked along with folks from the New Canaan YMCA where dad had worked so many years ago sought out group membership and posted messages there too.

A picture of mom from 1962 in a dress
we found in her closet in 2011. It the
picture used on Messages to Peg.

Still, we didn't know how she was going to take it. We decided to wait to show them to her until my brother made it back for a visit. He had compiled them in a notebook along side the ones which had been emailed to us. Then the three of us, my sister, brother and I, sat in the living room, around the hospital bed we had installed there for her, and read them to her. It was  difficult because by doing this we were admitting openly and together that our hopes for a miracle were, most likely, not going to be answered the way we were asking for. Yet through it all she was amazed and delighted every time we read a new name and message.

The change in her end of life came later. On a day where it was just she and I. On the last day I saw her make it from the bed to the chair she had been sitting in her entire married and widowed life. I sat on her bed and watched the tears start to flow.

"I thought there would be more time." she said, "There's not enough time, I have stuff I want to get done."

I told her there is never enough time.

"Think instead" I said picking up the book from the table, "of what you have accomplished. Look at the people on whose lives you have had an effect and in some cases a profound effect."

She dried her tears and acknowledged that, yes, the Messages to Peg had shown her that she had accomplished more than she previously thought she had.

It was from that moment on, about two weeks before she finally passed, that she accepted the inevitable and came to accept that her life had been a full one and she had, in fact, made an impact thanks to an idea brought forward by my brother and the power of social media to connect.

Evernote and Motivation

In my guise as a special educator (I am an aide and pretend to be nothing more or less..well ok, I am a tech pusher too) I am constantly looking for way to motivate and extract higher levels of work from the "clients" that I serve on a daily basis.

I have also been party to discussions about using games on technology as reward, which I'll call Angry Birds Syndrome, to motivate. In other words, "if you do your work using this pencil invented in 1565 and this paper invented in 104 then you can use this technology invented in 2009 to play a game". Sounds kind of silly put that way.

I use tech all the time but the difference is that for me using tech to do your work is the motivator not playing games afterwards. If you think about it, kids want to appear more grown up. They want to model adult behavior (and we know what a double-edged sword that can be) and what they see is adults using technology to complete everyday tasks whether it's ordering things online, planning vacations or, in some cases, checking the school website to see what's up at school.

So when one of my "clients" who I has yet to embrace my love of writing made a statement that I thought would make a good story I began a 10 minute interview process with him over his statement. I began entering what he was telling me into Evernote on my Windows Phone 7. after a few minutes of jotting down the stream in its entirety he stopped me and asked what I was doing. I told him he was writing a story and that I was just entering what he was giving me. He asked me to read it back to him which I did and then began an active 15 minute revision cycle. The input was exactly what he gave me. I didn't editorialize I just asked a probing question once and awhile. When he was done we had a personal narrative based on an event in his life exactly as he recalled it. He said, "so writing is just like talking then?" I said yes and he seemed proud of what he had accomplished.

Later we went to his case manager's room and I showed him how the story he had written on the phone with me was available on the computer. We copy/pasted it into MS Word and he added a different font for the title and his name. We printed a copy for the teacher and left it on the screen for his case manager.

All in all I was thrilled. A small and to me cool but not earthshattering bit of tech has given a voice to someone who had none in the written sense anyway which brings me to my point; if you are resistant to technology you are going to be able to explore/play with things that might come in handy some day and that would be a shame for you and those who you teach.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

The world lost one of it's greatest innovators today. Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, was the father of personal computing having "liberating" the point and click interface for computers from Xerox.

Other things that Mr. Jobs helped make every day parts of our lives are:

• Digital music
• Pixar and the revolution in computer animation
• PDA's
• Computers that look cool
• Tablet computing
• Really smart Smart Phones

Many geeks weep today for the world as we know it would be a different place were it not for him.

Hello World

To anyone who has learned programming, Hello World is a familiar phrase. It is, or used to be anyway, the first thing that you created when coding. You would type in 30 or so lines of html code and then, when you previewed the page you had created in a web browser, you would see Hello World.

Now, thanks to Google Plus, Hello World has a whole new meaning. It means literally, Hello World.

I have been a member of Google Plus, Google's Facebook, since July 13th and am enjoying the experience. Without turning this into a full review of Google Plus, we'll discuss it's possibilities for education later, I wanted to share something about my experience so far.

One of the coolest parts of Google Plus is Hangouts. They are live group chat. You can join a Hangout and chat live via video with anyone else in the hangout. Mark Olsen started a Hangout that has been going since Google Plus launched.

I have been in the hangout three times. first was a day or so after I joined Plus and then last night and this morning. Last night I was chatting with people from Australia, California and the midwest. This morning it was US, UK, Sweden and Croatia.

What an amazing social tool and, for those who dismiss social media as a worthless diversion, a reason to re access the movement.

The Way Change Works Now

On a recent stop to the Milk Bar on RT 7 across from the Rt 33 intersection I saw probably one of the greatest examples of how change is coming faster and can fundamentally change or replace exsiting processes.

Having set up a retail store in a previous life, I know that one of the biggest hassles is setting up how you will take and process money. There is the cash register, and training that goes along with it, bank deposits and then credit card processing.

The cash register is usually some complicated bit of mid-low level technology which takes a lot of time to set up and more to master. Those of you who have worked retail checkout, especially the older NCR machines, probably remember a time when you hit the wrong button in the wrong sequence and the machine started beeping at you and went into "unresponsive-as-heck" mode with a line of customers standing in front of you tapping their feet and looking at their watches. Then there is setting up a credit card terminal and all of the training that goes along with that. And they are not that portable.

Baby Cat Milk Bar uses a new bit of tech called a Square from Square Up. It works off of an app running on either an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch (an Android version is available as well). They use the iPhone version when they go out to the farmers markets and events.

The app is easy to set up and the Square itself is small and easy to use (it's the little white thing on the bottom right of the iPad). You can link to your bank account so your money can be direct deposited and the fee is 2.75% which is slightly higher than some discount processing houses but there is no monthly fee, no terminal rentals and no supply expenses. It also allows for cash transactions which means that it is a fully functioning cash register.

The point of this post is this, Square may change the way retail takes in and processes money circumventing a whole industry. Change does happen. Today it happens at a much faster pace then we are accustomed to.

We, as human beings living in this age need to be able to open up to change. To embrace it, and by doing so, help guide that change or at the very least be part of it.