iPhome
A technology shift is under way. The PC’s promise to transform how learning happens in the classroom is being realized by Apple’s iPad. Students and teachers in grade school through higher education are using the iPad to augment their lessons or to replace textbooks.
The iPad is especially helpful for students with special needs. Its simplified touch interface and accessibility features help these children learn more independently; aftermarket accessories assist in making the iPad more classroom-friendly.
In March, I wrote about how my mother learned how to use her iPad for basic stuff -- like checking e-mail and browsing the Web -- without ever having used a PC in her life. Students at all grade levels are finding it just as easy to use.
Jennifer Kohn’s third grade class at Millstone Elementary School in Millstone, New Jersey, mastered the iPad with minimal training. For the most part, the students didn’t need to be taught how to use their apps, Kohn says.
Kohn uses the iPad when it’s meaningful to enrich, extend, or introduce what students are learning in the classroom. Her class has used their iPads to interact with storybooks, brainstorm ideas for creative writing, and to learn mathematics. Math Bingo, an app that teaches kids math through gaming, is one of the top selling iPad apps for education.
The students used netbooks prior to the iPads’ arrival, but the PCs were hard to use, sluggish, and would slow down over time, Kohn says. “The iPad’s one-button interface makes a big difference when working with kids. Its better for most things.”
Here’s a video of the Millstone kids with their iPads:
The Millstone experience is reminiscent of a story recounted in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography of a an illiterate child who was able to instinctively navigate an Apple executive’s iPad despite never having encountered a PC or “smart” device before.
College students are also turning to the iPad to do what they do instinctively well: saving themselves money. Marianne Petit, a New York University staff member, recently began taking credits in pursuit of another certification, and uses her iPad in place of textbooks.
“The price of the iPad pays for itself after a single semester,” Petit said. “iPad books cost so much less…It’s a legal alternative for students who are using BitTorent [to pirate books].” Steve Jobs was exploring the textbook market near the end of his life, according to Isaacson.
There is also high interest in using iPads within clinical settings, Petit said. Aside from her studying, she works as a master teacher at the Interactive Telecommunications Project, an initiative of New York University’s Tisch School. Tisch has formed community partnerships to create assistive technology, and students write apps for healthcare.
“For a device without a tactile interface to be the most accessible device for people with visible impairments would have been shocking just a few years ago, but they’ve been so good developing interfaces,” Petit said.
Students who have special needs can benefit significantly from the iPad’s adaptability and ease of use, says Jennifer Lowton, director of GMPDC, a professional development center for teachers. She also works as an in-class consultant.
“Motor skills are not necessary. Three-year-olds are using them and instantly figured out how to swipe from left to right,” Lowton said. “The home button gets you out of anything.”
Lowton credits Apple for investing in accessibility features for students who have less defined motor skills. Apple recently released its Assistive Touch software for people with spasticity and motor impairments.
Other non-lingual interface elements such as + signs to add photos also make it easier for students to work independently, Lowton says. “It instills confidence in them.” PCs were more challenging for the kids to operate.
While PCs were sometimes helpful, students frequently struggled, because managing a mouse, double clicking, and the handling a large keyboard requires high motor skills, Lowton notes. Special education students and students who have motor issues often have low motivations because of those difficulties, but the “iPad comes over so many of those issues”
In practice, Lowton says students with communications issues–such as trouble difficult pronouncing words–can use apps that insert phrases to comment for them.
Some of Lowton’s classrooms use Evernote to take pictures of notes and upload those images to the cloud, so that they will never lose them. Students to whom English is a second language can use apps to translate anatomy and science terms .
Not a panaceaLike the PC before it, Kohn noted that the iPad isn’t a panacea for educators: It has its appropriate time and place. “I don’t use them with every lesson or even day. It’s not always appropriate to lesson or objective of what I’m trying to teach,” Kohn noted. “You need meaningful apps used in the best way for kids – not just another thing to do with them.
Petit said that Apple’s App Store policies might hinder app development. “Tisch student have a lot of issues around…Apple’s openness for developers.”
It may also be difficult having kids handle iPads. The standard iPad cover proved insufficient for third graders: Apple’s Smart Covers didn’t protect the hardware from being dropped and didn’t elevate the screens high enough for comfortable desktop use.
Millstone Elementary uses an iPad accessory called the iPhome, a multisided foam case that can be positioned for hands-free use and stacks for storage in the classroom. “It’s not flat on the desk, and is easier for all of them to see and use,” Kohn explained.
Lowton recommends the iPhome for unique learners, because having the iPad become hands free limits interactions to tapping and swiping. “Students grab on to them and they just go,” she says. “The iPad is very slippery, and the smart cover wasn’t very smart for the classroom -- it’s just held on by a magnet.”
The iPad may also pose challenges for school IT administrators, and some are having difficulty pairing the iPad with schools’ existing technology investments/ iPad adoption is most difficult for schools that have standardized on the PC. File sharing, syncing, and printing are some of the primary issues, and not all schools have Wi-Fi.
“We have to find creative workarounds,” explains Lowton. Those workarounds include using cloud services such as Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Docs. Some schools have used Bluetooth dongles to share files in place of WiFi. iOS 5 and iCloud have improved syncing, but are not usable for large files such as iMovie videos used by students for digital story telling. Teachers may also have trouble deploying apps.
While network administrators may have difficulty managing, supporting, and tracking iPads, Lowton notes. “It’s less of a problem for the teachers.” And teachers are driving demand for the iPad. Lowton is presenting an iPad “boot camp” this month, and it’s already overbooked. “Schools are going over to eBooks -- paper text books are outdated and loading down students shoulders.”
“They want it all on device. Some schools are doing a 1:1 initiative with Kindles or iPads.”
The iPad is less than two years old, and it’s already proving to be a disruptive technology in education. Despite years of talking about going digital, PCs never were a suitable substitution for paper. The iPad and other smart devices just work better. The long reign of the traditional textbook could finally be coming to an end.
[Thanks to iPhome founder William Fitzgerald for helping to arrange speaking to the teachers quoted in this story.]
For more smart takes on technology, visit Technologizer.com. Story copyright © 2011, Technologizer. All rights reserved.
These days, this business of phone-as-brain goes way beyond stand-alone apps. Nowadays, the iPhone handles the computing, connection and display tasks for a huge range of hardware from other companies. Why should they jack up their products’ prices by selling you a screen, memory, processor, microphone, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when you’ve already got all of that in your pocket?
There are blood pressure monitors (iHealth), bathroom scales (Withings), physical activity monitors (Jawbone), sleep monitors (Zeo), credit card readers (Square), security cameras (iZon), remote-control helicopters (Parrot) and, of course, about 73,001 speaker systems. All of them rely on the iPhone as a brain.
Until the Epson Megaplex came along, however, one screamingly obvious iPhone accessory didn’t seem to occur to anybody: a home theater projector.
Why is it such an obvious idea? Because these days, millions of people carry around their photos, videos and music on their iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches. The world is teeming with charging docks that also play their music. It shouldn’t have taken so long for someone to create a dock that also plays the photos and videos.
But that’s what the Megaplex does. Tucked in the back is a retractable tray containing the standard charging connector for Apple i-gadgets. Insert your phone, iPad or Touch, and suddenly you can play its music through the Megaplex’s speakers — or view its TV shows, videos, slide shows and presentations on a screen, wall or ceiling, 300 inches diagonally.
Now, there have been projectors for Apple devices, which throw a 40-inch image onto the wall with 40 lumens of brightness, requiring a totally dark room. But the Megaplex is a true desktop projector, like the ones you find in boardrooms and home theaters. It pumps out 2,800 lumens, which is enough to see even with the lights on or sunshine coming in.
But if you do create a completely dark room for the Megaplex, oh boy; 2,800 lumens in 720p hi-def looks stunningly bright and clear. Like a movie theater in your home, which I guess is the point.
From Epson’s perspective, the Megaplex wasn’t such a stretch; the company already makes a wide range of projectors, some very similar to this one, that don’t have the iPhone connector.
In fact, there are two Megaplexes. The nicer one is the MG850HD; it costs $650 online and offers that 2,800-lumen, hi-def picture. You can save about $100 by buying its little brother, the MG-50, which isn’t hi-def and offers 2,200 lumens. (Tip: Go for the nicer one.)
You might think that $650 is a lot to pay for an accessory, but that’s right in line with non-iPhone home theater projectors of this type. In fact, this one’s better than many of its rivals, for a couple of reasons.
First, it has built-in speakers, which many don’t. Stereo speakers, 10 watts. These puppies are loud. They’re not audiophile quality — you’ll get crisper highs and thuddier lows from, say, a Bose audio dock — but if you need more than their boombox quality, you can always hook up a sound system.
Second, the Megaplex has inputs for everything. You can plug in a DVD player, Blu-ray player, Xbox or PlayStation, still camera, camcorder, just about anything, and blast its image onto your screen or wall. You can plug in a laptop or USB flash drive, the better to project your PowerPoint slides or family photos. There’s even a microphone input, so you can use it as a public address system.
Third, there’s a carrying handle. The thing weighs only 8.5 pounds, so it’s not like it’ll send you to the chiropractor. It’s shiny black, 4.5 x 13.4 x 11.5 inches. But the handle emphasizes the Megaplex’s aspirations to be a one-piece home theater machine that you can take to a friend’s, and it’s a nice touch.
Finally, you benefit from jumping into the projector game in 2011. These things have come a very long way. For example, it’s shockingly easy to focus and aim the image, thanks to a pair of levers on top — one for projection size, one for focusing. There’s even a keystone-correction lever right there on top, which you use to make the projected image perfectly rectangular if the screen is at an angle. On most projectors, you have to visit menu hell to perform this kind of adjustment; on the Megaplex MG850HD, you can fix a nonsquared image with the flick of a finger.
But the big differentiator here is, of course, that i-connector in the back. Once you slip an iPhone, iPad or Touch in there, you can project from any app that’s designed to send a video output signal. That includes all the obvious apps, like the built-in video and photo apps, plus Netflix, YouTube and Keynote slide shows. (Unfortunately, games don’t seem to like to be projected. Can you imagine 300-inch Angry Birds?)
You can set it up so that the projector accepts only authorized iPhones, iPads and Touches — up to 10 — to prevent schoolchildren from projecting naughtiness when the teacher’s back is turned.
Also very clever: the coffee-cup button on the nicely designed, illuminated remote control. It pauses whatever’s playing and blasts the wall with pure white, lighting up the room so you can take a break.
The Megaplex charges up your device, even when the projector is off. You can use the phone or tablet while it’s playing a movie simultaneously — to check your calendar or even play a game, for example. That is, if you don’t mind sitting behind the projector like some kind of contortionist audiovisual club president.
You’d have to be a real Scrooge to complain about the Megaplex; the truth is, it does a lot of things very well indeed. But there are some footnotes.
One is the fan. This projector contains a powerful light bulb, which gets hot. Depending on where you’re sitting and what you’re using for your sound system, the fan noise can be a distraction.
Some people mount their home theater projector on the ceiling to get it out of the way (and minimize fan noise). That, of course, is an awkward option for this projector, since the whole idea is that you’ll be slipping your iPhone or iPad in and out of it.
Finally, there’s no question that a projector gives you a far more cinematic, immersive movie picture than a TV; Epson points out that the Megaplex’s image is 12 times larger than what you’d get from a 40-inch TV.
But projectors require some thought. Where will you put it? Will you maximize the image quality by buying a screen, or just shine it on a wall? Are you prepared for the necessity of replacing the bulb after 4,000 hours of use — for about $250?
Keep in mind, furthermore, that you may not need a projector if your goal is simply to enjoy your movies and photos on a big screen. You can buy various Apple cables that connect to a regular TV. If you have the newest iPhone or iPad and an Apple TV, in fact, you can even connect it to your HDTV wirelessly. Thanks to a built-in feature called AirPlay, you can keep the thing in your hand as you watch your movies on the TV you already own.
If you do decide to go with a projector, though, the Epson Megaplex is a pleasure. It’s portable, versatile and simple to use (the on-screen menus mimic an iPod’s — Videos, Photos, Music, Rented Movies). “Megaplex” may be too grand a name for a room-size theater, but this Epson is about as well done a Miniplex as a $650 projector can be.
E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com
She’ll be staffing with us in the School of Photography I team in the January quarter here in Kona.
Both of her folks will be guest teachers in the same school (again!) :-)
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