iTunesU

I saw a great announcement today concerning iTunesU.  They are now offering K-12 content.  This was just announced Tuesday July 1st at NECC.  Here is an article with information:

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/?i=54390;_hbguid=f266f42f-b885-4d14-a151-b1b4cf0a11b8

iTunesU has been offering some great content since it began a little over a year ago.  Wikipedia says: iTunes U “features free content such as course lectures, language lessons, lab demonstrations, sports highlights and campus tours provided by top US colleges and universities including Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Duke University, Arizona State University, and MIT.” Since the day it opened we have been asking our Apple reps when they were going to start offering K-12 content.  The answer we always got was … soon.

What is exciting about this announcement is the opportunity for school districts to offer content on-line for on-demand access.  What is even more powerful is that users are not restricted to just their school district.  Any material that is released to the public will be accessible through the iTunes store. The initial Universities that started offering their content this way felt that the charge of their institution was to offer the best education to the world they could.  They no longer have to be confined to the bricks and mortar buildings on their campuses to offer this content. Many professors embraced this opportunity and the amount of content you can find now from post-secondary schools as grown tremendously.  I expect a similar explosion in K-12 content.

Apple to Lancater

It appears that Mac fans in Lancaster County will have a lot to be excited about this fall as an Apple Store is planned to go into Park City Malls this October:

http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/222225

Apple has traditionally only sold their products at their online store or at their own retail stores – named Apple Stores. The closest one to Lancaster is the King of Prussia store.  It is very small in comparison to some of Apple’s more well known Apple Stores.  Among avid Mac users these stores are big attractions.  It is almost a badge of honor to say what Mac stores you have visited.

Each store not only displays and sells Apple products, but they also set out their equipment for people to use so you can experiment with the exact product you will be purchasing.  They also run training sessions where you can learn about some of Apple’s newest software.  But probably the most attractive feature of an Apple Store is the Genius bar.  Every Apple Store has a Genius bar where you can talk to an Apple “genius” and get any questions answered, get hardware and software support or just talk over best practices for using your Mac.

Apple Store openings are also big events.  The first 1,00o or so customers get a free T-shirt with the store name on it.  People will wait in line at some of the more prestigious openings for hours before the store opens to get a T-shirt.  Some come out Lancaster in Oct. and wait in line with me to gett a free T-shirt.

Google Calendar

We all now that Google is putting out some great Web 2.0 products. In this post I want to focus on their calendar. I have a work laptop, a blackberry phone and a home desktop. The challenge is being able to keep my calendar straight on all 3. Google Calendar is the solution I use. Since it is on the web I can access it on any computer and edit/update entries as needed. On the laptop and the home desktop I then use iCal. Google calendar give you either a XML, an HTML, or an iCal feed that allows you to share your calendar with other applications, feeds or websites. It really is simple to do. For iCal I just get the address from Google for my calendar, I go to iCal and chose subscribe to calendar and paste in the address. Then I get a read only view of the calendar I edit on Google. What is great about this is I can set up as many computers as I need – in this case 2 – to see the same calendar. If I am at work and make a change to the calendar within 15 minutes it is updated on my home computer.

Some things that make this even better are Google allows you to create and maintain multiple calendars. So I can keep my work, home, baseball, church, etc. calendars separate. I can color code them so they are easy to pick out. Also, Google has a lot of public calendars that you can subscribe to. For instance I subscribe to the National Holidays calendar, phases of the moon, and the Ohio State football schedule. Those calendars are created and maintained by someone else.

For my blackberry Google makes a great sync application that keeps my calendars up to date on the blackberry as well. It auto syncs so I always have an up to date calendar on my mobile phone also.

The only downside is that you have to have Internet access to update the calendar. This is true for all Web 2.0 apps and for me is really not a problem. For the odd times that I am out of Internet range I simply write down the date and update the calendar when I am back online. It is a great solution for me.

No post this week

Sorry everyone, but in honor of my newest child being born this past Friday, May 30th, there will be no post this week.  See you next week.

Need Software?

Tip of the Week #6 (TOTW#6): Where to get educational pricing.

One of the questions tech support gets a lot is where can I get the best price on software for my home computer. This comes right after – are you sure “such and such” software doesn’t have a home license agreement? While we would love to hand out software for free most of the apps that people want do not extend to home as well.

So there are 2 alternatives. One, Look for an open source alternative. There are more and more open source alternatives available today and they are becoming easier to use all the time. Most of them still lack some of the functionality of the pro apps, but you may be surprised at how close many of them have become. For instance NeoOfice for the Mac, OpenOffice on a PC, is a great alternative to Microsoft Office. The download is big and takes a little time to pull it off the Internet, but the app you get is very rich and full-featured. You will hardly know the difference. Then there are always operating systems. This is where people seem to be most passionate about not trying alternatives, but if you are tech savy and are looking for Free there is always Linux. It is as full functioning as Windows or OSX and has quite a devote following. You will definitely have to tinker a bit more to get it up and running, but those that use it swear by it. There are plenty more examples out there and I could go on forever.

The second option is to just but the software yourself. There are plenty of educational discounts available for teachers and students alike. For some of the more popular software out there I would reccomend using JourneyEd.

http://journeyed.com.

Here educators can get prices such as: Microsoft Office for Mac $79.99, for Windows $84.99, Windows Vista Ultimate $99.98, Adobe Photoshop $299.99, etc.

You do have to prove that you are an educator to receive these prices. All I had to do was mail in a copy of a dated staff or student ID. They even have a convenient web upload if you can scan your ID. The site is very user friendly and when I had a problem with billing (my problem – not theirs) there was a phone number I could call and they quickly took care of it for me. There are certainly other places, and you deal hunters may still look to try and get it on a auction on eBay, etc. for cheaper, but this site is definitely a great resource for quick cheap software pricing. So the next time you need some software I would recommend starting there.