My Final Post...Again! (or "We've Moved!")

Anyone who's followed the http://sweasy.net domain for the last year has got to be tired of me writing blog entries with this title!
First, in June of 2011, I wrote a post in which I stated that I was taking some time off from my personal blog. At the time I said I didn't think it was forever, but I didn't know how long I would be gone. I ended up taking about seven weeks off, and in late July I started posting to that blog again.

Then, back in February of this year, I wrote an entry in which I said I was going to stop writing a personal blog and was going to re-envision http://sweasy.net as an Ed Tech only site. And that's what I've done.

But now, here I am, two months later, and for the third time in 10 month I am writing a blog entry that is supposedly my LAST blog entry. This time, though, I'm not giving up writing blogs. Instead, I'm just moving to a new location. http://kyedtech.com is a blog that--as its name says--is focused on education technology in the state of Kentucky. I was invited to come and write by one of the blog's two authors, and since my blog and their blog have the same purpose, I didn't think it made sense for both to exist, and since their blog title more clearly stated the purpose of the blog, and since there are two of them and only one of me, I decided to join them rather than trying to get them to join me.

So there you have it. For now, this blog is dead. I'm not going to pull it down, though, because it does get a lot of hits, especially because of the blog posts about the Kindle Fire and because of the "Tablet Decision Maker" link on the site. But I don't plan to add anything to it.

I'm not really sure what will happen to the Sweasy.net domain. At this point I don't really have a use for it. But I'd hate to let it expire. I've had the domain since January of 2000. It predates my blog by almost a decade. It actually predates Facebook and YouTube and My Space. I originally used it as a place to post photos and movies for far flung relatives. I don't know what I'll use it for now. Maybe I SHOULD let it expire and let someone who has a use for it actually use it.

I don't know. It doesn't expire until January. Between now and then, I'll have to decide if this is the last sentence I'll ever write on the http://sweasy.net domain.

Kindle Fire vs. Nook Tablet 8GB

(NOTE: See important update by CLICKING HERE!)

Since November I've written quite a bit about the Kindle Fire. I've written nothing about the Fire's closest competition, the Barnes and Noble Nook Tablet. That's because--until just a couple of weeks ago--I hadn't handled the Nook Tablet but for a few minutes. But after reading review after review about how the Nook Tablet was a superior product, I purchased the cheaper 8 GB Nook Tablet as a tester. And now, after a couple of weeks of playing with it, I want to talk about how they compare from an educational standpoint, particularly as an instructional device that schools might provide to students. And I'd basically like to break this blog entry into three parts: 1) The Few Ways that the Nook Beats the Kindle Fire, 2) The MANY Reasons why the Kindle Fire is Better than the Nook, and 3) Why I Would Purchase the Nook instead of the Kindle Fire Anyway DESPITE All That's In Section Two.

So here goes...

Part One: The Few Ways that the Nook Beats the Kindle Fire

As you can deduce from the paragraph above, I personally prefer the Kindle Fire over the Nook Tablet. Yes, they are very similar creatures, and in regards to functioning as an e-reader, both are VERY good.  However, there are a few places where the Nook works as a better device (though sometimes just BARELY).

• Web Browsing. The Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire are very similar from a hardware perspective, and it shows when I started looking at web browsing. They were almost identical in the speed with which they loaded web pages. However, the Nook Tablet was just SLIGHTLY faster than the Kindle Fire. And I'm not talking about a one or two second differential, either. I talking maybe a few hundredths of a second. Nothing that would really sway me to purchase a Nook Tablet over a Kindle Fire. If this were the only difference between the two devices, I would consider them basically identical. Still, as the Nook Tablet ALWAYS loaded the page slightly faster than the Fire, I'll give it the edge here.
• Ergonomics. The Nook Tablet is much lighter than the Kindle Fire, and it's not nearly as thick. It is thus much easier to hold in your hand for a long period of time.
• Microphone. The Nook Tablet has a microphone, though I'm not really sure what it's used for other than the ability for the reader to record him/herself reading certain children's books so that the child reader can have the Nook automatically read the story aloud.

Part Two: The MANY Reasons Why the Kindle Fire is Better than the Nook.

Those are honestly the only ways in which I see the Nook Tablet as a better device (well...other than the ONE thing I'll bring up later). Conversely, there are many ways in which the Kindle Fire is a better device.

• Construction. This may be the inverse property of the "Ergonomics" item above. The Kindle Fire is a heavier, sturdier feeling device. It has a substantial feel to it, and I know that its screen is made of gorilla glass. I get the feeling that it can be dropped without sustaining much damage (My Kindle Fire, in fact, I've dropped hard four or five different times, and it's always been fine aftereward). I don't have that same confidence about the Nook Tablet. One hard drop ought to do this thing in for good.
• Available Apps in the App Store. I read somewhere that the Amazon App store has about 8,000 apps in it while the Barnes & Noble app store has only around 2,000. I'm honestly not sure about the numbers and WAY too lazy to actually go research that, but I can tell you that there are many, many fewer apps in the Barner& Noble store. I've written on this blog about 24 apps that I called "essential" to the Kindle Fire. Of those 24, only FIVE were available in the B&N app store (To be fair, only 15 of them were available in the Amazon store as well--I sideloaded the rest). And some of the missing ones were important. For instance, since the Nook doesn't support the checking out of books from public libraries the way that the Kindle Fire does, I needed my county public library app to "borrow" free books. But that's not in the B&N app store. And I could get the app directly from the Kenton County Library, but...
• The Ability to Sideload Apps. ...the Nook, as of December of last year, no longer allows the sideloading of apps. As far as I'm concerned, this is a HUGE issue. As I mentioned above, only 15 of the 24 apps I've described in previous blog entries can be found on the Amazon app store, but I was able to download the other 9 apps to my Kindle Fire anyway by "sideloading" them. That is, I find the .APK installation files outside of the Amazon app store and then run them on the Fire and the programs are installed. If I do that with the Nook Tablet those files BEGIN to load, but then the installation errors out. This is an intentional behavior on B&N's part. A December update took away the ability to add these external .APK files. That means no YouTube. No Gmail. No Google Docs. And no Kindle Reader software (though I can't say I blame Barnes & Noble for that one and was actually shocked that my Kindle Fire loaded the Nook software).
• The Availability of Free Apps in the App Store. But those aren't the only thing about apps that bother me about the B&N Nook. It also bothers me that there aren't many free apps on the B&N app store. Take calculators, for instance. Sure, there are plenty of paid calculators on the Amazon App store. But there are also plenty of free ones as well, and some of those are pretty darned good. There are traditional calculators, mortgage calculators, percentage calculators, and even graphing calculators...all free on the Amazon App store. The B&N store: There are several calculators as well, but they all cost money. True, many of them are only 99 cents, and that's not going to break anyone. But if a teacher considers the $199 Kindle Fire and the $199 Nook Tablet to be identically priced, that teacher may rethink things when he/she finds that the couple of dozen apps needed add another $12 to the cost of the Nook Tablet. And those aren't the only things that will add to the price of the Nook Tablet.
• The Nook Tablet Need for an External micro SD card with some apps. One app that IS in the B&N app store and that I do think is absolutely an essential instructional tool is the program Evernote. I downloaded it onto my Nook Tablet anxious to see how it compared to the Kindle Fire's app. Would it be identical? Customized to the Nook? I never found out. I installed the app and tried to start it, and instantly a message popped up: "Requires external micro SD card." The same thing happened when I tried to start Skitch, another app I recommend. Again, micro SD cards aren't all that expensive anymore. I just checked and I can get an 8 GB card--effectively doubling the Nook's memory--for $6.99 plus shipping from Tiger Direct. But there's another $8 I wasn't expecting to spend. Add that to the $12 for apps that would have been free on the Kindle Fire, and the Nook Tablet is now $20 more expensive than the Kindle Fire. That's 10% higher in price. Plus, it can't load all of the apps I need! And I'm not finished yet...
• The Price of Books in the Device Bookstore. For the most part, the price of ebooks are set by the publishers, and they're exactly the same at both Barnes and Noble and at Amazon. However, Amazon has a HUGE selection of free books, which the Barnes and Noble website is missing. True, none of these are bestsellers, and some are even suspect in regards to quality. But when I'm an English teacher looking for ways to get kids to read, I care that they're reading SOMETHING. It doesn't have to be the latest Tom Clancy novel or the newest biography about a big name star. And Amazon supplies me with a LOT of free reading material. In addition, Amazon has a large number of books for sale for $.99 or $1.99, and every day discounts at least one book (and sometimes a whole collection of books) to that price. I firmly believe that if I gave a classroom set of Kindle Fires to a teacher and a classroom set of Nook Tablets to a teacher and gave them a bucket of money to spend on ebooks, by the end of the year the teacher with the Nook Tablets would have spent significantly more money and gotten fewer books.

Part Three: Why the Nook Tablet Wins Anyway


(NOTE: See important update by CLICKING HERE!)

Looking at Parts One and Two above, then, it would seem that the Kindle Fire is a pretty clear winner over the Nook Tablet. The three things that I mentioned were in the Nook's favor weren't awe inspiring by any stretch of the imagination (The web browsing speed difference is almost unnoticeable, the ergonomics probably affect build quality, and I don't even really know what the microphone is good for), and there are some real ways that the Kindle Fire is a better device than the Nook Tablet. But I've left out ONE problem with the Kindle Fire, and it's a big enough problem that it trumps everything else:

There's no way to turn off One Click Purchasing.

With that one problem, there is NO WAY I would give a school-owned Kindle Fire to a student to use. There's no way to keep the student from going in and purchasing music, or movies, or ebooks, or apps through the Amazon service. Well, that's not entirely true. I COULD password protect the WiFi and turn off the WiFi, but that would block a lot of the useability of the device. If I'm going to use it for anything other than a text reader, I'm probably going to want the WiFi on.

Yes, I detailed in an earlier blog entry how you can use the program Mobicip to block access to the various Amazon stores on the device, but this is an imperfect solution for three reasons:

1. Mobicip is currently in Beta. It's free now, but when it moves out of Beta, will it still be free? When the developer of the program moved the iOS version out of Beta, it started charging $5 per device for the app.
2. Because it's currently in Beta, it's an imperfect program. The program frequently crashes, and once it does, access to all of the stores becomes available until the next time the Kindle Fire is restarted.
3. As far as I can tell, you can block access to the Amazon app store and the user can still open the apps locally installed. And you can block access the Amazon music store and the user can still play the music files locally installed. And you can block access to the Amazon video store and still play the local videos. But if you block access to the Amazon book store, you also block access to the Kindle program that reads the books locally. I've played around with the Mobicip program for a while, but I can't figure a way around that. And though I may be wrong, I would IMAGINE that a teacher with a classroom set of Kindle Fires would want to use the devices as an ebook.

Last week I got tired of trying to use the Mobicip program as a solution to the One Click problem and instead just decided to go to my Amazon account and turn off all One Click purchasing. When I went to the website, though, I realized that I'd already done that months ago. The One Click purchasing on the Kindle Fire is separate from the One Click Purchasing settings in the "My Account" section of Amazon. Instead, I had to go to "Manage Your Kindle" and then to "Kindle Payment Settings." And once I'm there, there's no way to remove a credit card without adding another one!

Yes, a teacher can supposedly "return" any unapproved purchases within seven days, but I can imagine what a pain that would be. It's for this reason, and this reason only, that if a teacher were to come to me and say he/she had money to purchase a tablet reader for his/her class, that I'd point that person in the direction of the Nook Tablet rather than the Kindle Fire.

And that's a shame because it seems like it would be such an easy fix on Amazon's part, but I'm not the first person to complain about it, and they haven't fixed it yet, and I guess they won't any time soon.

(NOTE: See important update by CLICKING HERE!)

Instant Results

A few days ago I was out and about and I needed to talk to someone in my family (why isn't really relevant to this story). They were all also out and about. I first tried calling my wife on her cell phone, but her line went straight to voice mail. I then tried my older daughter. Voice mail again.  Then I tried my younger daughter. Ditto.

My first reaction was one of anger. Why are we paying for all of these cell phones, I thought to myself,  if no one is going to have the darned things on when I need to get ahold of someone? Later,  when I had calmed down a little bit,  I realized how ridiculous that thought was. They all had their phones with them,  but no one has her phone up against her ear constantly,  and in a noisy situation it's easy to not hear your phone.

But that initial reaction did get me thinking. I EXPECTED to be able to communicate with my family instantly. I wanted instant results. And that is so different from just a few years ago. A decade ago,  if someone's family were away from home, that person would most likely have just waited for the family to get home to talk to them. Not today. Thanks to cellular technology,  he can expect to get ahold of his family at all times.

We live in an age of instant results,  and it impacts more than just my expectations about communicating with my family. It also affects the expectations surrounding the technology in schools. Eight years ago,  when I was still a classroom teacher,  I would estimate the reliability of our district network to have been about 90 percent. Most of the time our network was up and running,  but it wasn't uncommon for the Internet to go down for an hour or two once a week. This was especially likely on a Monday morning when the network had just had from Friday afternoon at 4 until Monday morning to croak out for one reason or another.

This was a real problem for me as I had a web design class that was taught as an "Early Bird" class from 7 A.M. until 7:50, but the district technology department didn't get into work until almost eight. It became such a common occurrence,  in fact,  that I structured my class in such a way that I didn't depend upon the network being up on Monday mornings.

That would never fly today in this era of Instant Results. The Internet is expected to be up. And it usually is. Thanks to a server that my district network admin setup, I found when I ran a report Friday that the WORST reliability any part of our network had was 98.4 percent. And for most of the network our reliability was above 99.5 percent! And that's good, because if the Internet weren't up tomorrow morning at 8 A.M., the district would ALREADY have had the following problems:

• The kitchen staff at each school who serve breakfast before the start of school would have been unable to use their cash registers and would have had to write transactions down on paper. This would have slowed the food service down and delayed the start of school. Which probably would have been a good thing because...
• ...We're MAP testing this week (an online,  formative assessment) and the test proctors w who get to school early and log into the computers and prepare them for the testing, would not have been able to setup the computers and would have had to delay the start of MAP testing.
• The district runs an alternative school that has an entirely computer based curriculum. Without the Internet,  that school would be unable to do ANYTHING. Speaking of which...
• ...That same Internet-based software is used in a credit recovery lab in the morning before school. That lab would have to close for the morning.
• Secretaries in the front offices of the schools would be unable to put into our Student Information System student absences as parents call in to say that a particular student will not be at school today. They'll have to jot it on paper until the system is back up.
• Teachers who wanted to enter some last minute grades into their gradebooks will be unable to do so.

And those are just the problems that would occur BEFORE school started. Starting at 8 A.M. that list would get much larger.

It's an era of Instant Communication,  an era when communication technologies are EXPECTED to work all the tome. And those expectations don't stop at the door of the school. And the expectations are only going to continue to grow as tome goes on. Teachers are going to want easy access to all of the tools they have at work at home. Students are going to want to be able to bring their personal technology into school and not have to just leave it in their lockers. An d EVERYONE is going to want wireless service that they can connect to without difficulty and they're going to want that wireless access everywhere. It's going to be my job to make sure all of this expectations are met.

Lucky me...

P.S. As I mentioned at the start of this blog entry,  I also suffer from an expectation of instant results. I couldn't wait until I was at a computer to write this entry,  so I wrote it on my Kindle Fire while sitting at a track meet.

Getting Away

Not my feet--Someone else's in my family

I haven't posted to this blog for a week and a half now. And I have a good reason why: I was on vacation.

From last Saturday until this Saturday, I was either travelling from my home to Florida, or I was actually in Florida, or I was on a cruise ship headed to the Bahamas, or I was actually IN the Bahamas, or I was on a cruise ship headed home from the Bahamas, or I was travelling from Florida back to my home. Or else I was sitting in traffic on the Spring Break-clogged Interstate 75.

You get the picture.

And while I was on vacation, I took a break, not only from writing this blog, but from focusing on technology at all.

I have my wife to thank for that.

As we were starting to pack for our trip the night before we left, she said to me, "You know, we're going to have a lot of time on the ship to just do nothing."

"I know," I said. "I'm looking forward to it?"

"What are you planning to do with it?"

"I'm going to read!" I said. "I'm going to grab a chair on the upper deck of the cruise ship, away from the noisy pool, and I'm going to turn the chair so that it faces the ocean, and I'm going to read."

"What are you going to read?"

"Well, I have 29 books and 12 magazines that I've downloaded to my Kindle, so I'll have a lot of options, but I'm planning to read three books: Ian Jukes' Living on the Future Edge, a book called What School Leaders Need to Know about Digital Technologies and Social Media, and finally, a book a friend recommended called Stop Stealing Dreams."

Before I had finished my description my wife was shaking her head pretty violently. "Uh uh," she said simply. "I forbid you to bring ANY of those books on the cruise."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because you need a break," she said to me. "You haven't taken a REAL break for a long time. You need to get away from your work."

"But I will be away from work!" I pleaded. "It just so happens that these types of books bring me pleasure."

"Not this week. Leave them at home. I forbid it."

Which was a ridiculous thing to say. And--to be fair--it was said at least partly in jest. From years of living with me, my wife knows better than to try to order me around. That's not how you get me to respond. I brought the three books along with me despite what my wife said (doing otherwise would have meant deleting them off of my Kindle Fire and I didn't want to do that).

But I did listen to what she said. And it stuck with me maybe more than I thought it was going to. And when the first chance came for me to read on my Kindle, I didn't open any of those books. Instead, I started reading Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, which is--thanks to the movie--enormously popular right now, and which I'd had sitting on my Kindle since November. And I enjoyed it.

I didn't mean to bore you with a long piece of dialogue, though. What I wanted to get at is this: It's good to get away from the technology for a while. From Monday, when we stepped on the cruise ship, until Friday, when we stepped off, I didn't get on the Internet once. I didn't update my Facebook status. I didn't check my work email. I didn't go online to see what was the app of the day or the Kindle book of the day at Amazon. And amazingly, the world didn't end as a result.

For a week I was able to leave most of the technology issues behind me. It was refreshing. I'm back at work now with renewed vigor, ready to really get some things done now.

So I'm writing mostly to implore others of you involved in EdTech: If you haven't already done so recently, find time to unplug and get away from the technology that is our jobs. And get completely away from it. If you have to, get on a big boat that doesn't have Internet access so that you CAN'T get online. You'll be glad later that you did.