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.

Two new apps for the Kindle Fire

A few weeks ago I published a blog entry entitled "20 Essential Apps for Educators" that listed what I felt were the top 20 apps for educational use. Today I'd like to add two more apps that I've found in the last few weeks.

New App #1: Go Launcher Ex

One of my biggest complaints about the Kindle Fire when I first got it was the homescreen. I felt like the turnstile that was used to scroll through previously viewed items took up WAY more space than it needed. And I missed the ability to have Android "widgets" placed on my home screen.

But with the Go Launcher Ex program a Kindle Fire user can setup his or her user interface more like an Android tablet or cell phone. Like most cell phones, there are five possible screens to scroll through, with the middle screen being the "Home" screen.

Using Go Launcher Ex, here's what my home screen now looks like:

Notice how I have widgets for my Touchdown program that display on the screen both my unopened emails (in the example above I didn't have any) and my upcoming appointments. I also have my most often used apps on the screen, and I'm better able to organize my other apps (placing utility programs on one page and games on the next.

I will say this, though: I miss the old home screen. For as much as I had complained about it before to other people, I guess I'd gotten used to it. It was unique. Now I feel like I'm just holding an oversized smart phone in my hand.

The old home screen isn't gone, though. It's called "Kindle Launcher" and is in with the other apps (and I placed it as the bottom left most icon on my home screen, sort of like the Windows "Start" button). If I go into the application settings and go to Go Launcher Ex and clear the default settings, the situation will reverse, and the Kindle Launcher will once again become the homescreen and Go Launcher EX will be just another app in the list of apps.

I'm going to leave the Kindle the way it is for now, though, and I'll decide after a few weeks of use which I like better.

You can download the Go Launcher EX program by clicking this link.

New App#2: Prezi Player for the Kindle Fire

The Kindle Fire is an Android device, and Prezi's don't work on Android devices. Except that one guy has found a workaround. It's a bit clunky and involves the installation of actually TWO different programs, but it doesn't require rooting the Kindle Fire. I'll be honest, though: it's a little trickier than anything I've recommended before, including sideloading apps. Directions can be found on this page.

Netbooks added to Tablet Decision Maker

The Mobile Device Decision Maker, which I wrote about in a previous blog post, has been updated now to include netbooks. The new spreadsheet can be found at the link above.

Originally I didn't include netbooks because--in my mind--netbooks aren't really a separate category. They're just a low end laptop. However, after consideration, I decided that a) in many people's minds, they ARE a separate category, b) there is a noticeable difference in ability between netbooks and the kind of laptop that I was scoring in the "laptop" category, and c) the spreadsheet WAS distinguishing between high end and low end Android devices, so it was only fair that I also distinguish between these upper end laptops and a netbook.

In addition to adding netbooks, I also added a 41st descriptor to the spreadsheet: "Boot Up / Wake Up Time." I added that as a result of considering the question of "Exactly what is it about netbooks that makes them less desirable than--say--an iPad?". One answer is the overall processing time of the netbooks is slower (a web page that a powerful desktop might pull up in a second and an iPad in a second and a half might take a netbook 8 or 10 seconds to open), but another problem with netbooks is the overall time it takes to boot them or wake them up. They're definitely not "instant on."

In any event, as I said when I first created this spreadsheet, I'm just one guy, so if you feel my scoring of the netbook--or any other device, for that matter--isn't quite right, let me know and together you and I can figure out what it ought to be.

Should We Teach Digital Citizenship?

Last week I had a conversation with a colleague of mine about the teaching of digital citizenship in school. This person asked me if I thought we NEEDED to teach digital citizenship and whether or not it was right for the state or federal government to FORCE local school districts to teach it.

I don't want to address the second issue at all (This blog isn't about politics and I don't want it to be), but as to the first question, whether or not we NEED to be teaching digital citizenship, the answer is absolutely!

And if you want proof that it's needed, I submit to you the following photograph, which I took while standing in line at a Subway sandwich shop:

We live in a world where people have to be TOLD to turn their cell phones off while placing an order! So yes, apparently we need to teach students the right way to act in the 21st century.

So that Subway Restaurants, Incorporated doesn't have to!

P.S. There's something ironic, though, to the fact that--while the Subway worker was standing behind the counter waiting for me to tell him what kind of cheese I wanted on my 6 inch Sub--I held up my hand and said, "Hang on! Let me get a picture of this!" and then proceeded to get out my phone and use it while placing my order so that I could write this blog post about how people had to be told not to use their phones while placing their orders.

Stranger at the Door

Every now and then something happens at work that knocks my pride down a notch or two...

Yesterday I was bringing a CPU over to my system administrator's office. It's at Lloyd High School, in an old part of the building that USED to be the principal's office. It's right beside what USED to be the front doors of the building, but now are just doors that nobody uses anymore because they're hidden by the new cafeteria . But I parked beside the cafeteria and walked over to the windows of my system admin's office, figuring that he'd let me in the building.

The only problem was that he wasn't in his office. So I walked over to the old entrance doors. I don't have a key to the doors, and as I said, this is an OLD entrance, old enough that it doesn't have an electronic key card reader on the locks. But I peered into what USED to be the main lobby of the building (and which is now an art exhibit hall) and saw, in the doorway of the gymnasium across the lobby/exhibit hall, six students. I motioned for one of the students to come and let me in. They didn't budge. I watched as they pointed at me for a few moments and talked among themselves. Once they finished their conversation they all turned towards me and started shaking their heads and pointing towards the CURRENT front entrance of the school.

I started to get angry. Didn't these kids know who I was? But I couldn't really get angry because the answer was obvious: No, they DIDN'T know who I was. And actually, they were doing the exact right thing. They shouldn't let a stranger into the building.

I got on my cell phone to call my system administrator to see if he was SOMEWHERE in the building and could let me in. While I was on the phone, a Lloyd teacher--I'll call her Emily--came walking by and the girls stopped her and pointed at me and talked to her. I hung up my cell phone, figuring she was going to let me in. After talking to the girls for a moment, she walked over to the door and shouted (I heard it through the double glass as barely above a whisper), "This isn't the main entrance anymore! You'll have to drive around to the front of the building and they'll let you in there!"

I looked at her with a smile on my face, thinking she was kidding. I pointed at the door handle. She frowned. "Sir, you're going to have to go to the front entrance! You can't come in here!"

"Emily!" I shouted back. "It's me! Bryan!"

"I'm sorry, sir," she said with a scowl. "You need to go around to the front of the building, or I'm going to alert the administrators!"

No smile cracked through her demeanor. She really didn't know me. I waved her off. "I'll walk around!" And I did. And as I did so a single thought occurred to me:

I need to get out in the buildings more often...

The Proper Use of a Prezi Presentation

The first time I ever saw a Prezi presentation, I immediately saw the potential for the site. With its swooping movement and its ability to drill down further and further into the details of something, I saw that Prezi was perfect when you had connecting ideas that didn't fit on a PowerPoint presentation. It was just right for showing off complex relationships, especially when there were varying levels of detail.

Unfortunately, I've rarely seen that kind of Prezi. What I mostly see are presentations that could just as easily have been a PowerPoint but that were placed into a Prezi so that people in the audience could be ooh'ed and awed by the dizzying movement. And I guess it must have worked to that effect, because the site has caught on and now it seems like everyone is using the site, whether it makes any sense or not, and whether the ideas in the presentation are connected in a visual way or not.

And as a result, I'm about as frustrated by a Prezi presentation as I am by a boring PowerPoint presentation.

Over the weekend though, I stumbled upon the website below, which shows EXACTLY the kind of information for which the Prezi tool works best. It's absolutely worth your time to check it out, especially if you're a science teacher.

Before I post the link, though, a disclaimer--the site isn't constructed solely using Prezi. It does look like it's a Prezi that's been modified by people with a working knowledge of Flash, but it's not something that a typical user could create on his/her own. It's not THAT much more advanced, though, and--as I said--at least it demonstrates the kind of subject that really works with a Prezi.

Visit the site.

My Least Favorite Day

It's that time of year again! One of my least favorite days of the year.

Let me back up and explain...

More than a year ago, our local cable system made the switch from an analog/digital broadcast format to an all digital broadcast format. Once that switch was made, any TV without a digital tuner (i.e. any TV more than 3 or 4 years old) could no longer display the digital only signals getting pumped through the cable. In my school district, virtually every TV is more than four years old. As such, on that day a year and a half ago, ALL of those TV's went dark.

The cable company, though, is required by law to provide cable TV for free to classrooms, so they sent to every school an analog to digital converter, one for each TV in the building. Sounds like a great solution, right? Except for one thing: These digital tuners require a much stronger signal than do the tuners built into the analog TV's. And the cable signals in our buildings are infamously weak. In the new wing of the high school, each classroom cable is split by a signal amplifier, which attaches to the electrical power of the building and increases the gain of the signal, but in all of the rest of the high school and in all of the rest of the buildings, the cables are split with 22 cent coaxial splitters, and they're usually split time after time after time, making for a VERY weak signal.

If an analog TV has a weak signal, it will still display the picture. It will be snowy, sure, but it will still display the signal. With a digital tuner, though, a weak signal isn't shown AT ALL. And that's what happened in the majority of our classrooms throughout the district. Sure, we could have purchased signal amplifiers for each building at the cost of thousands upon thousands of dollars, but when I went to the building administrators with this possibility, they immediately nixed the issue.

"Who cares?" one of them said in our monthly administrators' meeting. "No one watches cable TV in class, anyway. Everything's United Streaming" [an educational streaming service that the state of Kentucky provides to every Kentucky public school] "or YouTube or something like that." The other administrators all agreed that this wasn't an issue worth worrying about. Some even said they were glad that the cable was gone from the classroom because now they didn't have to worry about walking in on teacher's in their classrooms on their planning periods who were watching soap operas. So everything was rosy.

Until.

Until the first day of the men's NCAA basketball tournament. On that day, the same principal who had said to me that no one watches cable TV anyway called me and said, "Bryan, can you do whatever your magic is so that we can watch basketball over here?" I had to inform him that--despite his apparent misconception that I was a supernatural creature--I did not, in fact, have any magic that could make a weak digital cable signal work on an analog TV. He was actually pretty angry with me. "You KNEW this was going to be a problem, didn't you?" he shouted. "Well, then, will you unblock the CBS website so that we can watch the games over the Internet?" (For the record, I don't have the CBS website blocked, just the part of the site that streams the video.)

"I can't do that," I said. "It would be a violation of our district AUP for staff or students to watch it. Besides, we don't have the available bandwidth to support bunches of people watching online video all at once."

"So what are my options?" he said in an irritated voice.

I wanted to tell him, Maybe you could forget about the games and actually do your job. But hey! The University of Kentucky was playing, and I've learned from a lifetime of living in the Bluegrass that you don't mess with a Wildcat fan. "You could purchase an over the air digital to analog converter at Wal-Mart and a cheap rabbit ears antennae, and you could hook them directly to a TV. It'll cost about $60."

"How much?"

"About $60," I said. "Six months ago you could have gotten a coupon from the federal government and gotten the converter for free, but that program's over now."

"No way I'm paying $60!" he said. "Forget it!" And he hung up.

I felt bad for the guy, but can I tell you a secret: I'm GLAD that the games can't be shown in the classrooms. It eliminates the temptation. When I was a teacher at the high school, I resented the other teachers in the building who played the games. Students would come trouncing into my afternoon classes and say, "Hey, Mr. Sweasy! Can we watch the games?"

"Nope," I told them. "We're here to learn English, not to watch basketball."

"But Mr. _______________ let us watch it last period!" someone would shout, and then I'd get a laundry list of other teachers who were letting their students watch. I would inevitably give in and hold the game like a carrot above their heads.

"Let's get _______________ done first," I'd say, "and then we'll turn the game on and watch it for five minutes--FIVE MINUTES--before coming back together and doing ______________. Once we finish that, we'll watch again for five minutes. Is that okay?" They would always say that no, that wasn't okay, that we should watch the game for the whole period, but when I told them that it was a take it or leave it proposition, they always took it.

So I'm actually glad to remove that whole argument on behalf of the teachers.

But still, this is the one or two days out of the year when everyone realizes that their cable TV doesn't work anymore.

KySTE Conference 2012--My Final Take

The last two posts I've made have focused on what I "got" out of the 2012 KySTE Conference. Since the final day of the conference included only three sesssion time slots, and I actively partipated in two of them, I "got" a little less out of the final day than I (hopefully) "gave." So instead of focusing on that, I'd like to focus this final post on the conference as a whole...

I thought the third KySTE Spring conference was fantastic! The board did a tremendous job of organizing and pulling off a very professional conference. And I don't just say that because I'm on the board! Actually, as Past President of the organization, I probably had the smallest role of all of the current board members. President Jeff Jones and Executive Director Gary Grant did most of the heavy lifting, and they did so successfully.

After the conference, after all of the attendees had headed for home (or for local pubs to watch the UK basketball game), after all of the donated computers had been packed away and sent back to their respective homes, after we'd cleared out of the registration area so that the United League of Pentecostal Women could come in and start registering people for THEIR conference (I'm not lying here--they had taken over half of the registration area in the East Galt House while we frantically worked to get our stuff out of the other half of the area, and believe me, I'm not getting a bunch of Pentecostals all worked up!), and while vendors disassembled their "intelligent" classrooms and the convention staff from George Fern started tearing down the vendor hall, those KySTE board members who hadn't made an early exit for home gathered in the Magnolia Cafe for a debriefing and (more importantly) late lunch.

While we ate, we discussed what went well, but--as always seems to be the case--spent most of our time focused on the problems that needed to be fixed. The Members Only reception at the Hard Rock Cafe Thursday night was one issue that needed to be resolved. We turned away about 50 people who didn't preorder tickets, but we ended up with about 100 no shows, meaning that we could have allowed all 50 of those people in. How to fix that for next year was a topic of discussion. Another topic: the raffle during the vendor grand opening. A number of the people who put their names in the raffle drawing either weren't there or had left before the drawing or couldn't hear their names being called over the loudspeakers. We talked about that and decided that we may have to come up with something similar to what we did this year at the closing--that is, have people turn a ticket in when they ARRIVE at the vendor grand opening so that at least we know they were there at some point. Another issue--the lack of effectiveness of our ETAN booth. If you don't know what an ETAN booth is, well, then that says about all there is to say about how effective it was this year. I'm sure that'll be addressed for next year as well.

But as we sat there listing ideas, I said to the table, "If our biggest problems are that we turned people away from an after hours event, and we couldn't give prizes away at a vendor hall opening, then I think we're doing pretty good." And I really believe that. This was only the third KySTE Conference to occur in the spring at the Galt House (Prior to that, the KySTE Conference was a summer affair held--usually--in the home district of the KySTE Vice-president), and each year we've had the conference at the Galt House, the problem list at the end of the day debriefing has gotten smaller and smaller. And more importantly, the importance of the problems have gotten smaller and smaller as well.

At the end of the first conference, the number one problem was the difficutly getting on the Galt House Internet. Whether attendees attached via the wired network or tried the nightmare that at the time was the Galt House wireless network, they usually found that--connect or not--there was no bandwidth available. That's because the Galt House had a whopping 10 MB of bandwidth at the time for EVERY guest, both those in their rooms and those in the meeting room spaces. So even if you COULD get on the network, the bandwidth was maxed out. Another problem at the time was the KySTE dinner, a catered meal at the Galt House attended by almost all attendees on the second night of the conference. The problems were that a) the dinner was VERY expensive for KySTE and b) NOT the right place to have an awards ceremony (No matter how polite people are, if you put them at a circular table with food they're going to talk to one another). A third big complaint was with the organization of the conference, which had been ported to the spring from our annual summer conference. At the time all three days of the conference were open session days (like Thursday and Friday were this year), and there was a complaint from some administrators that it was too hard to have teachers out of the district for three straight days when school was in session. Finally, several attendees complained that there was no continental breakfast for attendees--not even a cup of coffee! While none of these meant that the conference was a dud (It was actually a roaring success!), they were SERIOUS issues that needed to be addressed.

And they WERE addressed for the 2011 KySTE Conference. First, working with Insight and the Galt House, KySTE increased the available bandwidth during the conference from 10 MB to 100 MB. This fixed the network problems for session presenters, who could plug into the network with an Ethernet cable and get out to the Internet just fine. What it DIDN'T do, though, was fix the slow, 802.11b wireless network of the Galt House, so regular attendees without 3G cards had no hopes of getting any Internet access. Second, the dinner was scrapped and the awards ceremony moved to the closing session, where people would be sitting in straight lines and paying attention a little better. This created a new problem, though, which was that the closing ceremony became TOO long. A second problem was created when some of the money previously spent on the dinner was moved to providing hot food for attendees at a lunchtime vendor opening. KySTE wasn't prepared for how hungry people were going to be, and ended up spending more than twice as much as planned on the food for the vendor opening, and STILL people were dissatisfied with how much food there was. On the positive side, though, some of the money saved from the dinner was able to fund a continental breakfast on both the second and third day of the conference. Finally, a third major change LAST year was the reorganization of the conference schedule so that the first day was for non-teachers only (administrators, CIO/DTCs, TRT's, and technicians). Teachers only attended the last two days of the conference.

To address the new issues from last year, KySTE successfully put pressure on the Galt House to upgrade their wireless network, which they literally did days before the conference last week. The wireless wasn't perfect, but when is it ever? Personally, I was on it throughout the conference on my Kindle Fire, two different laptops, and my cell phone, and I rarely got kicked off. Also, the second keynote address was removed from the closing session of the conference, and the closing session itself was scheduled to occur earlier in the day so as to avoid Louisville afternoon traffic. In addition, the vendor grand opening was moved to the after dinner hours, which removed the need to have hot appetizers. Instead, 1,500 pieces of cheesecake were made available as dessert for attendees. And in lieu of a dinner, a Members Only reception was held at the Hard Rock Cafe, with the issues that we described above.

But as I said, the "large" issue at the conference has gotten smaller and smaller each year. We went from "You Guys have GOT to do something about the Internet access" after the first conference to "You guys have GOT to do something about the wireless access" after the second conference to "I didn't know I needed a ticket to get into the Members Only reception." That's quite an improvement each year, especially from last year to this year.

So I guess what I'm saying is, good job, Jeff and Gary. You've outdone yourselves.

I have three months left on the KySTE board, and though I know there'll be a couple more monthly con calls and a retreat in May when a bunch of important decisions will be made, for the most part, my work with the organization is done for now. And that's always bittersweet. But after the fantastic conference that I saw put on this year, I know that the organization is in good hands.

And I look forward to next year, when I get to attend the conference as a regular KySTE member, enjoying the fruits of labor of this new KySTE board.

KySTE Conference, Day Two--Renewed Urgency

Yesterday I posted about day one of the conference, summing up what I felt the overarching theme of the first day was. Today I want to post about what I've gotten out of the second day of the conference, and I have no such grand plans to try to do any summarizing.
The reason: I didn't get to nearly as many sessions today. I spent a great deal of time today behind the counter at the ISTE "bookstore" in the 2nd floor lobby of the Galt House. And in all of that time, most of what I learned can be broken down into three basic ideas: 1) If you put yourself in the middle of a lobby at a conference and sit behind a table and look official, lots of people will come up to you and ask you questions. Mostly about the locations of specific meeting rooms. 2) KySTE needs a point of service solution so that we can accept credit cards more easily. 3) The next year that I volunteer to work the KySTE Conference (and that won't be next year--I fully intend to take a year completely away from KySTE and get recharged before coming back for probably one more run through before retirement) I'm going to ask to do something other than the bookstore, because that's not my thing.

But I'm not here to talk about the bookstore. I want to talk, actually turn around in my own head for my own benefit, what I DID get out of the conference today. I attended two sessions, one on the uses of Microsoft OneNote, and another by KySTE 2012 Keynote speaker Scott McLeod about being an effective technology leader. From the OneNote session, I debated with the speaker about which is the better choice for Kentucky schools--OneNote or Evernote. We didn't really decide. On one hand, most teachers already have OneNote installed on their computers and don't even know it, and many student computers have it as well (In my district, virtually ALL PC's in the district have it installed). This would make a district wide implementation fairly easy to achieve. On the other hand, Evernote is free (OneNote is a pricey purchase, especially for the home) and it syncs across all devices more seamlessly than OneNote does. It's something I'll have to decide about, and to be honest, I've got time because I'm not planning to push this out to everyone in my district unless a need arises.

That's about all I got out of that session.

The other session, though, that was a different story. Dr. McLeod presented a number of interesting ideas for 10 ways to improve your technology leadership. He made a number of statements that I found really intriguing. So many, in fact, that I sometimes found myself hearing a great, thought provoking idea and thinking, "I need to write that down," and before I could he or his colleague said something ELSE intriguing and I started thinking about that and soon lost all memory of what it was he had said before (In fact, at one point I seriously considered raising my hand and asking him if he could repeat word for word everything he'd said over the last six minutes so that I could remember what that one really inspiring phrase was, but he seemed on a roll and I decided to let it go). But one thing stood out for me.

I don't remember exactly what the wording was, but as Dr. McLeod was talking about PD he said--simply as an aside--that we gave PD to teachers in the same way that we tried to teach students, with the one size fits all philosophy. And that really got me thinking. In my school district we have the same standard, four professional development days that everyone else in the state has, but we also have our students attend school longer than 6 hours a day in order to get the required 1,062 hours of instruction in 170 days rather than 175, and we use those additional five days also for professional development. That's nine full days of professional development, 54 hours. And what do we do with it? In all schools in the district, for the most part, you'll walk into the school building on PD days and the teachers are sitting in the library, all getting the same information drilled into them, as if every teacher in that building all had exactly the same professional need at exactly the same moment.

It's ludicrous.

And more than ludicrous, it's hypocritical. Because we tell our teachers all the time that they should be differentiating instruction, but here before those teachers' eyes are their leaders and they aren't differentiating ANYTHING.

I swear I was listening to the second half of Dr. McLeod's presentation. At least with half of my brain. But the other half of my brain was on a mission: This has to change, that half of my brain was saying to me. It doesn't matter how, but I have to go back to my district and somehow convince the other school and district administrators that this has to stop. We have to find a way to not only meet the students where they are with their learning (practically a mantra in my district), but to also meet the teachers where THEY are. And that means acknowledging first and foremost that they're not all in the same place.

Larger conferences like this KySTE conference are a great model for one kind of way that we can do that. The first time that I ever went to this conference, back when I was a teacher instead of a CIO and it was called the Kentucky Teaching and Learning Conference, I was blown away by the fact that there were so many possible sessions that I could go to, and that I had all of the freedom to go to the things that interested me and that I NEEDED. This was the kind of professional development I wanted and needed. I came back to my district thinking, THIS is what we need to be doing for PD in the district, and a couple of years later, when I was CIO, I convinced the district leadership to give it a try. The Erlanger-Elsmere Teaching and Learning Conference is what I called it (Okay, so maybe coming up with titles for stuff isn't my specialty--look at the title of this blog, for Pete's sake!), and we had the thing for three out of four years. You can see a website for the last version of it by clicking this link. Of all of the PD's we've ever had in the district, it was BY FAR the most enthusiastically received. As in 94% of all of the staff members ranked it as either very beneficial for their job or somewhat beneficial to their job. And 97% of the staff members in that final year wanted to see the EETLC continue from year to year.

So what happened? Senate Bill 1 / Unbridled Learning happened. Building principals pushed back against the conference--they said they couldn't "waste" an entire PD day letting teachers do whatever they wanted when there was all this work that had to be done for Unbridled Learning and the Common Core Standards and End of Course Assessment and everything else that occurred. So now teachers are sitting in the library learning about CIITS and common assessments and curriculum alignment. Because it's important that all of this stuff gets covered.

And I'm not knocking the principals. All of this stuff really is important.

But darn it, this has to change. It has to. We're never going to get effective PD assuming these teachers all need all of this. And I'm not sure what to do (though I have a few ideas I'm going to bat around with the central office administrators next week), but I have to do something.

Wow, having written all of this, I have to say, maybe I got more out of today than I thought I did. Maybe I got a renewed sense of urgency.

That's not a bad takeaway...

KySTE Conference, Day One--Pandora's Box

Today was the first day of the annual Kentucky Society for Technology in Education Conference, which is held every March in Louisville. The conference proper starts tomorrow, but today there were multiple pre-session meetings for district administrators, technology teachers, CIOs, and technicians. Unlike last year, when as KySTE President I was in charge of the conference and pretty much spent the entire three days standing behind the registration desk dealing with issues, this year I've actually gotten to go to about half of the first day's sessions. And here's what I got out of them:

People are nervous.

Specifically, people are worried about the influx of personal devices and 1:1 initiatives and what kinds of devices to purchase and how do we protect the network from all of these devices and who's gonna fix 'em when they break and how can we teach when 30 kids have a total of 11 different devices in the classroom and how are we ensuring that kids are doing what they're supposed to be doing on these devices instead of chatting with friends on Facebook and what if they look at porn and do we charge a technology fee and how does equity of access fit into this puzzle and what about the teachers who haven't figured out how to incorporate a regular old desktop computer into the classroom much less a tablet or an iPhone and lots of other stuff.

And all of those concerns point to one fact. All of us in the field of ed tech understand that the education technology landscape is changing. Rapidly. And portable computing devices are driving this change. With the price of the iPad 2 dropping in the next few days to just $399, and with high quality 7 inch Android tablets like the Kindle Fire selling for just $200, and with Android cell phones selling in the corner supermarket for less than $100, we're approaching a point in the VERY near future--much nearer than I think most people in education realize--when every child will be carrying around SOME kind of portable computing device.

I've seen both this change and these concerns coming for a while.

About six months ago my school district upgraded our core router, and when we did so we changed the way the router was setup so that devices that couldn't attach to our domain and connect to our proxy server could still get on the Internet. "Transparent proxy" is what it's called, and I described it for months to the administrators in my district as "The Panera Bread Experience." I told them, "IF we institute this transparent proxy" [and we wouldn't have done so without their knowledge and permission] "users will be able to attach to our network and get on the Internet from our network with the same ease that they can do so at Panera Bread." I have no idea why I chose Panera Bread over any other business that provides free wi-fi, but that's not the point. The point was what I said next. "Once that happens, everything changes in the district. Any guest, parent, student, teacher...anybody...can attach to our network and surf the web. It will make access to the web easier. But it's also going to bring problems." Despite my warnings, though, the administrators were all in favor of instituting this change. That Panera Bread Experience was too tempting to resist.

On the first district administrators meeting that we had following the change, I told them that we were up and running, and that true to my word, it was now as easy to get on the Internet in my school district as it was at Panera Bread (to my relief. I wasn't really sure if it would be exactly as easy, and it turns out that yep; it was exactly as easy). And I told them, "I am VERY, VERY excited about what this can mean for instruction and for learning in this district. But I've been saying this and I'll continue to say it--everything changes now."

One of the administrators who'd been listening to me for three months and being silent finally asked, "What do you mean?"

"Have you ever heard of the myth of Pandora and the box?" He nodded. "It's like that." He looked at me uncomprehendingly. "Do you remember the scene in GHOSTBUSTERS when the mean, bearded guy from the EPA made them turn off the power to the grid and all of the ghosts came out and that weird, 80's music started playing and the one ghost got sucked up into the tailpipe of the taxi and ended up in the driver's seat? That's exactly what's going to happen!"

That, of course, told him no more than the story of Pandora did, so I kind of started over. I decided to forgo the analogies and just give it to him straight. "Once you open up your network like that, you give up a lot of control. Yesterday we knew about every device on our network, what the computer name was, who was logged onto it, what it was doing. If the user logged on was a student who didn't have a signed AUP, they didn't get Internet access. Now ANYONE can sign on with their iPad from their house, and we have no idea if that person is a teacher or a guest of the district or a student who has lost his Internet privileges."

"But that doesn't matter," that principal said. "Most kids don't have an Internet capable device with them at school."

"They don't because yesterday they couldn't get on the network. Today they can. We're not announcing that, but how long do you think it will take before students figure this out on their own? And once they do, they'll start bringing their devices in. And even if students DON'T have a device today, they will soon. With the prices of devices falling all of the time, it's inevitable that every student will have a device."

And it is. Consider this: The original Kindle device was introduced in November of 2007. At the time it cost $400. Today the current Kindle closest in specs to that original device sells for $79. That's an 80% price drop in 4 years. Now think about the Kindle Fire. It currently sells for $200. If the Kindle Fire follows that same pattern, that means that in 2016 a device like the Kindle Fire will be on sale for $40. And when that happens, that device will no longer be behind glass in the electronics section of the store. It's going to be hanging from a J-hook at the checkout line. And once that happens, EVERY student is going to own one. My children's school supply lists include a TI-80 calculator. They are twice as expensive as that 2016 Kindle Fire is going to be. If in 2012 we can place a calculator on a school supply list, in 2016 we'll be placing a personal computing device--one that can take the place of that calculator and take the place of a textbook and take the place of an Internet research computer and a host of other devices--on that list.

This is the day we've been dreaming of, folks. The day when every child has access to a powerful personal computing device. The day when students and teachers can pull these devices out and use them in their classrooms as an integral part of having class. The day when the phrase "digital learning" disappears because it's become so embedded in instruction that it's just "learning." This is the day that we've been pining for and wishing for and imagining for years now. It's just beyond the horizon now, just a few years away. It's coming faster than we ever imagined it would.

And we're scared to death of it...

Over the next two days of the KySTE Conference there are going to be plenty of sessions, and many of them are going to be about this coming day in one way or the other. I hope they help prepare us for the coming tsunami. Because, to paraphrase what we said when we were kids playing hide and seek in the backyard, Ready or not, here it comes...



I can't see the video.

Windows 8: (Very) First Impressions

Last week Microsoft released a consumer Windows 8 preview. I downloaded it and installed it on one of the laptops here in my office.
Good news: Installation was very easy. Go here-- http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso --and download the ISO image and then burn to a DVD (You’ll need to select the option in your CD burning software to “Burn an image to a disc” or something like that). Then install. I set the thing to run overnight and came back in the morning and it was done. There are a couple of prompts at the beginning, but once the installation actually starts that aren’t any more.

 Bad News (or maybe not—maybe just “News”): Uh, it’s WAY different from Windows 7. I haven’t seen a change this big to Windows since the move from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. It makes the change from Office 2003 to Office 2007 (the Ribbon) look like NOTHING! Frankly, I was lost at first. I am finding my way around it a little bit, but my first impulse is that I hate it.

 I know Microsoft is trying to create an operating system that not only runs on your desktop computer but can also run on a cell phone or tablet as well—one operating system for all devices. But frankly, I don’t want a cell phone operating system on my desktop computer—the icons are too big and even the graphics are weird—everyone else is going for flashy, 3-d graphics, and this looks amazingly flat.

I seem to be at odds with the rest of the computer world, though. Over the weekend I read story after story after story about how favorably everyone was regarding Windows 8. I feel like quite the outsider. Maybe the issue is that I think most people are viewing Windows 8 as Microsoft's first serious foray into the tablet world, and they're looking at the operating system as a tablet OS or a cell phone OS. And looked at that way, the OS is fine. But as I said above, I have it installed on a laptop computer, and I'm looking at it as a PC operating system. And viewed in that way, I think it has the potential to be a terrible failure.

Maybe my opinion will change. I've spent less than an hour hands on with the operating system. Maybe time will cause me to fall in love with it. But for now my feeling, I guess, is that it isn't always best to try to be all things for all people.

Kindle Fire: 20 Essential Apps for Educators

There are a lot of people out there who have--for reasons I haven't been able to determine--real disdain for the Kindle Fire. My honest guess is that these people are Apple-lovers who are upset that the Kindle Fire isn't an iPad. Me? I love my Kindle Fire. It's my personally owned device, but I use it for both personal use and for work. And today I'd like to share with you my favorite apps for both personal use and in an educational settings.

In regards to the educational setting, I want to break the apps into three distinct categories: 1) Apps for Instructional Use, 2) Apps for Administrators, and 3) Apps for IT Technicians. Add in the personal apps that I think ANYONE could use, and there are a total of four categories I would place these apps in. Here they are, in order from most favorite to least favorite (I started to do the list in descending order as I thought it would build suspense, but I quickly realized that there were some lower rated apps that were extensions of more favorite apps, and it made more sense to go in this direction).

By the way, some of the apps below require "sideloading." That is, you won't find them in the Amazon App store, and you'll have to search through the web and find the installer files (with the extension .apk) before you'll be able to use them.

1. Exchange by Touchdown
USERS: Administrators and Technicians
PRICE: $19.95
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/NitroDesk-Inc-Exchange-By-TouchDown/dp/B004SKASNW/ref=sr_1_1?s=mobile-apps&ie=UTF8&qid=1330376514&sr=1-1
WHAT IT IS: Exchange by Touchdown is the only app in the Amazon App store I could find that has full support for a Microsoft Exchange environment. If you want to keep tabs on your Exchange email, including Contacts, Calendars, Tasks, and Notes, this piece of software is essential. In fact, if you're looking to purchase a Kindle Fire for work-related purposes as a public school teacher in the state of Kentucky, then factor the $19.95 for this product into the purchase price...because you're going to want it.

2. Evernote
USERS: Everybody!
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/Evernote-Corp/dp/B004LOMB2Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=mobile-apps&ie=UTF8&qid=1330614417&sr=1-1
WHAT IT IS: Evernote is a note taking application. It's not unique--there are lots of other note taking apps in the Amazon app store. What makes Evernote stand out, though, is 1) its feature set AND 2) it's omnipresence. First, it's feature set: Evernote "notes" include typed text, of course, but the Kindle Fire app includes some really advanced formatting features, too, such as the ability to bullet and number text, and boldface, italicize, and underline text. In fact, if you're too cheap to purchase on office suite app (See #6 below), you can user Evernote as a basic word processor.

But that's not all Evernote can do. In addition to typing information into an Evernote app, you can also add attachments to the note, including sound files and pictures (Alas, since the Kindle Fire doesn't have a camera nor a microphone, so you can't record audio or take pictures on the fly, though the app allows for that if Amazon ever includes that in Kindle Fire 2.0).

And then, as I mentioned, there's the omnipresence of Evernote. Every major platform (Windows, Apple OS, Android, iOS) has an Evernote application or software install. There's even an online version of Evernote if you sit down at a computer or tablet that doesn't have Evernote installed. And every note you take--whether online or on your Kindle Fire or on your computer--is saved in the cloud and synced onto every one of your Evernote installs. So you can write a note in a meeting on your Kindle Fire and it will be waiting for you on your desktop Evernote software when you get back to your office.

This app made number 2 on my list because--outside of Touchdown--it is the app I most often use for work.

3. Mobicip (beta)*
USERS: Instructional Use
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: http://content.mobicip.com/category/tags/android


(NOTE: See important update by CLICKING HERE!) 


WHAT IT IS: Mobicip is a web filtering and app blocking software for Android devices. It's the first product on this list that has to be "sideloaded." That is, you won't find it in the Amazon App store and you'll have to find the .APK file yourself to install it. But don't worry--the link above includes a link to the APK file.

I've already written an entire blog post about Mobicip, so rather than repeat that here, I'll just say that if you're planning to hand a Kindle Fire to a student then you'll need this app, and I'll send you to my prior post for more information.

4. Wif-Fi Analyzer
USERS: Technicians
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/farproc-Wi-Fi-Analyzer/dp/B004EBZX6W
WHAT IT IS: Wi-Fi Analyzer is a FANTASTIC tool for analyzing a school's Wi-Fi network. Not only can a user walk around the school and see the strengths of the various SSID's in the building, the user can also see the actual access points operating on that SSID (in my high school I can often see 8 or more access points at one time operating on the same SSID) and what channel they're operating on. It's an easy way to get lots of information about your wireless network.

5. Calorie Counter by myfitnesspal
USERS: Personal Use
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/Calorie-Counter-Diet-Tracker-MyFitnessPal/dp/B004H6WTJI
WHAT IT IS: I've kept a food journal on and off for most of my adult life (mostly because of genetically high cholesterol), and I've never found an easier way to do it than with this app. Users can search for specific brand name foods (Oreos or Quaker Instant Oats) or specific foods from restaurants (McDonald's French fries or the Bourbon Salmon from Friday's), and I've yet to find a food or a meal from a nationwide company that wasn't in the database. And if it isn't, you can create your own foods as well. There's also an option for adding exercise so you can track that as well, and like the Evernote application above, everything is saved in the cloud and available on other Calorie Counter apps or at the myfitnesspal.com website.

6. Documents to Go (or some other Office suite)
USERS: Everybody!
PRICE: $14.99
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/Documents-Go-Full-Version-Key/dp/B004SDSSFY
WHAT IT IS: Documents to Go is a Microsoft-Office compatible suite with a Word-like word processor, an Excel-like spreadsheet application, and a PowerPoint-like presentation application. There is a free version available in the App store, but it's view only.

Honestly, the Documents to Go app isn't necessarily any better than the other paid Office suites that are available in the Amazon App store. They're all about the same, with the the ability to create very basic files that can be modified on a computer later. I chose Documents to Go over an upgrade to QuickOffice, the app that comes pre-installed on the Kindle Fire, only because Documents to Go was one of the Amazon Free Apps of the Day.

7. Gemini App (or some other application management app)
USERS: Everybody!
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/SEASMIND-Gemini-App-Manager/dp/B004UT6RE0
WHAT IT IS: Gemini is an application management program that allows a user to 1) see what apps are currently running on the Kindle Fire, 2) see the amount of memory that those apps are using, and 4) kill any running apps that aren't desired. There are other apps like it in the Amazon App store (Advanced Task Killer being the other one that I'm most familiar with). Any will serve the purpose, but you're going to want to have at least one for those times when your battery seems to be draining for no reason and/or your Fire seems to be dragging for no reason.

8. Google Docs*
USERS: Everybody!
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.docs&hl=en
WHAT IT IS: For those people too cheap to fork out fifteen bucks for #6 above, they can download the Google Docs Android app and do at least some basic office-suite work using the Google Docs app. It's not nearly as feature-rich as the web version of Google Docs, but in a pinch it'll get the job done.

There's a huge catch here, though. Amazon intentionally left all Google applications out of the Amazon app store, and though users can browse the Android market on their Kindle Fire, they can't actually install apps to their Kindle from the Android store. In order to install Google Docs, you'll need to search the Internet for the Google Docs .apk file (which I've already done for you: Download it here--once the page loads, just scroll down and click the link underneath the barcode).

9. Gmail*
USERS: Everybody!
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.gm&hl=en
WHAT IT IS: The Android app for Gmail. It's preinstalled on most Android devices, but the Kindle Fire removes it. Yes, you can setup a Gmail account in the mail app included on the Fire, but I like the original Android app better. It looks more like the familiar web version of Gmail, and it pulls emails in more quickly than the Fire's built in mail app.

Like Google Docs above, you have to "sideload" it, but I've done the footwork and you can just visit this page from your Kindle Fire and download the file here.

10. Pandora
USERS: Personal Use
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/Pandora-Media/dp/B005V1N71W
WHAT IT IS: Does anybody really need me to describe this app? Pandora is the most popular Internet radio site in the world. It works great on the Kindle Fire. You'll want to have headphones or external speakers to connect your Fire to, though, because the speakers on the Fire are infamously weak.

11. USA Today
USERS: Personal Use, Instructional Use
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/USA-Today-24-Free-App/dp/B006PJ3UKC
WHAT IT IS: I am not a fan of the print edition of USA Today. It's always struck me as being written at about a third grade level, appropriate for fans of the Weekly Reader magazine. And with plenty of other free news apps in the Amazon market, you may wonder why, then, that I selected this one. The answer: because it's awesome. The number one thing that makes it awesome is that--unlike most apps--which are really just links to mobile versions of websites, this is an actual app. Yes, you have to be connected to the Internet to get the latest content, but once you've synced the latest content, whatever "section" of the paper you're in (Top Stories, Entertainment, Sports, etc.) will continue to be available once you go offline. That's right--if you're somewhere where there's no Wi-Fi signal, you can continue to read the section you were on the last time you WERE on the Internet.

12. Alarm Clock Extreme Free (or some other alarm app)
USERS: Everybody!
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dmobile-apps&field-keywords=alarm+clock+extreme+free
WHAT IT IS: Like numbers 6 and 7 above, this is really more of a You-Need-this-KIND-of-App more than it is You-Need-this-PARTICULAR-App. There are plenty of alarm clock apps for free in the Amazon app store. I settled on this one because (and this may sound stupid but it really does matter to me) the icon of the app actually looks like a clock so that I don't have to try to remember what it is that this app does, and because this app allows you to save multiple alarms and wake up to specific music on your Kindle Fire. But really, one alarm clock program is pretty much the same as all of the others.

13. ES File Explorer (or some other file explorer app)
USERS: Everybody!
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/EStrongs-Inc-ES-File-Explorer/dp/B004HN2FY0/ref=sr_1_1?s=mobile-apps&ie=UTF8&qid=1330704951&sr=1-1
WHAT IT IS: Ditto #12. ES File Explorer is an app that allows you to browse the folder contents of your Kindle Fire. You don't necessarily need THIS file explorer app--so long as you have SOME file explorer app. You'll need them for those occasions when you download a file to your Fire but can't find it, or when you need to delete some files quickly. This particular one works for me. Choose it or choose your own, but make sure you have one.

14. Wi-Fi File Explorer
USERS: Everybody!
PRICE: Free (or 99 cents for paid version)
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/Dooblou-WiFi-File-Explorer/dp/B004KA1YE2/ref=sr_1_1?s=mobile-apps&ie=UTF8&qid=1330705238&sr=1-1
WHAT IT IS: The Kindle Fire comes out of the box with a built in USB port for charging and for connecting to a computer so that you can transfer files. However, the Fire doesn't come with a standard USB cable, so if you DO want to transfer files from a computer to the Fire you need to go out and purchase one.

Unless you have this app...

Connect to Wi-Fi, open Wi-Fi File Explorer, and you're presented with a web address. Type that address into your computer's web browser and a web page will open up that lists all of the files on your Kindle Fire. You can browse, upload, and download files.

Some advanced features (such as bulk uploading and downloading) require the paid version, but if you need it, it's only 99 cents. Good luck finding a USB cable for that price.

15. Fing
USERS: Technicians
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/Overlook-Fing-Network-Tools/dp/B005VT42BS/ref=sr_1_1?s=mobile-apps&ie=UTF8&qid=1330706310&sr=1-1
WHAT IT IS: Fing is a network information tool. Ever wonder how many different devices are on your network? What their MAC addresses and IP addresses are? What operating system they're running? This app quickly scans your entire network and presents you with this information. And it learns as you use it, maintaining a database of devices on the network as time goes on, so that not only can you see who's ON your network, but who USED TO be on your network but no longer is.

16. Kenton County Library/Overdrive Media Console
USERS: Personal Use, Instructional Use
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/Boopsie-Inc-Kenton-County-Library/dp/B006RA152Y/ref=sr_1_1?s=mobile-apps&ie=UTF8&qid=1330706407&sr=1-1
WHAT IT IS: Okay, so maybe this app is only useful if you live in Kenton County, Kentucky. But wherever you live, it would be a good idea to search the Amazon app store to see if there is a library app for your local library. With the Kenton County Library app I can not only browse my local library catalog, see if I have any books due or fines to pay, but I can also--using an app called the Overdrive Media Console (instructions for downloading and installing this app are in the Kenton County Library app)--check out ebooks and audio books on my Kindle Fire and read them using the Overdrive Media reader. That's right--I can install and utilize a competitor to the built in Kindle reader, and get books and audio for free! It's an inferior reader compared to the Kindle Fire (though I do like that--in addition to tracking where I am in the book--the Overdrive reader also tracks where I am in the specific chapter I'm reading!), but it does work on the Fire.  Speaking of which...

17. Nook for Android*
USERS: Personal Use, Instructional Use
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: https://market.android.com/details?id=bn.ereader&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImJuLmVyZWFkZXIiXQ..
WHAT IT IS: ...I can also download the Barnes and Noble Nook reader and use it on the Kindle Fire. So if an ebook is cheaper on the Barnes and Noble device than it is on the Kindle device (99% of the time the prices are the same, and that 1% of the time when they're not it always seems to me that Amazon's prices are cheaper. But still...), you can purchase the book on your Kindle and read it in the Nook Color program.

As you might expect, the Nook Color app isn't available in the Amazon App store, so you'll have to sideload it, but again I've done the work for you. Just click this link.

18. PG Calculator Free (or some other calculator)
USERS: Everybody!
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/Piotr-Gridniew-PG-Calculator-Free/dp/B0052N5GLI
WHAT IT IS: Another app where you want to have one of these types of apps but don't have to necessarily choose this one. I like this one because, more than any other calculator app I tried (and I tried about 7 of them), this one looks like a real calculator. Plus, and again I know this silly but don't really care, the icon of the app is a calculator as well!

19. Skitch
USERS: Everybody!
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/Evernote-Corp-Skitch/dp/B005TBWN0K/ref=sr_1_1?s=mobile-apps&ie=UTF8&qid=1330707637&sr=1-1
WHAT IT IS: Skitch is a whiteboard drawing app. Yes, there are a number of those on the Amazon app store, but I like Skitch because it is designed by Evernote (See #2 above), and it integrates perfectly with it.

20. Stopwatch (or some other timing app)
USERS: Everybody!
PRICE: Free
MORE INFORMATION: http://www.amazon.com/coolcode-org-StopWatch/dp/B004X85GMC/ref=sr_1_1?s=mobile-apps&ie=UTF8&qid=1330707855&sr=1-1
WHAT IT IS: A free stopwatch program. It's about the same as any other stopwatch program, no better, no worse. Again, it's the icon that drew me to this one (and the positive reviews).

BONUS APPS

Okay, I couldn't narrow it down to just 20 apps. here are two more that at least deserve honorable mention.

21. Web Snapshots: Have a web page you want to either preserve or share? Open your browser to the web page and then open Web Snapshots. You can use the program to save whatever page you're on as a PDF file or export to Evernote or your email system or several other programs on your Kindle Fire.

22. Blogger*: I use Blogger quite a bit (THIS blog is a Blogger blog), and this app would rate higher if you could use it to edit any blog entry ever made in a Blogger blog. Alas, you can create new blog entries in the Blogger app, but you can only edit entries that you originally began with the app. Started a blog entry on the web? Sorry. You're out of luck. Otherwise, I'd be using this app all of the time. It's still a nice tool to have, though, if I need to make a blog entry and there's no computer around.