Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Are screen shots and voice recordings in the typical student's arsenal?

When you have a new toy you play with it. That's what I've been doing with my iPad. Yesterday I put on the Kindle software - very nice except the periodicals don't come through, only the books.

Today I've tried Evernote. On the PC, I'd rather use Posterous, which does everything Evernote does and more. But on the iPad, getting the audio recordings out has proved a bit of a trick. Images are doable as email attachments but audio either is impossible or can be done but file size is limited or needs some special sync tool as in the case of iTalk. So Evernote seems like a cool alternative, though the voice quality is not quite as good.

Will students use these sort of apps in a rich way? It doesn't seem that they will do so of their own accord. Last fall when I had students blog it was a struggle just to get them to put in links into their posts. Yet when they did multimedia projects, they were quite expert with image use (at least most were) but in ordinary function they ignored images or only very rarely used them.

I wonder how many students know about Jing or about Audacity.

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