Today as I ventured towards Droidville I met a sage who reminded me about some useful keystokes.
Eclipse: Control Alt Down duplicates line
Emulator: Rotate screen – Control F11
As I moved closer to Droidville the air began to fill with hope, thousands of hopeful children and teachers poored into the streets, so I quickly hid and jumped into Bar Youtube (Part of the Starbucks chain) and watched another video to further my understanding of the power of Android, another good one this time by Ye old O’Reilly
Building my team to fight the forces of evil
I got in touch with a developer through rent-a-coder called Kumar Bibek who has 3 years experience fighting the forces of evil (developing Android apps). We had a conversation that went something line: “I can make the bow, can ye make the arrow?” We agree’d on 100$ for the array (final bits of the work that were out of my skill set).
Overview of the bits I’m doing:
Making Classdroid look fit for a princess (Layout design/User interfaces)
Making Classdroid easy to use (Application flow)
Making Classdroid link together (Intent assignments)
Designing how Classdroid will save our princesses minions (Database design)
Overview of the bits he’s doing:
Not shooting the messenger (Code to read/write preferences/settings to/from SQLite)
Carrier Pigeon nurturing (Control method for post to WordPress)
Controlling the Eye of Gondor (Camera SDK modifications)
In the Sage’s library I found a piece of parchment with some notes scribbled on it:
Resource = text,pictures, sound objects, layout….
Intent = change the page
View = new page layout/display
\n = newline when using text elements
Very cryptic clues, maybe I will need them to enter the great hall of Droidville?
It’s been a long day…..
As the day drew to a close and the Sun nestled the hills of Azrowilsden I discovered WordPress have an android application that does 80% of what I want to do from a control point of view so I’m going to hack into that to save me needing to write the function that posts the RPC over XML to WordPress. This is why the world should embrace more open source, it empowers us all instead of dumbing us down like iLem users who are too scared to google how to create an android application (or don’t see it being a valuable use of their time).
As the iLem users fall off their platform I am gently warmed inside by the knowledge that we are creating a better, more open world without any corporate borders. One application at a time.
Today I started on my journey towards Droidville, past the gargoyles of SDKs and into the realm of eclipse. I began my journey equiping myself with the finest weapons possible in the form of eclipse and android sdk including all the power ups and runes. I stopped for lunch at bar youtube where I indulged in an excellent documentary and began my developing whilst following the gentle, slightly distant voice of the presenter. “Whisper control shift oh! to the sage and ye be blessed with organized imports” I heard him mutter under his breath..
Hours went by and the youtube video was stopped, rewound and replayed various times, as the sun set I had my Hello world working and some UIs designed, unfortunatly my Hello World app is called com.golf.. The icon is set. If this is groundhog day let it end…
Flute playing and shots of rolling hills come into screen..
Making my Google Teacher Academy Application video only took about 30 minutes. The thing that took the longest was deciding what I was going to talk about. My recommendation to you is just to talk about something you are passionate about and not to try to think about what other people would want to hear. If you are thinking about applying I strongly recommend you put a little time aside to create a presentation because when you do it will make you think ab0ut a) what you are passionate about and b) it will make it easier for people to understand what you are passionate about. This was an unexpected outcome from doing my video and it has proved to be massively useful.
How I picked my topic
Initially I was going to do a high and mighty review about using ICT in an innovative way in the classroom, this just seemed too vague with a whitewash of buzz words and sales schpeil. I decided to do a presentation on something I think could affect education in the future and is slightly fringe and creative. Admittedly I spent hours looking at the brief by Google dissecting it and thinking about how I could make the perfect presentation. Ultimately I figured presenting something I am passionate about would come across better. I wrote my script and saved that to PrimaryPad, a few people jumped onto the Pad and modified all the incoherent bits so I was using simple language in my presentation.
Creating the presentation
I used Microsoft Powerpoint to create the presentation slides, I wanted to keep things simple and as text free as possible. All of the images I used were Creative Commons and found through various creative commons image search websites such as flickr.
Recording the video and audio
I used a flip video camera to record the video and a Samson USB microphone. I put the flip video camera on a box and stood in front of a white wall. I recorded the video through the day to make sure there was some natural lighting.
Making the video
I exported each of the slides from Powerpoint to a .PNG file and then imported those files into Camtasia Studio. I dragged the video and audio that I recorded on the flip camera and the Samsun microphone into Camtasia Studio. Once I had the audio, video and slides into the program I synced up the audio, chopped out all my out takes(about 80% of the content was useless) then and added a few transitions. I normalized the audio and shrunk the video from the camera into a corner. Finally I added a few transitions then exported the project to WMV which I then uploaded to Youtube.
Tools used:
PrimaryPad
Powerpoint (no shame here) – There are lots of alternatives I could of used.
Microsoft have released Office Web Apps 2010, this is big news for Primary Schools. Continue reading to find out why…
Price
Office Web Apps is completely free, you don’t need to buy into Microsoft Office or pay any registration free. In fact you can start using it right now by visiting Microsoft Office Live.
Documents are stored online
When you work on an office web app all of your documents are stored on Microsoft’s Skydrive. This means that even if your local computer crashes you won’t lose any documents. By storing files online you can also access them from anywhere with an internet connection and easily share and collaborate with other people. Of course the collaboration isn’t as great as PrimaryPad as it is only sentence by sentence and not really-real time 😛
No download or purchase required
Because Office web apps 2010 are completely online you don’t need to download, install or configure anything before you get started. Watch the video below to get an idea of how simple it is to use. For advanced editor features you will have to purchase Office 2010
Management with Live @ Edu
Live @ Edu is a service available for your primary school that allows you to have a management portal that manages the configuration of Microsoft Office Web Apps for your school. Live @ Edu offers a lot more than this but essentially if you think of it being a way to customize a pupil or teachers experience of using one of the Microsoft Office Web Apps tools then you can’t go far wrong!
Limitations
With Web Apps being relatively new (although in Beta for a long time at Microsoft) there are some obvious limitations:
Difficult to wrap text around images
Impossible to send content straight from a school MIS to the Web Apps.
I strongly recommend signing into your hotmail/live account and clicking the Office button and having a play. Only you will know how your school uses Office applications so only you can say what is a limitation for you. If you do find any please post them as a comment!
Summary
With office 2010 being familiar to schools and a very few barriers to uptake I can see this perfectly complimenting the work we are doing in Bradford, I look forward to deploying Live@Edu and think that the impact of extending learning should be easily measurable from an assessment point of view. The conservatives want to focus on the basics, what better way to focus on the basics than by delivering them anywhere, any time?
Have you had a chance to play with it yet? Is it too limiting for you? Do you believe we should be blogging/emailing instead of word processing?
