Tuesday 3-8-11

New apps today
Printopia – Install on a computer connected to the server and it becomes the host computer to allow the iPads access to printers on the network.

A student came in early this morning asking for help printing a document from his iPad. Firstly I was excited that he had completed his English assignment using the Pages app (Apple), secondly I was not sure why his paper would not print. Earlier we had set up Printopia on a computer in my classroom. This would allow the iPads to see the printers on the server here at school. Interestingly, all were appearing but no printing was occurring. I found the simple solution – the network cable had come loose from the rear of the computer. In the process however, I found that the in addition to printing to the various printers options were available to print to the computer or print to the dropbox of the computer that had Printopia on it. We printed to both and amazing, within seconds the preview window was up on the computer showing the paper as well as a “Printopia folder” within the dropbox folder with the paper in it (Dropbox the app not the Whipple Hill drop box). There will be a definite use here until we get the students emails up and running.
The class today had roughly half the students absent so we decided to tape the class and put it on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPuFoixRl_k). This was an experiment as you might be able to see that there is too much of me and not enough of the lesson. It also is somewhat hard not to be aware of the presence of a camera.
The lesson itself was planned and went well with the students doing an excellent job of taking notes. I have begun to place some additional space at the end of the slides that they download at the end of the class so that the homework can be completed there. With what I learned this morning, we sent some files to the computer and others to the dropbox. We did learn that we need to properly title the exported document because they all show up with the same file name. I will have to figure out if the files can be renamed. Like any time that we try something new it caused some delay and can be frustrating.