School folder on the iPhone

I purchased an iPhone not long ago. I had not used a mobile phone for about eighteen months prior to that. I passed my previous mobile phone to my wife when her mobile phone bit the dust. I did not particularly miss my mobile phone. I managed to survive. It is possible.

I had my eye on an iPhone for some time and I finally decided last Christmas to bite the bullet and obtain one. I have added a number of apps to the phone during the last few months. The most useful have been NetNewsWire, Air Sharing, Tweetie, Remote, ……..

I have utilised Air Sharing to back-up all my school related documents. The folders on the iPhone replicate those on my Mac I use at home and the Mac I utilise at school. I prefer to use my MacBook Pro and I would lug it from home to school and back each day. They are not as light as Apple would have you believe.

I recently performed a clean re-install of Mac OSX on the 12″ MacBook G4 I use at school. That laptop is supplied to me by the school. Good, eh? It is three or so years old now and it is still an excellent machine. I have Leopard installed on it and it works like a charm. I have always felt that the 12″ MacBook G4 was an elegant piece of engineering. I have kept it quite lean in terms of installed applications. I only have the apps that I really need on a daily basis at school. I have also backed up all my school related documents on that laptop as well.

So, in short my school based files, all 1.94 gigabytes, are replicated on three different devices that I use regularly (in addition to an external hard drive):

1. MacBook Pro 15″ (Home)
2. MacBook G4 12″ (Work)
3. iPhone (Anywhere)

Yesterday I did a little research in order to see if I could find an Automator script that would allow me to sync all three devices at the end of each day. Ideally I would like a scripted ‘drop box’ type set up which automatically syncs files on the fly. It is still early days yet I managed to find a simple automated action appropriately titled ‘Sync Folders‘. I imported it into Automator and then exported it as a self contained app or ‘droplet’ if you like. I named the droplet ’sync’.

Aliases or shortcuts on the desktop

I have created a folder on each Mac and the iPhone named ‘Files Transfer’. I simply save any new files into that folder on the Mac that I am using at that point in time. Later I shift the files to their appropriate destination within the school documents folders. I created aliases, or shortcuts, to the transfer folders and the sync app on the desktop of each computer. All I need do is select and drag the folders to the sync app and the contents of the respective ‘transfer’ folders on the Mac and the iPhone are synced. I perform the process at school and then repeat the same process when I return home. And vice versa. It is easy and fast.

File Transfer folder on the iPhone

What is the net effect of all that? I no longer lug any laptop to and from school. All I need is the iPhone. Simple. Sure, it is a bit of a pose. But, what the hell? I prefer to travel light. I think that makes me a geek.

I know I could use a thumbdrive and achieve the same result yet the impact is simply not the same. Gotta go geek.

I travel to school each day as part of a car pool. I share the travel with two colleagues. They often commented on the heavy backpack I carried to and from school each day. You can read about our adventures here and even see photographs of we three scaling massive mountains and traversing threatening cliffs, Ripping Yarns style.

Well, while I am waiting for my colleagues either in the morning or the afternoon I can catch up with my various feeds. I use the NetNewsWire client on my Mac most of the time. The feeds are synced to my NewsGator account and thence to the NetNewsWire app on my iPhone. If there is a post I would like to investigate further I can add it to my ‘Clippings’ and the next time I launch NetNewsWire on the Mac there they are. All is synced. Beautiful. Geek.

Then there is Tweetie. I have used it to microblog in 140 characters or less from various locations and even to post a photograph easily accessible from my Twitter feed. Geek.

When I am at home I can use Remote to manage my iTunes playlists on my MacBook Pro. I have my stereo linked to the wireless network at home via AirTunes and now I can sit outside, barbecuing, or drinking a beer, and change the song or playlist without having to go back inside the home. Geek.

As a complement to my Air Sharing experiment I have started making use of a DropBox account I opened 6 months ago. I will begin dropping files on DropBox in the future. I am not sure how it will handle the proxy at school. DropBox gives you 2 gbyte of space free. Quite good. The client interface on the Mac is very nice. It adds an elegant icon and menu to the menubar.

DropBox opens in Safari on the iPhone. It has a dedicated mobile interface. When you open DropBox for the first time on the iPhone do as I do. Select the “+” button at the foot of the Safari iPhone screen and select “Add To Home Screen” to place a DropBox icon amongst your apps on the iPhone. I do that with all of the mobile friendly sites that I access on the phone. DropBox also has a partially user friendly mobile interface. The top level is user friendly. The subsequent levels are not. As well, you have no options when you access a file. It would be convenient if you could email a selected file to an individual for example. More on DropBox in the future.

Last Thursday myself and a few colleagues gathered together for a lunchtime sharing of techie tools and ideas. I was in and out of the meeting as I took some photographs of events around the school. This meeting was attended by Peter, Frank, Marion, Michelle, Steve and myself. We were also joined by our two guest teachers from Koshigaya Minami Senior High School in Japan ~ Mitsuyo and Tatsuo.

Mitsuyo and Tatsuo at Bulli Beach

I opened the proceedings with a demo of Posterous. I showed how it is capable of creating rich multimedia blog posts with elegant galleries, embedded video and podcasts ~ all via email.

Frank was impressed enough to publish his students’ Comic Life projects using Posterous. The students’ geography projects can be viewed here. As I have mentioned elsewhere this elegant publishing tool is improving by the day.

Frank shared KeepVid with the group. This site allows you to download streamed video clips from sites such as YouTube. You simply paste the web address or url of the clip in the url download field.

It searches available download links providing the user with links to flv or mp4 file downloads. Click on the download link to commence the operation. This is a useful site. Cross platform. I still prefer Tooble.

Peter shared an alternative to Apple with respect to publishing your photographs in a coffee table book. Viovio allows you to publish coffee table photo books by submitting a pdf file of the ‘book’ created in another tool such as iPhoto. It costs significantly lower than other providers of such services. Peter has just ordered a book. Stay posted for a review of the product when it arrives.

Had a great lunch today as once again staff gathered together to share their tips and tools. It has been a fortnight since our first get together. Today a variety of tools were shared… from SnapNDrag to Time Machine. From GarageBand to Wikis. There was a nice roll up of staff keen to check out new ideas. There was Lynda, Louise, David, Marion, Michelle, Clare, Steve, Peter, Wayne, Frank, Maria, Judy, Wayne and myself.

Today we were joined by Maria, Clare and Frank

David showed how incredible GarageBand can be for creating music tracks. Imports, edits and quick mixes were ably demonstrated by David. This worksheet for creating podcasts in Garageband will provide some good ideas regarding use of the tool. David pointed out how useful GarageBand was in the teaching of music and languages for example. Frank also indicated the value of GarageBand for recording and editing speeches given by students.

GarageBand

David also took the opportunity to show a tool that teachers would find useful if they ever need to de-stress a little. Goodness knows teachers need to chill out from time to time. Anyway, the site is Brain Train. There are a variety of activities that can give your brain a bit of a workout and take your mind of matters for a moment. Yes!

Brain Train

Lynda shared two of the most interesting features of the Mac OSX Leopard operating system… Spaces and Time Machine.

Spaces allows you to run multiple desktops so that you can spread out your running applications, files and documents across several screens. It allows you to have an uncluttered desktop. A simple keyboard shortcut will take you from one screen to the next. You may have a browser running in one space, image processing apps in a second space, word documents in a third space and iTunes in a fourth space. There is a good demo of Spaces by David Sparks of MacSparky fame on YouTube. David has quite a few Mac “How To” videos on his macsparydotcom YouTube page.

Spaces

Time Machine is way overdue on the Mac. It is like Restore in the Windows environment. You can schedule backups of your data to an external hard drive. Time Machine has an excellent interface that allows you to track back in time to a particular back up date and restore your data as you wish.

Time Machine

Louise shared SnapNDrag with the group. This is an excellent screen capture tool for the Mac that allows you to programme your screen grabs. You can name the cpatures on the fly, alter the file type output and retreive captures made earlier. Very versatile.

SnapNDrag

Coincidentally, another collague, Kevin, shared a nifty little screen grab tool called SharpShooter that allows you to name your screen grabs on the fly. I like it! Louise also mentioned an excellent screen capture tool from the wonderful team that created Comic Life. It is called Skitch! Check it out

David raised a question about creating “How To” documents with labelled images that include arrows and the like. I mentioned how I like to use Comic Life to create How To documents like this one. Wayne added that he uses the clip art and symbols and in Microsoft office to create his documents. Lynda mentioned that she uses Keynote to create her how to documents. Interesting. That needs checking out.

Comic Life

I shared Wikispaces with the group and also shared some excellent wikis created by eduactors around the globe including:

Moving Forward
Mobile Technology In TAFE
Be an eduBlogger
Collaborative Learning
Mister Mak’s Learning Wiki
School 2.0
Web 2.0 Tutorial

Wikispace Example

There was one interesting observation… as we connected our Mac laptops to the projector VGA cable we utilsed at least three different dongles depending on the model Mac that we used. Apple, please get your act together and design a standard fitting.

Once again, a great lunch was had by all. Stay tuned for our next gathering or simply subscribe to this blog via email or through an RSS feed.

How did I create this blog post? This blog post was created using Wordpress. The web browser was Flock. The images were captured using SharpShooter and processed using Adobe Photoshop Elements. The images were uploaded to my web host, ICDSoft, using CyberDuck. The digital photographs were taken with a Casio EX-760 digital camera that resides in my pocket. The digital photographs were uploaded to my MacBook Pro using a MobileGear USB 2.0 card reader.

Recently a group of teachers at my school met together during lunch to exchange technology tips and tools. The meet-up had its genesis couple of weeks back with a thought that I felt it would be good to team up with like-minded and positive thinking individuals and share ideas.

To be honest I have not been firing on all six cylinders in a spiritual sense of late and I needed perking up so instead of sitting there in the mud I felt why not create an opportunity for a group of positive and forward thinking individuals to get together and share ideas. That is certainly the best cure for the blues I know. Surround oneself with happy people. Fair enough?

I mentioned this idea after school one day to our Learning Technology Coordinator, Lynda, and an email went out to the staff inviting interested parties to attend our first lunchtime meeting. It happened just over a week ago. I have been buried in marking since then and this is the first chance I have had to sit down and clearly document that first get together

We met in Room 27, a Macintosh Computer Lab that is affectionately known as the “Cage”. In addition to myself there were 11 other staff members present: Lynda, Louise, Peter, Judy, Marion, Melanie, Michelle, Chris, Sandra, David and Steve. Teachers, librarians, support staff and administrators.

It is an informal group and the idea is simply to demonstrate tips and tools and to exchange notes. The emphasis is on sharing. At our first meeting Lynda got the ball rolling by sharing Mindmeister with the group.

Lynda demonstrated how this online mind mapping tool could allow students and teachers to collaborate on mindmaps. As its own blurb points out, “users can create, manage and share mind maps online and access them anytime, from anywhere. In brainstorming mode, fellow MindMeisters from around the world (or just in different rooms) can simultaneously work on the same mind map - and see each other’s changes as they happen. Using integrated Skype calls, they can throw around new ideas and put them down on ‘paper’ at the same time.” It looks quite neat. Need to investigate that Skype interaction.

Lynda followed this with a quick demo of Vixy.net. This service allows you to download YouTube videos reasonably easily. As the home page states, “it converts FLV to MPEG4 faster and less lossy than a typical transcoder“. David asked a question about conversion formats and we shared ideas regarding mp4, move and other video formats.

I mentioned Tooble with the team as well. It is a neat client side software tool that allows you to search YouTube and perform multiple downloads of selected YouTube videos. Mac or Windows.

Following Lynda I gave a demo of CompFight, an unusually named online tool that allows you to search the Flickr image database rather easily.

I entered the terms Thera and archaeology into the search field and eighty nine excellent thumbnail images appeared. All were relevant to the current topic that I am teaching to Year Eleven Ancient History. The tool has a safe search mode.

After that I demonstrated Google Reader and indicated how it allows the web to come to me rather than I reaching out to the web for news, ideas and tools. I illustrated some of the advantages of subscribing to blogs, del.icio.us links, flickr feeds, news media feeds and other sources.

Then, Peter took the stage and gave an inspiring demonstration of the Photo Book feature within the Apple Mac app, iPhoto.

Peter has created some excellent ‘coffee table’ books illustrating the travels of his family and important events in the lives of his children. It is an excellent facility. Peter showed how one can employ the Autoflow setting to create the book, utilise templates and add text.

There was some spare time and I showed the group how I had set up a Mac 7.0.1 emulator on my MacBook Pro currently running Mac OS 10.5.2. Running the emulator is like stepping back in time 18 years. The software used is Mini vMac. It runs off a thumb drive.

We all enjoyed a nice meal of pizza, drinks and even a caramel mud cake. Lynda organised the food and drinks. Legendary Lynda! It was an excellent way to spend lunch. It may have been a cold and gloomy wintry day outside but within that room there was considerable collegial warmth and we all had a thoroughly good time. As I took a few photographs, with Peter’s help, I remarked on how excellent I felt the get together had been. We all had a great time.

Lynda wants to call us the Geek Group. I would like to call it, with a wry smile on my face, the Advanced Technology Group. Any suggestions?

Stay tuned for updates on following get-togethers.

How did I create this blog post? This blog post was created using Wordpress. The web browser was Flock. The images were processed using Adobe Photoshop Elements. The images were uploaded to my web host, ICDSoft, using CyberDuck. The digital photographs were taken with a Casio EX-760 digital camera that resides in my pocket. The digital images were uploaded to my MacBook Pro using a MobileGear USB 2.0 card reader.