I was talking to someone today about their job and they told me that they were a web developer. Nothing remarkable about that. Only that they used to be a Flash web developer but now they’ve had to retrain to build stuff in HTML 5.0 because there are something like a tenth of the Flash jobs out there than there were a year or so ago.
The iPad really has killed Flash.
If only education content providers would realise this!
Back in 2010, when we were considering getting some Macs in school, one option we considered was getting a set of MacBooks for use by kids. As we already had some PC laptops which connected to the server via wifi, I thought we could do the same with some Macs. However, our reseller strongly advised putting in wired network connections if you are binding a Mac to an Active Directory as performance would be poor on wifi. I didn’t think much further about this as we ended up getting lots of iMacs instead, which all ran off wired Ethernet connections.
However, I recently tried adding a MacBook Pro to our domain, running it just on wifi, and this cautionary advice all came flooding back. Because we’re a big school, we make a lot of use of shared drives for saving work on. Working on a document off of a network drive requires a constant connection, which can become a little tiresome on wifi (particularly if the access point has a couple dozen iPads on it as well!). Having had enough of the spinning beach ball of death, I found a long network cable and plugged myself in.
Running documents off a server does feel a bit like living in the dark ages though. Admittedly, it is handy to be able to log onto any computer in the school and have all your document just there, but you do pay for it with a performance hit. Storage read and write is the last great bottle neck, which is why Apple is aggressively moving towards flash storage (Flash? We love flash!) wherever it can. The iCloud document model also makes a lot of sense: your documents live on your iPad/Mac/iPhone, but any changes are pushed to your other devices so that the same document is ready and waiting when you get there. That way you get the speed (and non-reliance on a permanent network connection) of a local document with the convenience of network storage.
In my music lesson today, we were listening to different songs about the environment (with classics such as Leave them a Flower and 3 Rs) in preparation for making a radio show. Children worked in pairs on iPads, listening to each track and deciding which ones they liked.
In previous years, I had got children to search for songs on the iTunes Music Store, but with the iPad I instead just emailed a list of iTunes URLs to each iPad. I was expecting this to open up in the ‘iTunes’ app, but instead it opened up a preview panel within the Mail app and allowed children to listen to a good minute and a half of each song.
Emailing URLs is a very low-fi way of guiding children to different web resources, but it’s remarkably simple and easy! The only problem is when one child deletes the email, but this is easily fixed by fishing around in the trash.
Primary ICT 