geek.teacher

Here’s the presentation that Greg Kulowiec and I put together for our MassCUE presentation this afternoon.

If the embed below doesn’t work, try this link here.

My first presentation of the day at MassCUE is An App a Minute, in which I present 50 apps in rapid-fire succession. It’s a presentation for people who need an idea of where to get started with purchasing apps for iPads in schools or for children at home.

If I time this right, this post should be going live right around the end of my presentation time. I shared my app list this time around using Pinterest, so go check it out.

I’ve got a couple of speaking/organizing events coming up soon that I figured I’d mention here:

1. This week I’ll be at MassCUE annual conference on both Wednesday and Thursday. On Thursday I’ll be presenting two sessions. The first session will be me flying solo doing An App a Minute, in which I try to share 50 iPad apps in 50 minutes. Think one man iPad smackdown. The second session will be a joint session with Greg Kulowiec on Do It Yourself PD, a topic on which I think I’m somewhat knowledgeable. If either of those sounds like your bag and you’ll learn something, I’ll be hanging out in Theater B Thursday afternoon.
2. I’m very excited to work with the Coalition of Essential Schools to run a half-day unconference at their annual Fall Forum. We will, of course, be following Edcamp format. It’s not an Edcamp proper, but it’s looking like the closest thing you’ll get in New England in the next few months. The unconference thing is great and all, and it might be nice to see me, but there’s some serious heavy hitters speaking at this thing, most notably Alfie Kohn and Deborah Meier.

Assuming I don’t crash and burn this week, I’ll probably throw in a conversation idea or two for EduCon while I’m at it.

I’ve had the good fortune to play with the latest release of iOS for the past few days, and I have only good things to report back. Even if you’re keeping your current device and not anticipating a new iPhone this week, iOS5 makes your current iPhone a better phone. Here’s the things that I’m really liking so far:

• Better battery life. My iPhone 3GS is definitely feeling it’s almost two and a half years of life in the battery department. Unlike when I first got it, I need to charge it every single day without fail, and it’s frequently been near death by the time I get home from work. Since I switched to iOS5, I’ve had a little more juice at the end of the day.

• iCloud. Everything on my phone backs up over the air and just works? Yes please. I had constant problems trying to get over the air calendar syncing to work with my Google Calendar, but everything works fast and flawlessly over iCloud. If I need to restore my phone, I don’t need to be at my home computer any more, since it all backs up to the cloud. Apps that store things in iCloud are starting to drop now. GoodReader updated today, and Apple’s apps are updating tomorrow. Expect an avalanche of updates over the next couple weeks.
• Wireless syncing. If you’re still storing stuff on your computer, you can now have the iDevice in question sync over wifi. This feature will be hugely useful for classroom teachers with small classroom sets of devices (2-5 devices, say).
• Twitter integration. Easy sharing to Twitter from any app. Of course I’m going to like that.

• Notification Center. I always hated how notifications took over my screen in iOS. Now they don’t, they sit nicely and wait for me to act on them.
• iMessages. Thanks to my school building and my wife’s hospital both being built as bomb shelters, we get terrible cell phone reception at work. Now we send texts through Apple, so they work over WiFi. Bonus: No need for me to upgrade my texting plan any time soon.