The 2012 ADE Institute

I've spent the past week at the 2012 Apple Distinguished Educator Institute in Cork. It's been a great week. The best thing I can say about it is that the Institute was run to the same quality and attention to detail that WWDC is. I might add, though, that the lunches were substantially better than they are at Moscone!

About 270 educators from all over the world got together at Fota Island hotel in Cork to spend the week networking, socialising and working together on various projects. It was a delight to meet so many new friends. Personally, it was the most relaxing conference I've been to in a long time and I think most of us here would agree. We are all the "tech person" for our local institutes and communities and coming together in a group where everyone is working at that level is both relaxing and stimulating at the same time.

In conversations, I started to get the sense of two early and new trends that I think are interesting.

The first trend is that we, as a group, are starting to get into some of the second-order effects of 1:1 programs using iPad. Deciding to use iPad is an important step, as is going 1:1. However, there are a few of us who, having made that move successfully, are asking "now what?". We're all exploring different avenues to answer that question. For some, it's about redesigning the school building or the school day. Others are getting into extremely high-quality content creation. Some ADEs are doing outstanding work in accessibility and mainstream inclusion for children with additional needs.

Personally, I'm looking to iTunes U. My project for the next three years is to lead a transition to using iTunes U across the whole of our school. Initially, we will adopt it for assignments and content distribution. Next year, as the new National 4/5 exams come in, we will be redesigning our courses on the assumption that this kind of technology is available to us. Further down the road, I hope to use iTunes U to expand the range of courses available to our students and, once that model is proven, make those courses available to schools across Scotland.

The second trend I picked up on was the continuing shift towards total student autonomy in IT. The shift to mobile is eliminating the need for dedicated computer space in schools. The shift to iOS is eliminating the need for dedicated server hardware, home directory infrastructures and backup systems. On iOS pupils can genuinely administer their own devices in a secure and stable fashion, eliminating a broad range of tech support oversight functions.

The final step is to eliminate the network. I had several conversations about the difficulty of scaling school networks beyond the 300-400 device range into the multiple thousands of devices in larger schools. Several people observed to me that mobile networks are designed to scale to those numbers without issue. The shift towards LTE cellular networking - which is typically faster than the broadband in a school - is starting to look like an interesting option for schools that cannot provision or scale their networks to multiple thousands of devices.

Imagine, in 5-7 years having gone from the complexity of laying ethernet in fixed locations in schools, building broadband, deploying servers and switches all over the school to the simplicity handing out an iPad and a SIM card and getting on with the learning.

In the UK, we are well positioned to take advantage of this. We don't have LTE networks yet but that's certainly going to come. We already have pre-paid iPad data SIM cards commonly available, which isn't true in every country around the world. For £20, I can buy 3GB of data transfer from Three and, when it's done or the card has expired, I just go buy another one. It would be great if we could get to a point where we can buy non-expiring SIM cards. If you think we can't afford this, consider one conversation I had this week where I learned that a friend's school pays more than £200,000 per year for IT services. I think we can find some fat to trim.

This is what I mean by second-order effects of 1:1 deployment: you can't afford a 1:1 on top of everything you already do, but we are starting to learn that there are a lot of things you can stop doing when you become a - I hesitate to use the phrase - post-digital school.

It will take leadership and it will take courage. We'll need help from the mobile phone carriers. We'll need help from local planners to get masts built. We'll need far stronger leadership from politicians than we've seen to date, but I have seen the next steps to the future of school IT. It lives in the minds of the outstanding people I met this week, and the many others who were not able to be here. That's what I'm taking home from ADE 2012.

The End of Not Knowing

I had a very curious flash of insight the other day. Not a revelation as such but one of those moments that happens a thousand times a week and just occasionally you see the right juxtaposition to make you realise what just happened.

I was driving my family to Glasgow. We came around a bend in the motorway and, slightly abruptly, met the tail end of a traffic queue. It was abrupt because there were no signs indicating any roadworks. When you meet a queue before you see the signs, you naturally start to think you're in for a bit of a wait. Everyone wants to know just how long.

The driver of the car in the lane next to me started edging his car towards the centre line, craning to peer down the queue and see how far off the obstruction was.

Without even really thinking about it, I slid open my iPhone that was mounted on the dashboard playing music. I fired up the TomTom app, picked my destination. In a couple of seconds, the phone beeped to show that the obstruction was 1.1 miles from my current position and that the delay to my journey would be approximately four minutes.

It's not that GPS navigation systems with live traffic data are particularly new; it was just the contrast between my experience and the frustrated, anxious driver in the next lane that made me think about this. It felt like I had a sixth sense: data.

Book Scanning

I mentioned this on Twitter a couple of times over the past week and it seemed to generate a fair amount of interest. I figured a blog post would clear things up.

A number of months ago, I bought myself a Canon P-150 scanner (Amazon.co.uk) for scanning letters, receipts and so on. I found it rather addictive in a weird sort of way and since then have progressively moved to being completely paperless.

Being Paperless

My paperless workflow isn't that complex, really. It's based on being an Evernote premium subscriber. I scan pieces of paper and I put it in a notebook. For business receipts, I have one notebook for each financial year and a notebook called "Personal Archive" where everything else goes. When I want something, I search for it. It's very Gmail-inspired, and the Gmail approach has worked well for me for years now.

ARCHIVE ALL THE THINGS!

Since I've been on this road, I realised that there's essentially no limit to the stuff I can archive in Evernote in case I ever need it again. It's out of sight and it's retrievable by search. Evernote is increasingly becoming the 'fourth service' behind Twitter, Facebook and Instapaper for apps to share to. Here are some other routes for data into my Evernote.

I already wrote in detail about my Web-to-Evernote workflow. I've been using Pocket recently instead of Instapaper but sharing to Evernote is also supported there, so the workflow still works.

PDFs that I download in Safari are just opened directly in Evernote.

When I'm on the go, I've come to rely on Readdle's Scanner Pro iPhone app. Scanner Pro can snap a piece of paper, correct the keystoning effect and send the document to Evernote in a few taps. It's how I get rid of paper on the go.

I like Podcasts and, while they're mostly ephemeral, occasionally there are ones that I'll want to keep. I use Instacast on my iPhone to subscribe and listen to podcasts. Instacast supports "Open In" as a mechanism to send the downloaded audio file elsewhere. Opening a large MP3 file in Evernote on iOS just about works. Occasionally, the app will freak out if the file is large. As awesome as Evernote search is, they can't yet index the audio inside an MP3 file. For podcasts, I'll also add the title and episode text to the body of the note.

You Can't Beat the Smell of New Bits

As you probably know if you're a regular reader of this blog, I'm the kind of person who likes to push ideas as far as they can go. So now, I'm thinking: "what if everything went into Evernote?". I'm a big fan of eBooks, having owned a Kindle for many years, so I started wondering whether I could use my scan-to-Evernote workflow to convert my paper books into eBooks.

My first test was with a copy of Ground Control by Anna Minton which, by virtue of a 1-click accident, I had two copies of. I used a Stanley knife to cut the pages out and feed them into the Canon scanner. That worked well enough but the Stanley knife made quite a ragged cut on the binding edge of the paper. As a result, the pages tended to catch on each other and mis-feed through the scanner. This led to the scan taking a while.

My next try was with a copy of Nicholas Negroponte's "Being Digital" (ironically not available on Kindle). This time, I used a modelling scalpel to cut the pages out of the book. This was much more successful in creating a clean cut down the spine of the book. In scanning "Being Digital", I ended up with about three mis-feeds in the entire book.

Because the Canon P-150 scanner is a multi-page feeder scanner that scans both sides in one pass, the process was painless to scan the entire stack of pages. It's not quite as simple as putting the book in the scanner and walking away - the hopper isn't big enough to take the whole book - but it didn't take that long to scan the book in batches of about 25 pages.

The result being that, armed with a £200 scanner, a scalpel and a steel rule, I can turn a book from paper to digital in about 20 minutes. That's a pretty cool capability.

It was not my intent to take a paper book and turn it into a functional ePub file. All I wanted to do was make my book portable and readable on my iPad alongside all my Kindle books. That kind of precision book scanning to extract usable text definitely requires more advanced OCR software than I have at my disposal. Unless the book is absolutely not available digitally, it would probably be a better use of time and money to just re-buy it as an eBook.

The resulting book file was around 40MB in size, scanned at 200dpi. I dropped it in Evernote and synced it to my devices, where I was able to open it in the Kindle app and read it.

I have also uploaded a couple of pages from the book to give you an idea of the quality. Download: Being Digital Sample PDF.

Thoughts on Apple's WWDC Announcements

So WWDC is once again upon us and a whole slew of announcements from Apple. I don't propose to go over every single point, but just to pick out a few highlights that interested me.

Mountain Lion

Obviously, a lot of Mountain Lion stuff was about bringing features or concepts again back to the Mac from iOS. Broadly speaking, I like this idea. The only part that particularly caught my eye for the classroom is AirPlay Mirroring for Macs. I know I've been banging on and on about AppleTV for a long time now, but Mountain Lion completes the AV story for Apple-based classrooms.

Farewell, cables and adapters. I won't miss you one bit. Think about it this way: if you save yourself the replacement cost of three lost adapters, you've paid for an AppleTV.

iOS 6

I thought the iOS 6 announcement contained a few interesting features for schools. At the same time, I don't think I've seen an iOS release yet that has been so nakedly aggressive towards Apple's competitors. If you move through the announcements, someone was in the firing line of just about every one:

• Maps: Google Maps
• Siri: Google search
• Facebook: Google+
• Passbook: Google Wallet

Are you starting to notice a pattern? I'm not a Google hater. In many ways, I rather wish that we could turn the clock back to 2007 and that 'merger without merging' that Eric Schmidt talked about with the integration of Google Maps on the original iPhone. Still, we are where we are and the current intense competition is certainly spurring some welcome innovations.

Siri on the iPad is an interesting one. Despite the hype, not many kids are carrying iPhone 4S hardware yet. Many kids are and will be carrying iPads with Siri enabled. Siri isn't great today but it is already useful. What does it look like in 5 years? In ten? How does the classroom work when you can ask Siri instead of a teacher? I have no idea, but that day is coming and I'm trying to figure out the answer before it arrives.

I need to look in more detail at the security arrangements but Shared Photo Streams may be incredibly useful in classroom situations. When teachers need to move images to students and back, this will beat the heck out of emailing photos. You go on a trip and want everyone to pool their photos for an exercise at the end? Bingo.

I'm extremely interested in Passbook, Apple's centralised ticket, loyalty card and boarding pass app. I keep chewing over how we could leverage something like this into a way for pupils to register themselves in school by scanning their "school pass" on their device. I haven't installed the beta yet but, unfortunately, it looks like Passbook isn't on the iPad - only the iPhone and iPod touch. I get why - it's a new technology and the pocket-sized devices are the 80% use case. In my opinion, though, that's a missed opportunity for some more creative uses.

I also thought that Passbook vs. Google Wallet was another interesting example of two different strategies. In Google's world, you need a phone with an NFC chip built in. There are only about five phones with the requisite hardware available: the Nexus, two LG phones and the Sprint Galaxy SIII. That's not a lot of units in the field. By contrast, Apple's strategy is to turn any pocket-sized device that can run iOS 5 into a payment token. That's a lot of devices already in the field that will become payment hubs overnight when iOS 6 ships. I don't feel qualified to say which approach is better from a security or commercial point of view but I thought it was reminiscent of the argument for building the software keyboard on the original iPhone: you can go back and add a feature when you think of it, instead of waiting for new hardware.

Finally, let's talk accessibility. Education got a few mentions in the keynote and making the curriculum accessible to children with additional needs is something that should concern us all. The Guided Access feature, which locks out certain areas of the screen, is going to be very useful for people working with children with any kind of attention issues or motor control problems. At the same time, the ability to lock out the home button will find several uses in kiosks, museums and other specific-use situations.

I do slightly worry, though, that some teachers will abuse the lockout feature to turn iPads into glorified single-purpose textbook devices. I hope not - but I have seen some crazy hacks on iPads in schools to add just this level of "control". Urgh.

The iPad 1

My main disappointment is that iOS 6 will not arrive on the iPad 1. I had factored this possibility into my thinking when we signed a 3-year lease on our current hardware. We are tied into our lease until summer 2013, when we will refresh all of our devices. What does that really mean?

Well, iOS 6 is due in the autumn - which probably means late September or early October. That's not a good time to do a big OS upgrade across the school. When iOS 5 came out around that time, I went ahead and did the update on our devices. That was a mistake. It took WAY too much time out of my diary at that point in the school year. This time around, I'd at least wait for Christmas to do the update. So we're probably looking at 6 or 8 months of working with iOS devices running the previous generation of software, depending on how you count it.

I do have one big concern, though: mismatch between teachers' software and pupils' versions of iWork. We see this happening when new versions of Pages and Keynote come out: teachers update their devices promptly and create documents. Those documents are sent to pupils who have the older version of Pages and they won't open.

Usually, you can solve this with a quick update on the device concerned. Now, though, we may find ourselves in the situation where the teachers have moved to iOS 6 and iWork version 1.7 and the kids are stuck on iOS 5 and the current iWork 1.6 apps - with no document compatibility. The solution, I guess, is to hold the teachers' versions back but eventually someone will hit "Update All" and there will be no way to roll back. I hope the iWork apps have matured to the point where cross-version file compatibility can be maintained, at least for a while.

These are the perils of being an early adopter, and I knew they were coming.

Cedars School of Excellence on iTunes U

I'm pleased to announce the humble beginnings of Cedars School of Excellence's iTunes U site.

The first three courses focus on specific activities you might wish to do on an iPad:

• Using iBooks and iTunes U
• Using Twitter and Flipboard
• Using Keynote

These courses are billed as professional development for teachers but we think they have a broader use. We realised that, when you do a 1:1 deployment, you may well be sending an iOS device into a home that doesn't know very much about iOS.

We wanted to create some brief materials that could be used to give parents and pupils support for activities done on iPad at home. Too often, we have failed to provide support for parents trying to help with ICT homework and these courses are a first step towards trying to fix that.

The courses are available worldwide and for free through iTunes U. I would love to hear any feedback you have on these courses and, if you find them useful, please rate and review them on iTunes U.