Day 4 - Audio, Searching, & eMail

Our accreditation self-study blog (A-R)

I needed to clone a blog today... Long story - a Blogger blog can only have 100 authors. We have 120 faculty members. Added teachers whose last name begins with A-R to the original blog. Needed a clone blog for teachers whose last name starts with S-Z.  Now there's something that requires a computer (and a lot of patience!). I'll be honest, I didn't even try it on the iPad version of Blogger. I worked on it at school yesterday (on a Windows machine), was successful after some time, but cloned it to the wrong Google account (I HATE it when I do that!), went home to fix it, and realized that the .xml files don't play nice on Mac. Went back to school, found a bug in the cloning process that took me way too long to sort out. It's done now. Needless to say, I "cheated" for the first chunk of the day. I've been working with our esteemed music tech teacher, Anna Mase, to commission a student to write a catchy little jingle for the CECA/CASL conference next year. She sent me Jake, who wanted a hint as to what I was looking for. I told him I really liked the jingle for the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Of course, Jake had never heard of the Brian Lehrer show. It's not so easy to find the tune online. So I told Jake to come by at 10 and we'd listen to it live on air together. When Jake didn't arrive a ten sharp, I downloaded the app to the station, streamed it live, and recorded a snippet of the jingle on my iPhone. I could have done that on my computer, but it was easier on my iPad. Still working with Anna Mase on another project. We need a song for our school's learning expectations - a catchy music video that will help all members of the learning community remember them, be able to recite them and incorporate them into their personal learning culture. We met with the student who is leading the project, Chris. We went over the nchsneasc13.info website, the blog (above), our Core Values and Beliefs (CBV) statement, and our learning expectations. They wanted shared notes from our meeting which included the CVB statement and expectations. I had sidelined a project of making posters of this for every classroom (I am co-chairing our accreditation self-study). Two birds; One stone: I decided to make the poster and in Google Docs, on the iPad. I gave up quickly, moved to a computer, and ultimately to Word. When I liked what I had, I exported it to GDocs, added the notes, shared it with Chris and Anna, and cloned a note-less version for the poster. In short: not easier on the iPad. I could have tried it in BE Write HD, but uploading it to Google Docs would have been a problem, as I have it synced with my personal Google account, and switching isn't so easy. Pages...well...not impressed. If you are typing a document, fine. But fine-tuning formatting is much harder. With great ease, I located and emailed an article to our Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and instruction (she needed it in a hurry, and it took no more time on the ipad than on a computer). Yay! Also needed to set up trials for LexisNexis and CQ Researcher. Did both on different browsers - can't even remember which ones I used. I couldn't tell the difference. That was smooth. Tried to upload a post to edWeb.net - just a quick link to a survey. No luck there. No hyperlink option available, and when I just embedded the URL in the text, it was kicked out when I uploaded the post.

I sent an email from the wrong address. On a computer, I can change the sending address from a GMail account (once it is configured to do that). That is not an option in either the Google browser or the GMail app. One other difference between the Google Browser and Gmail app - in Google, you can toggle between accounts, whereas you cannot in GMail. I downloaded Photoshop Express. We'll see what that's like next week. I'd like to try to make a logo or symbol for this blog, and I guess I am going to have to do it on the iPad. I tried once again to copy and paster cells from a spreadsheet. I used Numbers, GoDocs, Google, and CloudOn (new free Windows cloud product for iPad) to no avail. It is simply impossible to manipulate spreadsheets on an ipad. Maybe I will try graphing next week. There is no spell check on BE Write HD. UGH! Apps acquired:

• CloudOn
• WSHU
• WNYC
• Adobe Photoshop
• BlogPress