Blogging with the iTouch part 1

At an Apple event organised by the Sheffield College on 26 Nov 2009 and sponsored by http://www.krcs.co.uk, I was lucky enough to learn a lot more about using Macs generally (Dave Foster's session was particularly good. He's the manager of the Leeds West CLC) and some new things about the iTouch that I didn't know about as a newcomer to these devices.

Quite a few of my eCPD PDAs and MoLeNET projects are using or going to use iTouches so I thought I'd mention a couple of useful things here.

First of all, if you buy a small mic for your iTouch, you can use it as a voice recorder. Better still, set up an Audioboo.fm account and you can create podcasts on the fly. Here's my first audioboo: http://audioboo.fm/boos/92908-mic-for-itouch

The first mic I saw for the iTouch was the thumb tack-like mic at the Sheffield event: http://tinyurl.com/ybptuge

This is nice and small (and easily mistaken for a real thumb tack!) and works simply by inserting it in the headphone socket of the iTouch. However, the disadvantage is that you have to remove the mic in order to hear the recording (since you have inserted it in the headphone socket, the iTouch will try to play it back through the mic).

I went on Amazon.co.uk and bought this one instead: http://tinyurl.com/y8vcn9a

This is much bigger than the thumb tack so less aesthetically pleasing, but

allows you to simply record and then playback without having to remove it from the headphone socket. There is a slightly different model on Amazon and if anyone has any other models and experiences, it would be good to find out what you think to your mic for the iTouch.

The iTouch does not have a camera which makes it somewhat limited in capturing what you see. I learned to do a screen grab of the iTouch screen by clicking the on/off button at the top and the button below the screen at the same time. Whatever you are viewing at the time is then added to the camera roll and you can use the image in your blog or podcast. You can browse to a picture using Safari on the iTouch and screen capture it (ensure you are staying legal in terms of copyright, of course).

Other ways of getting photos to your iTouch without having to sync to iTunes would be to email pictures to yourself. Tap the picture in the email and a menu comes up with options to save your image.

Thanks to Dave Foster and James Clay for their ideas and introductions to the hardware/software.

Great social use of blog sites

I'd suggested to a tutor that they set up a blog site and give out the email to blog address to the learners so they could all add photos and reflections on one blog site. We're going to try this from Sept with a group so I'll update my blog later in the year with the outcomes of this.
I was chatting to some friends in a kitchen today and people are already using this function in their everyday lives: after a wedding, the bride and groom have given out a blog/photo site email address so that everyone can upload their photos of the event to one site for everyone else to look at. That's a great idea! And the fact that this is becoming everyday practice is all the more reason for us teachers to be adopting it in teaching, don't you think?

mippin.com - internet aggregator for mobiles

I've had a pda phone for about 2 years now. Used to have the MDA and now have the HTC Touch.

So far on my pda phone, I've installed Newsbreak, a rss reader so I can keep up with the likes of Andy Black and Dave Sugden on the go. I paid a little bit of money for this.
Just come across mippin.com, which seems like a nice free 'aggregator' for the mobile phone, bringing together news sites and blogs in one site. Kind of like igoogle for your phone. It seems to work better than Newsbreak because it shows me the full blog, whereas Newsbreak shows me the headlines and a short version of the blog. To read more, it then launches Internet Explorer and takes me to the site. Mippin will let me keep my preferred sites as favourites and formats them nicely for the pda screen. Seems like a nice function to me.

And it has a mipplet that adds my Twitter stream so it appears on my mippin page! Nice...