One of the ways that working in education is different from almost any other industries is the annual summer break. The summer break let’s schools and districts tackle large projects in ways that simply aren’t possible in other fields. Deploying a brand-new network, building an expansion, and taking part in professional development programs are just a few examples.

With the end of the school year, Apple is taking the opportunity to remind schools and educators about a free professional development program that it’s offering. Called the Tune In Series, the program is a series of webcast events covering the iPad and many of the technologies that Apple introduced during its education event in January. The series is running every week through the end of August.

“You can’t take it with you.” This is a saying usually uttered by those people who are bitterly jealous of their richer friends' and relatives' success. It refers to the fact that your money is no good when you’re dead.

But it could equally apply to many external battery packs for the iPhone, which you can’t take with you because they’re too big, and you’re not carrying a bag.

Enter the Gum, a tiny 2200mAH battery pack which fits in your pocket, and while it won’t help you in the afterlife, it will help you where it counts: in the actual real world of too-short battery life.

First thing’s first: this report is as sketchy as it comes, and probably has no validity whatsoever. We still think the theory being presented, though, is interesting enough to discuss.With that out of the way, a Chinese newspaper is claiming that Apple will launch a new iPad later this summer, and far from being the seven-incher everyone has been expecting, it will actually be a 10-inch model that will fix everything that was wrong with the new iPad: mainly, the heft and thickness.

Read enough articles about NFC and its potential for mobile payments and you’ll find yourself thinking the technology is the inevitable mobile payment platform. Every major mobile platform except iOS already includes or will include support for NFC-enabled devices. There are lots of partnerships being announced between key players like device manufacturers, carriers, and banking or credit card companies. It also just seems to make sense that this is the future.

Until you look up from all the stories about what NFC and look at what’s really happening in the  world. You don’t see much evidence of NFC payment systems in everyday life. NFC isn’t yet emerging into mainstream commerce, but there is ample evidence that mobile payments are taking off without it. Those options becoming mainstream are decidedly low tech by comparison, but that’s precisely why they’re succeeding.

After a day of dumb product names (Adixxion, Shoqbox), I’m glad to be able to bring you an app named Mc Loud. You’ll see how clever that name is when I tell you what it does: Mc Loud streams music and movies direct from your Dropbox account.

You know one of the secrets of great and productive designers? Great templates. Templates that don’t just look great, but are also flexible enough to make sure their project don’t look “cookie cutter”. Buttons, textures, backgrounds, design elements, layouts. A great designer has a slew of these stashed aside to pull out for a wide range of projects. Now, why should app developers be any different?

They shouldn’t. Which is what today’s deal is all about—The iOS App Design Bundle. Having great templates on hand to kick off your next iOS app project.

A lot of people are getting excited that today is the iPhone’s fifth birthday, ourselves included, but it’s also arguably an even important anniversary: it marks the day that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak first got together and decided to change the world. Today is the day when two great minds first conceived not only Apple, but the PC.

Just the thought of letting a stranger use my iPad for anything other than a quick browse of Wikipedia creeps me out, so I’m certainly not the target customer for Griffin’s Kiosk. But I understand that some businesses use iPad’s for display material, and for them the protective, immovable stand looks ideal.

There’s no point in exercising if you can’t tell your friends all about it afterwards, right? Well, if you’re a Nike+ FuelBand user, you now have yet another outlet through which to broadcast your latest jog. Version 1.2 of Nike+ FuelBand for iPhone introduces Path integration, background syncing, offline browsing, and more.

Technology in the education sector, particularly for K-12 schools, often poses unique challenges not seen in business or enterprise organizations. The iPad is a great example. As we noted yesterday, BYOD is generally not a good idea for school environments. That means effective iPad deployments are typically managed by schools and education IT staff.

There are plenty of stories out there about schools moving forward with one-to-one iPad deployments (we’ve run two this week – one about the massive iPad investment by San Diego’s school district and one on East Alton’s decision to lease iPads instead of buying them). One-to-one initiatives, in which each student gets his or her own device for use in class and at home, are generally considered a much more effective and ideal model than when students sharing devices during to school hours.

One-to-one programs, which were first established for laptops, can be challenging because such programs need to take into consideration that the iPads will be used at home. One area where this creates problems for schools is the need to comply with filtering regulations.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, seems to be getting in on the portable Bluetooth speaker game. Now the ante has been upped by the venerable Dutch consumer electronic company Philips, and the offering is a pretty good one.

Like the JamBox which inspired this whole market segment, the Shoqbox (as it is named) is a small rectangular “candy-bar” style speaker with stereo drivers and a Bluetooth radio. The difference is that this one has been ruggedized.

Although it sometimes doesn’t understand everything you say, it’s hard not to like Siri. After all, the voice-controlled assistant has made it easier then ever to perform all kinds of tasks on a smartphone using only the natural language that we use on a daily basis. But as we are well aware, Siri isn’t perfect.

Especially when it comes to answering your questions. In fact, Apple analyst Gene Munster believes she’s still two years behind Google after she only managed to answer 68% of the 800 questions he asked in a quiet room.

Today is the fifth anniversary of the release of the original iPhone, and for Cult of Mac’s writers, it’s a particularly important birthday: not only does June 29th mark the anniversary of one of our most all-time beloved gadgets, but it’s also a day so momentous that it has rippled through every aspect of our professional lives as both Apple fans and writers.

To mark the occasion, Cult of Mac’s writers got together to talk about where we were when the first iPhone came out, what it meant for us then and what it means for us now. Check out our stories, then please feel free to hop in and leave a comment telling us where you were when the iPhone was born.

Pretty much the only segment of the camcorder market that hasn’t been destroyed by either cellphones or video-shooting SLRs is the rugged sports-cam market, if only because nobody wants to strap their iPhone or Canon 5D MkIII to their head and ski down a mountain.

So it’s no surprise that JVC’s latest offering is – you guessed it – a rugged sports cam, complete with various attachment to mount it on helmets, bikes and even goggles.

On Sunday, MobileMe will be dead, and anyone who is still using MobileMe and not Apple’s replacement service, iCloud, will be forcibly evicted. That means anyone still using MobileMe either needs to transition to iCloud and/or copy all data stored in their MobileMe accounts to their Mac or PC. Any files stored in MobileMe’s range of services that can’t be converted to iCloud will be deleted. If you opt not to use iCloud, all data in your MobileMe account will be deleted.

Although iCloud offers several advances over MobileMe, there are some MobileMe services that don’t have direct iCloud equivalents. These include MobileMe Galleries for sharing photos and videos, website creation using Apple’s iWeb, and iDisk remote storage and file sharing. File and information sync is available using iCloud, but the functionality is implemented a bit differently than in MobileMe. In addition, users still using Snow Leopard also can’t upgrade to iCloud.

It’s a tricky problem for thousands of users. There isn’t a single online service that delivers quite the same mix of features and functionality that Apple offered with MobileMe, but by combining some apps and services, you can get pretty close to MobileMe’s feature set. We’ve gone through all of the main competitors to try to find the best services for the soon-to-be dispossessed MobileMe subscriber.

As a tech writer, I know that pressing Option-Y on my keyboard will give me a ¥ symbol, and that Option-K will add a little degree circle˚ to my article. I even know how to add umlauts (handy for death mëtal band names – just press Option-U and then type a letter) and accents (good for clichés – like an umlaut but using Option-E).

But what about the Apple logo, the copyright symbol, or any of those other essential but seldom used characters? That’s what Characters is for.

If you use your MacBook with external displays, you might want to use it with the display off but the lid open at some point. If so, today’s tip should help you accomplish this goal, with not one, not two, but three different ways to do so.

You can do this with the laptop lid shut, but with ever more powerful MacBooks out there, avoiding the heat that might build up in there is probably worth leaving the screen up, right? Leaving the screen up with the display off will let heat leave the Mac through the keyboard, and will allow the graphics processor give all of it’s power to the external screen, which is helpful if you’re working on graphics-intensive applications.

Following the iPhone’s prepaid debut on Cricket Wireless just a week ago, Apple’s hugely popular smartphone is now available on Virgin Mobile. Like Cricket, Virgin is offering the handset on a prepaid basis, with prices starting at as little as $31 per month on the company’s Beyond Talk plan — which includes unlimited data, and unlimited texts.

Take advantage of the company’s offer and you could save yourself around $800 a year.

Sometime last week, it became apparent that Apple had tweaked its App Store search algorithm to display results in order of their user rankings and descriptions, rather than the names of the apps themselves. The change brought some confusion, not only to App Store customers, but also to developers, who found that their apps were no longer appearing under certain searches as they had been.

It now appears that Apple has backtracked on that change, however.

Google finally released its hugely popular Chrome web browser for iOS yesterday, and just as we had expected, it’s the best third-party browser so far. In fact, in many ways, it’s also better than Apple’s built-in mobile Safari browser. And you can now use Chrome as your default browser on your jailbroken iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches, thanks to the BrowserChooser tweak.

So, yeah, like clipping the white 30-pin docking cable to the bottom of my iPad and iPhone is SO difficult. You kids these days have it easy. Back when I got my first iPhone, the docking cable had little freakin’ buttons you had to press on the sides just to disconnect it. Man, those were the days.

Wait, where was I? Oh, yeah. Patents. One specific patent, in particular.

Amazing: I just liberated 10GB of space on my MacBook Pro’s harddrive that was being held prisoner by backups of iDevices I used to own, but had long since gone. And frankly, I’m not sure I would have found and freed up the space without the $10 DaisyDisk app.

There’s a whole new class of app these days centered around lending out cars, bikes, and even homes via iPhone apps like AirBnB, Relay Rides, Getaround, and others. They allow people looking for a short term rental car or living space to connect with other people who have spare space or vehicles and pay a fair yet small fee for doing so. It seems like a good idea, on the surface.

A new app, called SideCar Passenger, takes it up a notch. The app not only connects you with a spare car, but with a spare driver as well. Think of it as peer-to-peer taxi cab and you’ll be close. Users download SideCar, register and account, and then either search for rides or offer their own services up.

Does this strike anyone else as potentially creepy?

Gizmodo reported today that their new MacBook Air was crashing something fierce. They turned to their own forums and the Apple Support forums and found that many other users of the MacBook Air also had the crashing issue. Both parties saw improvements when they stopped using Google’s star web browser, Chrome, but no one could be sure.

They even checked on the MacRumors forums, finding the same issue. Then, they heard from Google.

Ever wondered if aluminosilicate glass surface of your iPad would make a great dance floor? Now you can find out.