education - page 6

Say hello to John Tambunan. This five-year-old resident of Indonesia published his first book on the iBookstore a few days ago – a cute tale about catching fish.

Head on by the kiddy table at your local Apple Store and you used to see four iMacs, loaded up with educational software and games. Go on by with your kid today and you’ll see four iPads running educational iOS apps instead.

Hope they wipe those things down frequently: never seen a kid without at least several culture farms worth of germs on his or her pink, sticky hands. Those iPads are going to be disease-crusted petri dishes after a day’s worth of kids finish sliming them up.

Otherwise, great call. The only better learning tool for a child than an iMac is an iPad.

This is Fragile Earth, an interactive photo gallery designed to teach you a little about ecology, conservation and the natural environment.

Apple introduced the iOS printing a year and a half ago in the form of the iOS feature AirPrint. Although the feature has been available for some time, only a handful of printers ship with AirPrint support. There are, of course, a couple of ways around that limited selection like the Lantronix xPrintServer, the OS X Printopia utility, and FingerPrint for both OS X and Windows.

Those are great options for home use, but what about business users? The iPad is the best selling business tablet by a huge margin and that should translate into at least some workplace printing – or should it?

If, like many people, you find Mondays just too much to cope with, you might want to avoid today’s app. It’s not the sort of thing that’s going to make your Monday feel any better, and in some cases it will just fry your brain until next Monday. Which would be a shame, because you’d miss out on a whole weekend.

Be forewarned, then: The Fourth Dimension is an app which will mess with your head. Deliberately. Even though the aim is education and expansion of knowledge, it will still mess with your head. You will emerge from the experience only fractionally the wiser, and quite a lot more confused than you were at the beginning. Don’t worry, this is perfectly normal.

Recently, we’ve been highlighting some of the major partnerships that are beginning to form between mobile management and mobile/cloud services vendors. These partnerships are strategic and aim to enable IT workflows that better secure, support, and monitor iPhones, iPads, and other mobile devices than what any one company could offer. So far, these partnerships and the integration of solutions that they offer haven’t included Apple or the basic management tools that Apple makes available for free – until now.

Mac and iOS management provider JAMF has posted a guide to integrating the company’s signature solution with Apple’s free Configurator tool to streamline iOS deployment.

Apple’s e-textbook initiative, which the company launched in January along with iBooks Author and a revamped iTunes U service is aimed at K-12 schools rather than higher education. Higher education has a different set of needs when it comes to textbooks, study, and reference materials. There are also big differences in device/platform selection between K-12 and the college market.

In fact, these differences are probably a big part of why Apple decided to focus the majority of its e-textbook (and, by extension its iPad in education) effort on the K-12 market. It’s a market that yields Apple more growth opportunities now and down the road. 

There are plenty of stories out there about schools that have already launched large-scale iPad programs or that are considering them for next year. Many U.S. school districts have yet to determine an iPad strategy, however, and are still moving forward cautiously.

In a small survey of public school IT managers, research firm Piper Jaffray identified the iPad as a new technology being tested by the majority of public schools. The survey also offered insights into the the pros and cons that school IT managers are weighing when it comes the iPad and some competing technologies.

Apple is set to overhaul its online store to introduce a “dramatically simplified user interface” that will make spending your hard-earned cash on Apple goods easier than ever before. And this isn’t just another story fresh from the rumor mill; it was revealed by Apple itself.

Barefoot Books World Atlas ($8) is a kind of digital globe for children, giving them easy access to a simplified cartoon overview of the whole world.

From the orbital view (for want of a better word), you see the globe peppered with hundreds of colorful icons. Spin the globe and zoom in. The little icons grow and become tappable controls. Each one reveals a snippet of information in text and audio form (read aloud by the UK’s favorite TV geographer (yes, we have those), Nick Crane). There’s also a photo to look at for each fact, which is often much more informative than the icon was to start with.

Many schools in the U.S. haven’t even had their spring break yet, but school administrators are already planning for the next school year. For public schools that means determining how best to allocate scarce financial resources and trying to determine how far they can push their budgets before the residents and homeowners in their district will vote them down. School IT departments meanwhile are beginning to consider what major projects and upgrades they’ll be doing over the summer recess.

Although this decision-making process tends to run like clockwork for most schools and districts, this year there’s a new factor to consider: Apple’s iPad-based iBooks 2 e-textbook initiative (as well as the iPad itself).

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Apple uses digital certificates and code signing in various ways to help keep Macs secure. One common example is that apps sold through the Mac App Store are digitally signed, which allows an individual Mac to know that it’s getting the genuine article when a user launches the App Store app. It also allows a Mac to ensure that an application hasn’t been tampered with by a malicious user or a piece of malware each time that app is launched (Mountain Lion’s Gatekeeper feature will be based on the same technology).

The same process is used with Apple’s Software Update servers. Each update from Apple is digitally signed using a certificate that let’s each Mac know that they’re getting genuine updates from Apple.

Digital certificates are designed to expire periodically and tomorrow, March 23, 2012, the certificate associated with Apple’s Software Update functionality will be expiring. Apple already has a new certificate ready that won’t expire for seven more years (2019). The transition to the certificate will be transparent for almost all Mac users, but it may create problems with some OS X Server installations.

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As with many Apple product launches, today’s release of the new iPad is mostly a consumer event. But that doesn’t mean that the launch won’t have an impact on businesses. In fact, on Monday morning a number of new iPads may be walking into workplaces around the world. And users may be lobbying their employers to purchase the new iPad – if they haven’t stared doing so already.

So, what questions should businesses or IT professionals be asking about the new iPad? More importantly, what are the answers to those questions?

Virtually everyone who’s ever used an Apple product has an Apple ID. This user account for all things Apple is most commonly used with the iTunes Store and the iOS and Mac App Stores. It’s used to both authorize purchases and to allow you to access content or run apps after they’re downloaded. Apple’s philosophy is that every person should have their own Apple ID and that each of us should use our individual Apple ID (and only that Apple ID) on each of our devices – iPads, iPhones, iPods, Macs, even PC’s running iTunes or other Apple software.

That’s a great concept, but it creates a big challenge when iOS devices are used in business or school environments. When someone configures an iOS device for an employee or student with a selection of apps and other content (like iBooks 2 textbooks), they need to use an Apple ID. But once that device is deployed, the end user may need or want to purchase additional apps or other materials.

This is often a stumbling block for business-owned devices. And it’s something that Apple has finally begun to address with Apple Configurator.

One of the first things most IT folks will think about Apple Configurator is that it’s pretty limited compared to some of the mobile device management suites on the market (including Apple’s Profile Manager in Lion Server). MDM suites are designed to make device management as easy, automatic, and wireless as possible. Most include robust monitoring and reporting features – virtually all can use Apple’s push notification system to update a managed device at any time.

Configurator, on the other hand, requires connecting each iOS device to a Mac using a USB cable to perform any administrative tasks like configuring device settings, assigning a device to a user, installing apps, or updating iOS. That means that Configurator isn’t appropriate for a lot of businesses or workplace situations. Yet, for some organizations, Configurator is a more ideal tool than most MDM suites because of its hands-on approach.

So, what kinds of environments is Apple Configurator suited to?

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Virtual school The Khan Academy just released an official iPad app today, and if you have kids in school you might just want to grab a copy, because it’s excellent.

Along with announcing the new iPad and Apple TV (and related iOS and app updates), Apple released a new tool for managing iOS devices in business and education. The new Apple Configurator app is a free download in the Mac App Store for Macs running Lion. Although it takes the sting out of managing iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches for smaller organizations, it won’t replace more full feature mobile management solutions for mid-size or larger companies.

Unlike most computers, the iPad isn’t designed to be a multi-user device. iOS doesn’t support multiple user accounts or profiles – that essentially means one set of device and application settings along with a personal collection of information like notes, email, browser bookmarks, and stored passwords for different online services. Sharing a device with that much personal data makes it easy for someone to snoop while using another person’s iPhone or iPad or on an iPad that is commonly shared between multiple users.

Passtouch is a web browser for the iPad that’s designed to offer at least some multi-user capabilities as well as to secure web-based information like bookmarks, cookies, and stored passwords. It doesn’t offer whole-device accounts or profiles but it does offer some extra security for devices that are regularly shared.

Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer-on-a-board developed by a team from Cambridge, UK, went on sale at 6am GMT this morning.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — When I first spotted the Aurasma booth, I thought it was yet another annoying app to serve ads on top of the real world, using augmented reality. And it actually is. Only before I could walk away, I got caught by the enthusiastic marketing folks and found out that the app is actually very cool indeed.

Aurasma is a kind of cross between augmented reality and Instagram. It works like this: You point the app at anything: a painting, a product package, a building, and Aurasma will remember it. You then pick a video or photo or a 3-D rendering to show up over that real-world scene whenever you point your iPhone’s camera at it again.

Apple hasn’t made the Mac App Store the only source for Mac software, but the company is nudging both developers and users in the store’s direction. That’s fine for consumers, but it may create problems for businesses that need to buy software in bulk and distribute it to a large number of Macs.

Apple’s announcement of Mountain Lion breaks with the past in a few ways including by announcing with out a major Apple event. One of the other changes is the news the Apple is moving OS X to a yearly release cycle like iOS. That may be a great way to introduce new features for consumers, but it’s likely to create problems for organizations that have a large number of Macs.

Schools and colleges are still among the organizations that have large Mac populations and have always been a key market for Apple. A yearly release schedule stands to impact them more than any other type of organization and that impact isn’t likely to be a positive one.