It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.
We are a culture on the go. We work, eat, play and study on the move, multitasking all the way. It doesn’t take an advanced degree to understand the appeal of Apple’s new mobile devices, particularly iPads and MacBooks, on college and grad school campuses everywhere. Many schools are getting in on the act directly, and facilitating mobile computing by providing iPads and MacBooks to their incoming students.
“The trend in higher education computing is this concept of mobility” said Greg Smith, George Fox University’s chief information officer, “and this fits right in.”
It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.
Apple had traditionally enjoyed 50 percent of the educational market, however a tight economy coupled with lower PC prices led by netbooks until recently depressed the Cupertino, Calif. company’s classroom reach to just about 20 percent. While the iPad is credited with many advances, it also sparked a comeback for Apple, making the $500 tablet competitive with PCs in the secondary and higher education markets, according to Needham & Company’s Charlie Wolf earlier this year.
Wolf’s prediction, made before the iPad really hit the street, has been confirmed again and again.
It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.
Cedars School in Greenock, Scotland, has become the first school in the world to deploy an iPad to every child in the age groups it serves (roughly 5 to 16 year-olds). We’ve mentioned this effort before, so Cult of Mac decided to check in on the project again for our Education special and see how they’re doing.
“The iPad has become far more embedded in our school day than I ever thought it would become,” Fraser Speirs, the architect behind the project, wrote on his blog.
It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.
As part of Cult of Mac’s ‘Apple in Education’ week, we’ve trawled through the hundreds of thousands of app in the App Store and compiled a list of the best applications for your iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, that we think will help you make the most of your device while studying.
The applications we’ve featured will help you to study for your exams, remind you of when your assignments are due, and make it easy for you to create and manage your notes in class. We also have 4 sections dedicated to different subjects, and a few applications designed to help you in these areas, including English, Math, History, and Science.
The competition is scrambling to keep up with Apple after they finally succeeded in landing the Beatles catalogue for iTunes: in the hour since the announcement, Amazon has already dropped the price of at least two Beatles offerings to undercut Apple’s own prices on the same albums.
As predicted, Apple’s big iTunes announcement today wasn’t iTunes in the cloud, or streaming, or a subscription fee… it’s John, Paul, Ringo and George. After ten years, the Beatles and their music catalogue have finally hit iTunes.
Although it’s not been announced on Apple.com as of writing, the Beatles’ presence on the iTunes Store now commands most of the upper fold. The entire catalog seems to be available, along with a link to the band’s page, the Beatles Box set and more. You’re even getting a decent deal on the Beatles Box Set: it cost $250 when it was released last year, and currently costs $154.99 on Amazon at a heavily discounted price. Apple’s price? Just $150 for every Beatles song ever recorded.
The sudden resolution of Apple’s decades-long standoff with Apple Records, first for the Apple trademark and then for the Beatles catalog, has happened swiftly. One thing’s for sure: however Steve got Apple Records and EMI to agree to iTunes’ terms, it’s going to make one hell of a read when the story finally comes to light.
Although many of us already own the Beatles’ catalog — I have the full collection of the recent remasters already converted to lossless MP3s — and while many will be apathetic to this news, this is a big win for Apple, as the record labels release their death grip on one of the last digital music holdouts.
CDs and records aren’t the future of music anymore: iTunes is, and the labels have finally been forced to give up one of their last aces-in-the-holes in order to stay relevant.
It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.
Computer scientist Alan Kay is one of the most foremost experts in computers in schools, and yet he believes technology in education has largely failed.
Kay is a pioneering computer scientist, a former Apple fellow, and famous for formulating the Dynabook concept that predicted laptops and tablets 40 years before they became commonplace. Kay was a researcher at Xerox PARC in the seventies on technologies that Apple later commercialized in the Lisa and Mac. Among many honors, Kay has won the prestigious Turing Award for work on object-oriented programming. During the mid-1980s he was an Apple Fellow at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group.
Computers have been in schools for the last 30 years, but with few exceptions, they haven’t been used to their full potential.
Kay says the education system has squandered 30 years of technology in classrooms. He likens the modern factory educatory system to a monkey with a microscope. The monkey looks at its reflection in the microscope’s barrel but doesn’t look through the eyepiece — it utterly misses the point.
Computers have become tools of distraction, Kay said, instead of education. He singles out Guitar Hero as the best example of this — players get the fantasy of virtuoso guitar playing without learning a single note.
“When I look at computers in schools, this is what I see. It’s all Guitar Hero,” he said during a keynote speech at CES earlier this year.
We asked Kay to expand on these ideas in this exclusive Q&A. Kay talks about the importance of using technology to create educated voters capable of participating in a democracy, and Apple’s general disinterest in education.
Head on over to the official Apple website and you’ll see a new front page teaser.
“Tomorrow is just another day. That you’ll never forget,” the copyt reads, before telling visitors to check back with Apple.com tomorrow at 10AM EST / 7AM EST for an exciting new announcement pertaining to iTunes
What the heck could it mean? Our guesses and yours after the jump..
It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.
Launched in 2007, Apple’s iTunes U is a powerhouse of knowledge. Currently more than 800 international universities maintain active sites and the digital library houses some 350,000 free lectures, videos, films and other resources available for download on the iTunes store.
Here are five reasons iTunes U is better than actually going to college. (And we’re only joking a little.)
It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.
When Newton North High School in Newton, MA was rebuilt recently as a new, state of the art facility, a primary goal was to teach students information literacy using current technology. With a generous budget and the opportunity to start fresh, the result is a school with five Mac-based computing labs, over 130 new iMacs, and a library that rivals one found at many colleges.
It’s enough to make any Apple user envious, and much of the potential is still untapped. “With a lot of this being so new,” says Phil Golando, IT Manager, “we don’t even know all the ways we can use this stuff.”
Apple quietly tweaked its iTunes application for the iPad today and introduced support for their music-based social network Ping.
Ping is now available through a tab at the bottom of the application, and it gives users access to their feed, their profile, who they follow, and who follows them. The function also connects to a Twitter account and automatically tweets anything you ‘like’ or post on Ping.
Ping for iPad also features a concerts section that allows users to see concerts coming up in their area, upcoming tours, which concerts they’re attending, and links to purchase tickets through Ticketmaster.
The team behind OpeniBoot, which allows users to run the Android OS on the iPhone 3G, are now hard at work on porting the hack to the iPhone 4 and the iPad.
Jailbreak expert Hexxeh posted a video on his blog yesterday that shows OpeniBoot running on the iPad. There’s not much to see at this point, but the video’s below if you’d like to see it.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIixUYaLufo
This is a great step towards booting Android on Apple’s latest iOS devices, and it shouldn’t be too long before the hack is available for release.
If you have an iPhone 2G, 3G, or first-gen iPod Touch, and you’d like to try booting Android, it’s now even easier through Cydia – check out John’s recent post here.
Apple has released an update for iTunes today which brings the software up to version 10.1. This update introduces support for AirPlay and the iOS 4.2 firmware for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch.
With iTunes 10.1, you can now wirelessly stream videos straight from iTunes on your computer to the latest AppleTV. The update also provides a number of important stability and performance improvements.
After we published the Men’s section to our 2010 Holiday Gift Guide earlier this week, a few of our readers — not realizing that we were parceling out the guide in sections (Teens are up next) — wondered why we hadn’t made any suggestions for women. Fear not, dear readers: There’s no way we’d miss out on confessing all our favorite gadget, case and app gift ideas for women. We’ve even got pillows in there!
Christie’s of London just announced a special item for auction, an original Apple 1 computer shipped directly from Steve Jobs’ garage. Labeled system number 82, this kit includes the motherboard, cassette adapter, manuals, the original shipping box in good condition, and a signed letter from Steve Jobs to the original owner!
The Apple 1 was the first pre-assembled personal computer, it did not require soldering skills to get running. “This is the forerunner of the iPod, iPad and iPhone” said Julian Wilson from Christie’s, “it worked straight out of the box.”
Approximately 200 Apple 1 systems were produced, and about a quarter of those survive today. The Steves – ever the jokesters – originally priced the system at $666.66. In 2009 an Apple 1 was listed on eBay for $50,000. Christie’s estimates this one to sell for £150,000 ($240,000)! Not a bad return on your investment.
Artist Michael Tompert takes Apple’s products and wrecks them with blowtorches, sledgehammers, handsaws and handguns. His large-scale prints of the detritus are surprisingly colorful and beautiful.
“It’s an alternate viewpoint,” explained Tompert at a preview of his first gallery show, which opens in San Francisco today. “They’re beautiful inside. They’re beautiful when you open them up.”
At a preview last weekend, Tompert’s three kids sat on the floor playing with iPhones and iPod touches underneath their father’s artwork. The irony was lost on no one. In fact, it’s our obsession with Apple’s products that Tompert is commenting on.
Artist Michael Tompert, who’s first exhibit of Apple-inspired artwork opens today, tried to destroy an iPad by hitting it with a sledgehammer.
“I hit it with a sledgehammer about 10 times,” said Tompert at a preview of his art show, which opens today. “It did nothing. It’s incredible. It was really, really hard to destroy.”
Instead, Tompert took a blowtorch to the iPad.
“I had to blowtorch it for 15 minutes until the inside boiled and it exploded from inside,” said Tompert.
I hope you didn’t jump out of bed at the crack of dawn today, throw open the curtains, crack open a few eggs in the frying pan, connect your iPad to iTunes and then sit down to spend the next few hours to continuously hammer the “Check for Update” button, because we’ve got some bad news for you: it doesn’t look like iOS 4.2 is going to drop today.
We have just learned that a new patent has confirmed Cult of Mac’s earlier report that Apple is working on ambitious remote computing tech that would allow files and settings to be transferred between the Mac and iPhone through a Near Field Communications (NFC) chip.
Neil Ferguson, developer of Virus Strike, explains how to become a successful iPhone game developer in 10 steps.
I believe that anyone can develop an iPhone game. I recently developed a physics-based puzzler for the iPhone, Virus Strike, on a zero budget despite having zero experience developing iPhone games. It wasn’t easy, but there are very few set-up costs if you have the right skills and approach.
Admittedly, I’m an experienced programmer – I started developing on a BBC Micro at the age of 8 and now work full-time for a software start-up in London. Obviously, my experience helped me when I was developing Virus Strike, but I don’t think you necessarily need to have any programming experience to develop a successful game. Just follow these 10 steps:
I have an embarrassing confession to make: I wear out headphones the way most people wear out socks. Whether from Shure, Ultimate Ears, Sony, Koss, or 99-cent Chinatown bootleg, one of the ears won’t be playing sound within the first three months I own them. Fraying cables, rusty headphone jacks from rain, shorted audio drivers from running-induced ear sweat (?!), and many more have kept me from my music collection. I can’t help it; I wear my headphones everywhere. Consequently, I’m increasingly interested in durability as a key design consideration beyond just audio quality and a comfortable fit.
And I might have finally found the ideal iPhone headset for the active, occasionally irresponsible urbanite: V-Moda’s Vibrato headphones.
We know you like to shop. We know you like gear. And we know there’s a honking big holiday season coming up.
Over the past year or so, we’ve run across some drool-worthy gear we think would make perfect gifts for the holidays. And, in the spirit of holiday sharing, we whipped up this handy guide you can print out, laminate and take with you while out foraging. (Come to think of it, laminating can be expensive. Maybe just put it in a binder.)
Mophie's Juice Pack Air is certified by Apple, but Apple won't currently sell the slide-on battery pack in its retail stores because of "Glassgate." Photo by Kokkie76. Used with permission. http://bit.ly/aZD7on
Apple’s retail stores have suspended sales of iPhone 4 slide-on cases because of concerns about trapped dirt causing scratches and cracks — the so-called “Glassgate” issue.
The ban is impacting at least half-a-dozen case makers who expected to have a blockbuster holiday season, said a source who works in the case industry and asked for anonymity.
At least one manufacturer has hundreds of thousands of battery pack cases that have been suspended by Apple’s stores, despite being certified by Apple’s “Made for iPhone” program.
“Glassgate is a real problem,” said the source. “Apple is not approving slide-on cases right now for its stores.”
Lately, updates to Apple’s official Mac software suites have tended to be first rumored by the strange source of pages for the idiot’s guides seeded on foreign Amazon dot whatever bookstore pages… and sure enough, that oh-so-reputable source is already touting iWork ’11 as coming out sometime in the near future.
But when exactly? Probably shot down the tube along with the splintered iLife ’11 apps when the Mac App Store launches, according to reports.
Toy manufacturer Hasbro is set to unveil a pair of $30 goggles called ‘My3D’ that will attach to an iPhone or iPod Touch and allow users to enjoy 3D content, according to a report from the Associated Press on Monday.
It promises three-dimensional content that offers a 360-degree experience in gaming, virtual travel experiences and entertainment content. It’s aimed at both children and adults.
The device, which resembles a pair of binoculars with a slot in which users insert their iPod or iPhone, will be priced at $30. It will be available starting next spring at stores where Apple’s iPhones and iPod Touches are available.
Hasbro, which is the nation’s second-largest toy maker, has teamed up with Dreamworks Animations, Discovery, Sony, and IMAX to provide 3D content which will be delivered through specialized apps for the devices. The A.P. report also claims Hasbro worked closely with Apple to develop the My3D device.
I’ve been looking forward to 3D content on iOS for a long while now, and Hasbro’s My3D looks set to be incredibly popular. With a list of reputable companies helping to develop content to accompany the device, it should certainly be top-notch, and that price-tag isn’t too bad either.
