never mind the optics

I watched José Picardo’s excellent tutorial for interactive whiteboards a few weeks ago and finally got round to trying some of his tips today.  I thought I would try something for my S1/S2 classes and so I created two magic box Smart Notebook files.

For S1, the box contains the different forms of energy.  The screen perimeter has images representing the forms of energy and the objective is to match the words pulled out of the box to the images.

The S2 file is designed to test pupils’ knowledge of food chains.

Download the files here.

S1 energy box

S2 food chains

With so many assessments scheduled for the end of term, it’s not been the best time to try to work with the N810.  However, I put it to good use today with a pupil who needed some help with a section of work that had been missed through illness.  I updated the tablet with all of the screencasts I had uploaded to my site by resynchronising the tablet’s RSS reader with my feedburner feed.  Then a quick run through the controls of the default media player was all I needed before letting him work through the solutions he had missed at his own pace.  He used headphones to get the running commentary as the work progressed.

Now, I could have set him down in front of a laptop.  The problem is that you can’t be very discrete with a laptop.  The tablet sits half hidden by a jotter and allowed him to catch up on work without feeling self-conscious.  Seems like it is a great tool for personalised learning.

Well, I’ve had the N810 from Nokia for a week now, it arrived last Friday evening.  I’ve spent quite a lot of time just “playing” with it to see what it can do for me.  It took a wee while to figure out how to take a screenshot but I finally managed to install something that would do the job for me.  Here are my inital thoughts.

The desktop interface is quite nice.  It has a taskbar down the left side of the screen and there is a widget facility that allows tools to be set out on the desktop for easy reference.

As you can see, there are also some handy icon along the top right of the screen to inform the user about wifi signal strength, battery life, etc.  The green circle in this shows that I am logged in to Google chat in the background, this is the chat service supported by the system as delivered.

The left menu provides access to a comprehensive series of options, as shown in this next screenshot.

The tablet runs OS2008, a Maemo linux based OS and has Firefox as it’s default browser.  The Firefox interface is clean and does not have the usual screen real estate loss due to menu bars.  These features are accessed via the lined button in top left of the browser window (the same button exists in most applications).  

The address bar lies at the bottom of the window and has minimal navigation controls alongside.  Crucial for such a small screen, there is a zoom facility available by tapping on the magnifier icon next to the navigation controls.  I’ve found the browser to be very responsive and the wifi system is good.   It will pick up a signal anywhere in my house, including places where the stone walls prevent wireless access from my windows and mac laptops.

I need to point out that the N810 is an internet tablet, not a mobile phone.  That said, if you have a network connection, voice calls can be made via a VOIP service, such as Skype.  Installing Skype for the N810 was a simple two-tap process once I had arrived at the Skype homepage.  Shortly afterwards, I was enjoying a chat with Lisa.

I was disappointed that the Skype port for Nokia tablets does not yet support video calls. Hopefully, this is something that Skype will be able to offer shortly.  During our call, the audio quality was good at my side.  However, Lisa reported that there were instances when the quality of my voice dropped noticeably.  She described it as sounding as if I had “put a huge sticky toffee in my mouth”.  This seemed to coincide with the blue corner LED lighting up and I think that this indicates power saving mode.  The only way to maintain call quality was for me to make frequent taps on the screen to keep the tablet fully active.  This was a bit of a nuisance and requires further tweaking to see if the power saving can be adjusted to fit the circumstances.

There is a RSS reader already installed.  

I found it very easy to use, my first move to was remove the subscription to BBC Sport and my second was to subscribe to my own Feedburner feed to see if I could get by classroom blog on the tablet.  It worked without a hitch, as you can see.

With screen area at a premium, a nice feature of the RSS reader is that you can swap to a single pane view to allow more space to read feed content.

The next things was to see if the files inside the enclosure could be viewed.  Tapping on the pdf icons allowed me to view them in the tablet’s own PDF Viewer, with the option to save to the internal memory card (micro SD).  The PDF viewer is pretty good, with several viewing options available.

There is the same minimal navigation that we saw earlier on the browser.  There are some extra options that allow you to focus on the text of your documents.  The first of these is the zoom option.

and a further option is to remove images using the small blue icon in the bottom right corner of the viewer pane.  This leaves you with just the text of your document on display.

You might have noticed from the RSS screenshots that some of the posts in my classroom blog contain mp4 files.  These are also no problem for the N810.  Tapping on the icon gives the option to view (stream) or save the file for later viewing.  Streaming worked well across my home wifi and saved files have the advantage of appearing in the library of the built-in media player.  I had hoped to show how clear the video playback looked but you’ll have to take my word for it as the screenshot tool was unable to capture running or paused video output from the media player, rendering the video panel green instead.

I like the size of the controls on the media player, they are large enough for fingertip control rather than forcing you to use the stylus all of the time.

The other application for looking after your audio, video and podcasts is Canola.  I downloaded this from the maemo.org community.  The Canola interface is beautiful, see the full screen screenshot below.

The player within Canola is intuitive, with simple controls.  The player picked up my iTunes podcast art and displayed it while the video file was downloaded.

Unfortunately, Canola was unable to play the mp4 video although audio performance was satisfactory.  

In terms of other applications, I hap a play around with the Maps feature.  The tablet contained a default map covering the west coast of the USA & Canada and it was straightforward to replace this with a downloaded map of UK & Ireland.  Here’s my town up close

The N810 also has GPS capabilities although it took some time to find a signal, I was finally able to get something to register.

Best of all though was the discovery of Numpty Physics.  I think it is a clone of Crayon Physics and it is very addictive!

I’m still working on how to integrate the tablet into my classroom and will write some more once we’ve had a play.

I’m a lot happier with the homework situation.  Homework submissions from my Higher Physics class have improved since my last post.  Then, this week, several parents came to our school’s senior parent evening with questions about the new system and how it works.  I suppose it shows that pupils have been talking about it at home.

Some parents were looking for reassurance that their son/daughter wasn’t wasting time sitting at a computer pretending to do homework, while others wanted to know more about iTunes so they could monitor the subscription themselves and know when an exercise is due.  I certainly hadn’t anticipated that parents might be looking for ways to keep up with the work their children were being set.

It’s the last incident that I feel is the most significant though.  I blogged a new exercise late last night just before going to bed.  After lunch, I was informed by a pupil that she had updated her iTunes library over breakfast and had discovered a fault in the latest pdf file, it wouldn’t open.  It turns out she watches the video solutions on the bus to school.  She was right, the file had been corrupted and it’s been replaced.