TedCurran.net » Apple

Did you know? Your Smartphone is a Powerful Medical Reference Tool!

Ted Curran — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:44:34 +0000

Image by Wisconsin Historical Images via Flickr

The adoption of Android and iOS smartphones “skyrocketed” in 2010, which means ever more health sciences students, faculty, and staff have access to powerful mini-computers in their pockets. With this rise came a new crop of excellent free medical apps that practitioners, faculty, and students can access wherever they go. According to the recent SMU Student Tech Survey, 70% of our students currently have smartphones, and 82% are interested in using health-related apps for smartphones.

Health and Medical apps for iOS and Android are growing more sophisticated as phones & tablets get more powerful. Now you can carry a guide to drug interactions, medical reference books & journals, and news about ongoing medical research in your pocket. Apps can help you study anatomy, diagnose conditions, or even provide care in a foreign language. If you have one of these information powerhouses already, it might be time to start exploring the many excellent tools available to help you and your students empower your practice. We look forward to supporting and expanding SMU’s use of mobile technology for education, and these free apps are a great way for you to explore your options.

Interesting Apps

This article outlines the Top 15 free Android medical apps, and this one covers the Top 20 free iOS medical apps.
This article on Recommended Nursing Apps for iPhone/iPod Touch gives a nurse’s perspective into each app’s effectiveness in practical use, just as 25 Android Apps Every Nurse Needs does for Android.

Please post to the comments with any apps you find particularly useful, and we will add them to a central list where students and faculty can see & download them.

Top Free Android Medical Apps Reviewed (medgadget.com)
Android Takes Over as Leading Smartphone Platform (chris.pirillo.com)
iMedicalApps’ Top 20 Free Medical iPhone Apps (medgadget.com)

"The Golden Apple": Showing Students that Their Learning Matters

Ted Curran — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 21:54:04 +0000

(This post is part of a series called “The Connected Class Community”).

Image by Topsy at Waygood via Flickr

The Golden Apple is the most cryptic and strange of all of these ingredients. Not surprisingly, it’s also difficult to explain. I think the idea will make sense after a couple stories…

The Golden Apple is an object or symbol that reminds the course community members of the great value of their shared work.

My first teaching assignment was at a startup charter high school for Latino students in rural Gilroy, CA. The school itself was located in portable trailers hunched around a disused junior-high school tennis court. Every view from every window was filtered through the links of a 15-foot chain link fence. The computers were few, outdated, and often broken. The school lunch was made up of surplus lunches from the junior high school. The surroundings were a constant reminder to the school community that somewhere, someone thought very little about us and our attempts at teaching and learning.

I went from that school to a charter high school in affluent Marin county, located in spacious buildings between the live oaks and rolling commons of a community college campus. Clean classrooms were filled with a phalanx of matching white Macbook laptops– which themselves were filled with professional quality software for future professionals to master. This communicated to students everyday that someone somewhere believed in them, their teachers, and their bright future. These subtle reminders of student value helped build a secure, safe place where students felt free to explore– where learning was play instead of work. The powerful, gleaming Macbooks served as the community’s Golden Apple– a daily reminder that “we are doing something special here”.

The best teachers I’ve known find some nonverbal way to communicate their respect for the students and their pursuit of learning. Some do it by maintaining a neat, orderly classroom, others by wearing formal clothes or giving gold star stickers. My style of communicating the Golden Apple to students was by expressing meticulous care in making high-quality learning materials for them. (Please see my SAT prep vocabulary slides on Flickr as an example). However we do it, teachers need to provide students with a tangible symbol of our belief that they are worthwhile.

The image that floated into my mind when I called this element “The Golden Apple” was a student giddily manipulating an iPad, enthralled in self-directed learning. While this is not meant to be an ad for Apple computers and smartphones, Jobs and co. have mastered the art of creating beautiful baubles that beg to be touched, played with, and experimented on. Macs make me feel like someone sat around thinking about how I would feel as I worked in this environment– The rough, stupid edges that persist on Microsoft products remind me of a mean lunch lady saying “you’ll eat what you get and you’ll LIKE IT!” Learners in a safe, smooth, shiny, and responsive technology environment spend less time fighting with the tools and more time in a “flow” state of learning.

Mac users pay a large premium for this Golden Apple experience– the hardware and software is all more expensive than its Windows counterparts’ offerings, but we pay it gladly because of how the Mac tech ecosystem makes us feel. We all see ourselves as the “Mac” guy instead of the “PC” guy in the iconic commercials, and we need technology that recognizes that fact. This funny video shows the irrational lengths people are willing to go to to get the Golden Apple feeling.

I believe that students, learners, and workers of all kinds feel better and work better when their technology is smooth, powerful, and enjoyable to play with. When evaluating the demo versions of Blackboard, Moodle, and Canvas, I was struck how clean, modern, responsive, and easy Canvas felt to navigate compared to the older LMS candidates. I got that Mac-like giddiness as I toured its clever gradebook and intuitive dialogues for building courses. Unlike the clunky “early-2000s” feeling inside of the established LMSes, Canvas feels intuitive, snappy, and well-thought-out like the best Web 2.0 tools on the modern market. Working inside of this environment gave me that Golden Apple feeling.

The question I have is: How important is the Golden Apple in relation to the other components of a learning ecosystem? If given a choice between a more powerful but clunkier interface (like the HTC Evo) versus a feature-rich and less powerful alternative (iPhone)– which would you choose? Does it matter?

Your computer has that "not so fresh" feeling? Get AppFresh or TechTracker to update all your apps!

Ted Curran — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:48:11 +0000

AppFresh is a great app for the Mac which scans through your whole computer, checking to see if all of your apps are up to date. It checks them against the iUseThis database to let you know how many other people are also using your favorite apps. All you do is press the “Update All” button and AppFresh will get to work downloading all the updates from all the disparate software vendors who make your apps. If you’re like me, you have lots of freeware, open source, and shareware apps made by obscure mom & pop vendors. No problem! AppFresh hunts them down from the furthest corners of the globe.

The bad new is that AppFresh is Mac only. Fortunately, the wonderful people over at CNET have developed the cross platform (Mac/PC) TechTracker. Although I have not test this software (yet) I have seen it demonstrated at MacWorld and it looks at least as solid and easy to use as AppFresh. I have a very high opinion of CNET due to their great podcasts, so I expect that TechTracker is a worthy adversary to AppFresh. Have you used either app? Got a better one? Discuss it in the comments!

Broke free of my iPhone/AT&T Bondage!: Road Test for the Palm Pre on Sprint

Ted Curran — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:03:40 +0000

: Image by zoovroo via Flickr

Since its debut in 2007, I’ve been a fanatical iPhone jailbreaker and general enthusiast of the device. As more and more iPhones have begun bogging down the 3G network in the Bay Area, Apple/AT&T seem to be taking their customers for granted (charging ever more for data, texts, and increasingly bad customer service). When I got my new 3G S this summer, I discovered that every time I’d jailbreak it, the SIM card would die and I’d have to restore it back into Apple jail to make it work. >:-( The jailbroken experience is half the fun of the iPhone, so I was pretty frustrated that Apple wouldn’t just leave all us poor hackers alone.

The final straw came when I was scheduled for a telephone job interview– I knew I couldn’t get cell coverage at my house in the Berkeley Hills, so I went down into the flats, in an open air park, with nothing between me and the cell satellites but a sunny day. The reception was so bad, the interviewer couldn’t hear what I was saying and asked to reschedule the interview when I can get to a land line phone. It was then that I knew that AT&T had to go. I called AT&T to complain AND THAT CALL GOT DROPPED. So I went into the AT&T store, demanded to be let out of my contract without a cancellation fee, and finally broke free. (Actually it took two hours of standing in the store, being transferred on the phone from manager to “manager”, but I held firm and they let me out).

I went down to Radio Shack and bought three Palm Pres– one for me and each of my parents. Since then I have been amazed that I can get through a day without a dropped call, delayed text message, or bunged up internet connection. Sprint service is great here, and the customer service people I have interacted with are generally much friendlier and more empowered to help me out. In addition, the service plan for 3 Palm Pres on a 1500 min family talk plan with unlimited text and data is under $150. Let’s see AT&T do that with 3 iPhones.

As for the device itself, it is indeed a worthy iPhone competitor. The interface is smooth and intuitive, and the fact that it can multi-task means that I can get up-to-the minute notifications when I get a new email, SMS, IM, or call. The slide out keyboard is a great tactile experience, although I am still much slower with it than I have become with iPhone’s virtual keyboard. The web browser is comparable to the iPhone’s, having the click-to-zoom and pinch gestures that make mobile HTML browsing a joy.

It’s designed not to need to be plugged into a computer– unlike the iPhone which is dependent on iTunes for its syncing and updates. The Pre does it all over the air. This is good and bad. As a Mac head, I had my Address Book, iCal, iPhoto, and iTunes all dialed in to sync to my iPhone. The Pre uses my Gmail contacts as the address book, so I had to go through my old email contacts and delete old students, colleagues, and craigslist response emails to clean up my phone’s contact list. On the positive side, I can use the Pre as a simple drag and drop USB device, putting whatever video, audio, or documents into its 8GB internal memory and being sure that they will work from inside the WebOS interface.

As a jailbreaker, I LOVE LOVE LOVE that Palm has basically said “go ahead! hack it!” There is already a burgeoning hacker movement, supplementing Palm’s nascent App Catalog with over 200 “homebrew” apps. This is a far cry from iPhone’s vibrant app scene, but AT LEAST WE HAVE A GOOGLE VOICE APP (two, in fact). Seriously, the Pre needs more developers and more apps, but the conditions for developing these things are really good. The Pre is basically a linux box with a snazzy frontend, so linux apps can easily be ported over to the device.

Even though I have only had it for two days, I am loving the freedom and quality of coverage I’m getting on the Pre. Sure, I miss all my snazzy apps, but I have faith that once developers realize that it’s so easy and safe to develop for the Pre, the apps will come through, too.

Google Picasa- A Lovable Alternative to iPhoto

Ted Curran — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:13:00 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

I really like a lot of things about Apple‘s iPhoto– it makes it easy to rip, organize, and upload your pictures. However, I HATE how it tries to keep me from knowing where my photo files are, and how it always wants to steer me into using Apple’s paid Mobile Me service.

In those sad years when I was using Windows XP on my main computer, a bright light was Google‘s great Picasa– a more lovable, open source, iPhoto replacement.
It does indeed try to steer you into using Google’s Picasa web service, but at least it’s FREE like Flickr.

Now they have Picasa for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Try it out– I found pictures and videos on my computer I never knew were there!!

Even though iPhoto is great, I’m thinking of switching to Picasa ON MY MAC so I can have more control over my photos. This means that my media won’t be as integrated into all of the other Mac programs (like iMovie or iWeb) but it also means I can quickly and easily see all the media files on my computer– not just the ones Apple wants me to see.

This Week’s Top Downloads [Download Roundup] (lifehacker.com)
iWeb – Build A Quick, Easy & Beautiful Website [Mac only] (makeuseof.com)
Review: Eye-Fi Geo (macworld.com)
Apple’s iPhoto Makes It Way Too Easy To Delete Your Entire Flickr Library (techcrunch.com)

iProcrastinate: helps students stay on top of their work!

Ted Curran — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:18:00 +0000

Mac/iPhone/iPod Touch

Need an easy way to keep track of your assignments? iProcrastinate has been a favorite of Mac users for a long time. Now iPhonies and iTouchers can get in on the fun.