Versatile NoteLedge

I have used the free, older version of the NoteLedge app on my iPad and there is a MacBook version as well which is pretty handy. NoteLedge is easy to use, offers some good note making options and is something which suits a classroom well. If you look at the images you can see my original handwritten ideas are much neater than the stylus writing. To be honest, I am better on a graphics tablet and with something like Tux Paint. Is it me? It is the app? I look at it this way. If I use it the developers will see how bad I am with a stylus on an iPad and make the app more responsive. It prints quite well but , you know, I am an adult, I want to use cursive. If I wanted to print , I would type. That said, you can look at the screenshots on the app site and it may just be I need to practise more. Electronic things can develop as you do and they become familar with your way of doing things as you use them. My next thought is a perennial one. Should I pursue handwriting on the iPad or just keep it to my graphics tablet? Do I pursue something which looks pretty sloppy or do I use the tool which makes me look effective? My answer is a bit of both. Keep practising but use my graphics tablet when I really need to have a credible image. I have tried different styluses and so far…no. Not that good. Last week I was able to get NoteLedge Ultimate for free on App of the Day. I really like it. My handwriting is a bit better but there is so much more with this one. It is 9.99 paid so you would really want to know that this is something you would use regularly and would be of good help. I started to work more effectively with this version because it runs really smoothly. One good thing about NoteLedge is you can export it to different file formats. The free version is very effective, though, and you can sync across devices.

If I am using something like this in class for the first time, we do the 5×20. 5 things in 20 minutes. It could be 5 things I like, 5 things about winter, 5 things I want to do, 5 things I did at the weekend. Sometimes I get the students to load their efforts onto the LMS so I can have a good look at what hey have done. Other times we just do show and tell and oral feedback. Students love using new things, they love exploring and they love reviewing. I always tell them that we won’t know if this is any good for learning or not unless they try it out and tell me what they think. I usually use Edmettle to get the feedback. Meanwhile, I shall keep practising.

MyPaint on Linux Mint

Charlie Henson is like me. He doesn’t really know how to get the best out of paint apps and tools but he can see that MyPaint on Linux is in a league of its own. Like me, he found he could do things easily and could feel a sense of achievement. His video takes you on a good tour of MyPaint so that you can see what it does and find the online support easily. It is a programme which enables you to be artistic because it is intuitive. I downloaded it from the package manager on Linux Mint last night and was able to do things with it even though I was just using my mouse. I love the symmetry function.

This is my first effort.

I was amazed how much I could actually do. I have since watched people with some real skills using it. It’s a very comprehensive, but easy to use programme. I downloaded the extra data package from the package manager as well.

On my Wacom tablet

Today I spent time setting up my Wacom tablet on Linux so I could try that. I’ll explain what I did tomorrow. It isn’t as straight forward to set up a tablet on Linux as it is on Windows and Mac. It wasn’t that hard, though. Once I got my tablet round the right way (!) it functions really well and was very responsive. I can write almost normally on it and better than on Windows or my Mac. I could even do a little drawing. More proof that Linux Mint 17.2 is visually stunning.

Animated whiteboard presentations

This is my first attempt , so go easy on me. I wanted to show you how easy this app is to use. It’s a paid app called Elevator Pitch. It cost about 2.40 AUD. It is not a top of the range whiteboard animation app for scribing like VideoScribe. The latter comes with all the bells and whistles and runs on a computer or a tablet. Elevator Pitch is for the iPad and I can see some people would be able to use their iPhones to produce animated whiteboard presentations.It’s an entry level app for visual outlining. I was up and running in a couple of minutes.The time line at the bottom is very easy to follow and you can swap the elements around if you want to. You can add your own images, use supplied clip art and then you type in the text and choose the presentation styles. It has no sound element which does not worry me at all. I am a beginner at this animated whiteboard presentation skill and I shall need to progress in my own way.Not having sound means I don’t have to worry about it while I am getting the text and visual elements in place.  The little video you make saves to the camera roll on the iPad and then I saved that to Dropbox. It saves as a .mov so it can be imported into a video programme for enhancement, sound, other added video elements. I put my presentation into Movie Maker because it is very quick to make a presentation. This one is just to start the year in my classes and get students who have done French before to introduce themselves quickly. More fun than writing a list of expressions on the board. I can show my video and then we can do a bit of  practice. The movie I made with Elevator Pitch itself lasts 20 seconds and is on my iPad, so if ever I want to do a quick refresher of the expressions in class all I have to do is go to my camera roll. This is going to be a great way for me to cover basic expressions and language patterns and quickly revise things we have learned. The only downside was that it appears to have no support for accented characters. Not even if I used the French keyboard.