The Educated Kiwi
fun
iPad Guitar Amp
Aug 23rd
Was just looking at guitar amp apps for the iPad and found a cool peripheral and app from ikmultimedia. If anyone has given this a go let me know before I drop NZ$95 + NZ$25 for the app but it does look very cool.
While I was looking around I also found this:
Facebook Apology
Jun 17th
I have to say after watching this video I did feel a bit like the complaining about privacy is a bit rich considering that people pay nothing for Facebook. We all like privacy but then you can’t blame the company for wanting to make more money can you?
Four Chord Song
Jun 10th
A little light relief. Australian comedy group ‘Axis Of Awesome’ perform a sketch from the 2009 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Footage courtesy of Network Ten Australia.
See http://www.axisofawesome.net/ for more details of the comedy trio including Jordan Raskopoulos, Lee Naimo, & Benny Davis.
Virtual haircut
Oct 30th
Nat came home today and told me about the virtual haircut well worth a look. It had me reaching out to see if there was someone there. I can only imagine what this will do for gaming and the movies some day.
Exam Room Cricket
Sep 12th
And so we come to the time of the year where we have to supervise exams. You can’t do marking, you can’t surf the internet on your phone, what’s left? Well being stuck in the hall again I have decided on cricket. The international rules are as follows:
Happy Examining
How much work do we do versus how much time we have.
Jul 30th
So at present my class are working on Achievement Standard 1.1, History Research. For this they have two weeks, Four class periods for research in which I have booked the library and laptops and then a week by themselves. As always I feel that this graph accurately shows how busy they are given the fact that two weeks must seem like an eternity to a teenager. The graph was created with Crappy Graphs which I find very funny, especially given that I am known for drawing crappy maps in class.
So now I await my students finished projects and I’m again left wondering. If I gave them two days to complete this how different would the result be? Just how many hours make up a good task?
Borneo – Travelog
Jul 30th
Now for something totally non IT related.
Recently I blogged about travelling to Borneo unplugged. Usually I don’t get into promoting travel destinations but this last trip was a little different.
We took our 6yr old twins with us on their first ‘adventure tourism’ jaunt so it was very cool seeing things through their eyes and I asked them when we got home “what where their favourite bits of the trip” …as they lined up with mine I decided to share them:
- Visiting Selingan Turtle Island, snorkeling with reef fish and staying overnight to watch Green turtles come in and lay their eggs and then watch a release of baby turtles ..laid 45 days before. This was also really special as we got to see and be involved with anatural turtle hatching during the day (somehing basically unheard of) …very cool see video here
- Visiting the Sepelok Orangatuan Rehabilitation centre …where we watched the Orangatuans be feed .got watched by another and ‘adopted‘ a baby one for the princely sum of $90 NZ a year!
- Taking a boat ride up the Kinabatangan river to see Probiscis monkeys and lots of other wildlife and staying overnight up in the jungle itself.
- Going into the Gomantong cave and seeing the bats, and swallows and watching mum freak out about the guano and the cochroaches!
- Swimmimg at the Sepilok Jungle Resort in 34degrees while Dad and Mum had a beer
…and it was so damm cheap !!(and I felt safer than in Auckland) $3000 for 6 days for 4 people …including all food, drinks accommodation and travel ..if you are interested in this sort of experience I would really reccomend it and I must make a plug for our guide for the six days as he was great and looked after our family. His contact details are below if you would like to contact him directly for a customised tour:
Casey Omar Zulkarnai
Nature Tour Guide
mar_cassey@yahoo.com
Travelling ‘Unplugged’
Jul 27th
Well back a week from 12 day family holiday in Brunei and Borneo. I made the decision the day before I left that I was going to go ‘unplugged’ …i.e first time in years I wasn’t going to take a laptop …shock ….horror!! Really couldn’t be bothered with having to go through the scanning, on, off etc at each airport. So I loaded up my iPhone with useful apps told all my friends I would be offline for 12 days and away we went.
I learn’t a few things while away …
1. iPhones are marvelous ..kept up with twitter, kept up with news on the net, laughed at the weather back here, talked with friends on skype ….in fact more connected than at home!
2. I had some significant misconceptions re how easy it would to be online in Borneo ….I got off the plane ..full 3G coverage (thank goodness I’d turned off data roaming ..$10 per MB would have killed the bank balance) …Both in Brunei and Sabah Malaysia every resturant we went into had free wifi ….something I never thought would be the case ..just showed my misunderstanding really.
3. We have lousy phone signal here in NZ. We drove 3.5 hours up into the interior of Borneo up to the Kinabatangan River then went up the river for 1.5 hours to view the wildlife (Probiscis Monkeys, Wild Oranguatuans etc) and my phone STILL had signal …in fact I had to turn it off so it didn’t scare the wildlife and I so I didn’t get thrown overboard!! ..I still lose signal as I travel from Home to school each day (it must be more remote!!).
So next time I’m looking forward to a another laptop free trip !!
iPhone apps my Daughter loves
Jun 20th
Recently Rylee has taken to playing a memory game on abcya.com, she does however find the multiple button mouse difficult so we were thinking about how cool a touch screen would be. I then remembered a review of some of the toddler games for the iPhone OS and to be fair I was amazed with the variety of different games available on the platform.
The touch interface is fantastic for her and I was amazed how quickly she started arranging the words and letters in the correct order. The following video is the two apps that I have brought first.
I did read some interesting comments on the review page of people saying how toddlers using an iPhone was the downfall of society but I think these people need a reality check. Rylee can play the games for about ten minutes and then we do something else. There is no need to hide her from technology when her whole life will be surrounded by it. I mean just imagine if I took the iPhone off Mrs van Dijk after only ten minutes, now thats addiction.
Everlong
Jun 16th
I downloaded the guitar tab (sheet music for guitar) for “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters about 2 years ago now. It’s one of those songs that I love, especially the acoustic version, but every time I try and play it I put it back in the “too hard basket”. It also happens to be one of the songs on Guitar Hero World Tour which I score quite highly on guitar and that prompted me to have another go on the real guitar.
I have basically taught myself guitar recently from downloading tabs of songs I know and trying to replicate them but without having any proper tuition sometimes I am stumped. Then it occurred to me to go to YouTube for a guitar lesson and no kidding, I was playing Everlong within about half an hour. Even my wife said it sounded good.
I picked up a couple of key points from the video. Firstly I needed to tune my E string down to D and boy did that make life easier. Most importantly the teacher talks about holding shapes with your fingers on the frets. Trying to apply numbers and fingers and frets from a diagram is hard but when the guy says make this shape with your fingers, then move it here, then here it all becomes clearer.
I could go on to apply lots of profound educational speak about the way people learn but take whatever meaning you like from this. Instead I encourage everyone to learn a musical instrument using the internet and I hope you get as much satisfaction as I do.
The Playstation 3 is for Educational Research Dear…
Apr 23rd
Yeah Right!
These days you have to keep up with the kids. Ironically Playstation was the first console to be marketed at 20 somethings with expendable income hence its success and the playstation 3 is no exception with its price tag. I bit the bullet and the GE money genie bought me a PS3 and Guitar Hero World Tour (with guitar, drums and mic) on tick. After some hard practicing I took the gear round to Richards house for an evening of home made wine and rock and roll.
The game itself is fairly straight forward, choose an instrument, skill level and a song, play individual or as a band and away you go. Beginner skill level just requires you to keep a beat with the strum bar (guitar) or tapping a beat on any part of the drum kit and if you have never done it before even this is quite challenging for an entire song. Crank it up to easy and it gets quite intense with medium almost impossible without considerable practice.
Playing as an individual is great fun but playing as a band is even better and if someone makes too many mistakes then the band gets booed off the stage. I even had a go at playing drums and singing at the same time Phil Collins style which was extremely challenging but I managed to get to the end of Band on the Run.
Of course with a room consisting of 75% teachers we saw huge educational value amongst all of the fun and thoughts wander to how it may be used in a classroom. We also wandered if we could hook the wireless drum kit up to Garage Band and sure enough you can – just download Gamepad Companion and map the drum pads to keystrokes and use it with the on screen keyboard to play the drums on your mac. And even though the guitar playing isn’t as authentic as the drums, as a guitar player myself I could see it helping with strumming patterns, rhythm and muscle control (especially little finger fretting which I tend to avoid).
There are a whole lot of skills involved in this game and it is one of the few games that doesn’t annoy me when I get killed. Maybe it is because there are some great rock songs, we all certainly found the drumming very satisfying and decided that it was more fun than singstar because of the team element.
I would love to see one hooked up to a projector in a music department with students learning to appeciate good rock music instead of that crap they listen to these days.
Shape Collage
Feb 22nd
Another gem from Lifehacker.com, Shape Collage is a free download and works on Mac and Windows. On the Mac I just dragged a bunch of photos from iPhoto into Shape collage and a few clicks later I had a collage. Does what it says on the tin.
Apple Turnover
Feb 21st
iPod Touch part 2
Sep 21st
In reply to question of why the iPod Touch over the iPhone? Simple – I already own a Nokia N95 which has a far better camera and dvd quality video, video calling etc. I would love to only have one device but those times are a little way off yet, I will go so far as to predict that the 4th gen iPhone will be the all in one device.
Back to the iPod touch. One of the first things I did when I set it up was to sync it with my mobile me account. I have been using .mac for a couple of years now, primarily with iWeb and more recently .mac gallery for uploading photos and video of our daughter to keep the grandparents happy on the other side of the world. As a result of the sync I found my address book, calendar, bookmarks and mail all on my iPod adding my other mail accounts was a breeze through iTunes.
If you don’t want to fork out the NZ $180 for mobile me I am pretty certain you can sync your gmail and google calendar fairly easily.
The ability to check email anywhere around the school is great but I could do that on my N95. Where the iPod Touch comes into its own is the ease of which it is to write a reasonable amount of text. Writing a reply on the N95 is a laborious task with the number pad whereas the touch keyboard and predictive text on the iPod is far better.
On the fun side, and the only app I have bought so far, is Super Monkey Ball, a game in which you tilt the device to control the direction of the monkey in the ball to navigate mazes, obstacles and bananas. It is very addictive and highlights the intuitive use of motion as an input as with the Nintendo Wii and if you visit the App Store most of the top downloads are games.
One app which I am looking forward to trying is Air Mouse which is currently only available for windows. The application uses the accelerometer and wifi to control the mouse on the computer for presentations.
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