Agreed, Stephen.
At the show, I couldn't even find any information about mac
compatibility. That's very weird. Many schools have invested in macs
as they have the reputation to encourage more creative activities.
But all whiteboard applications were run on PCs. As if they expect
the teacher to be fluent with both platforms.
That's quite interesting. All stands with plenty of pupils around or
taking parts in various activities like creating podcasts on the
show, or on the stand with the two kids I spoke with, they were all
filled with Macs.
Then all these whiteboard applications where that's about a student
listening and sometimes pressing on the key of a multibutton keypad,
they were running on PCs.
Sure, these whiteboard applications are a lot more interactive than
before. Sure, they allow students to better visualise some problems
(there was a nice mathematical problem of transporting 50 pupils from
one point to another in a tractor who could only hold 4 at a time,
where you could put pupils in the tractor, get the tractor moving,
drop down the pupils at the end and start again).
But it is possible to do *a lot* better than this. The idea of chat
is good. Pity the absence of way to easily input text is a bit of a
hurdle. But there are other teaching situations that you can imagine
where students would collaboratively solve a problem, by manipulating
objects on the screen. Revolution would be such a nice software to
develop such applications.
Then there is something else that should be done with revolution. But
this thing, I was told that if I was to do it, I would become
millionaire. Who wants to share a million? What is your guess?
Marielle
<gripe>
One thing that ticks me off about software merchants that often in
their ignorance or arrogance, they NEVER mention WHAT PLATFORM their
software will run on, as if Windoze was the only game in town. Then
if one is possibly interested in the utility or app, one has to
laboriously plow through the advertising, web sites and pdfs to find
out.
It turns out that both of these links lead to products that have some
level of mac compatibility, but it took a bit of time to find out. At
Promethean, the only clue was an icon for Mac OS 9 (smiling mac)
which would indicate system 9. No MAC OS X logo was seen. For both
there was absolutely no Macintosh version information. You see what I
mean?
For such companies that seem to do this, I tend to want to go
somewhere else.
</gripe>
------------------------------------------------
Marielle Lange (PhD), http://widged.com
Bite-size Applications for Education
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