I was fortunate enough to get to participate in Austin Peay’s Innovative Professor Conference earlier this week in Clarksville, Tennessee. This was my first trip to conference and first time visiting the APSU campus – both were absolutely amazing! I had a wonderful time getting to meet both new and old friends, talk about various methods of creating content for iOS devices, and discuss the importance of mobile devices and the future of education.
I will be writing some longer posts over the next few days with some additional materials from my talks at the conference, but I wanted to go ahead and get the presentation slides posted in case anyone was looking for them!
Creating Content for iOS Devices
This session discussed several different ways of creating content for Apple mobile devices - from HTML and CSS to native application development using Objective-C. I used the development of the D2L Instructor Quick Reference app as a basis for discussing the pros and cons of each method. Click here to download a PDF of the presentation slideshow.
I ended up giving this presentation a couple of different times during the conference, but both sessions were relatively similar.
Remixing the Future of Education
My lunch talk focused on the rise of mobile devices, why they matter, and how they will change the way we teach and learn. The first part of the talk discussed mobile statistics and suggested that mobile devices are the first truly “personal computers” in the history of computing. The second part of the talk discussed several methods of remixing existing content to be more “mobile friendly.” Click here to download a PDF of the presentation slideshow.
Please feel free to leave any questions, suggestions, etc. in the comments area below. Feel free to check back in the next few days for more links and source code from both of those presentations.
I recently returned from D2L’s annual Fusion Conference, which was held in Denver, Colorado this year. In addition to a great location, there were several exciting product announcement in the mobile area that really caught my attention. I am particularly interested in the REST web services API that I believe is slated for release along with 9.4 in October.
Audrey and I presented a poster session on some of the ways we are enhancing faculty training using mobile technology including:
- The D2L Quick Reference app for instructors, which has already been discussed on this blog.
- Embedding QR codes in training resources.
- A new iOS app I’ve been working on that automatically downloads workshop handouts, links, and other resources when launched. You can find out more about the initiative by reading our post on the ETS blog!
Rather than a traditional poster, we decided to simplify things a bit by bringing only a QR code that linked to a mobile-optimized web page with the poster details. Not surprisingly, the poster drew quite a few visitors!
Lia and I stuck around the area for a few days after the conference was over and had an amazing time touring breweries, hiking in the Rocky Mountains National Forest, and just hanging out together. Take a look at some of the pictures from our trip on my Flickr page!
On April 19 I offered a beginning iPhone application development training session at Walters State Community College. We started off by discussing some of our favorite mobile applications, then jumped right in to a discussion on what’s needed to develop apps for iOS devices. We ended the first part of the day by making our app icons and splash screen in Photoshop, taking a quick tour of X-Code, and covering the basics of Objective-C. We built something similar to the D2L Quick Reference app in the session after lunch; adding an extra media player and removing the shake features and settings screen.
This was the first time I’ve taught an iOS development workshop so I wasn’t really sure how things would work out. All things considered, I think the day went fairly well. We actually finished a majority of the app even though I had to take some shortcuts towards the end of the day to get all of the functionality in place. Driving home from the event, however, I realized that this sort of training would probably be much better suited for a series of blog posts or video tutorials than a full day of training – especially for folks that have never launched X-Code or developed in Objective-C before.
This summer I’ll be spending some time developing materials for an upcoming course I’m teaching on mobile web design (more on that later), and I think that would also be a great time to get started on a series of iPhone dev tutorials. My thinking is that the tutorials would be presented weekly and guide tech-savvy educators and instructional technologists through the entire process of developing an app from an idea sketched on paper to preparation of submission to the app store. At this point I don’t know exactly what app I would want to build, but I definitely want to keep it simple – maybe a training app or some sort of e-book app. Or I could even go through the app we built in the original session. Anyway, I’d love to know what you think. Feel free to leave your comments or suggestions below!
