iPods in Classrooms. I'm in!

This young lad makes a great case for iPods in classroom. I know I'm all for it. I wish our kids bought these instead of the TI83s we force them to in Math.

Moodle needs an iPhone app

I love Moodle. Use it daily. Now I have an iPod, and love it too. It's time to get this great piece of hardware together with this awesome software. I've posted as much to moodle.org, but I'm not getting any traction. So if you have an ipod/iphone please let your voice be heard, run over to moodle.org and post your opintion. Here is the thread where I've been posting these thoughts;

moodle thread on mobile moodle an the iphone.

Thanks.

Picasa 3.5 Rewards Procrastinators

I've used a lot of picture apps over the years. Most do the job. They organize, create folders, do small touch ups, and add tags. Picasa has always been amoung the best. Add free and an easy way to upload and share over the web, and I've been using using it as my main stay for years.

One thing I've been meaning to do though is to tag my pictures with the names of who is in them. Now I have no excuse. The new picasa 3.5 adds face recognition. The cool thing is it works. Start by naming a few sample pictures, then let Picasa run through your whole collection. If you are like me, it may take a while to eat through the 10s of thousands of pictures. But it will. I suggest checking in on it every hour or so. Remove the few miss-identified pictures and then confirm all. After a few hundred examples for a face it gets very, very good. It even recognizes a wide age range amoung kids.

Aside from simply being amazing, I was surprised at how much fun it was. It was a real blast to scroll through the dozens than 100s of pictures it found of my son or daughter. Seriously, this technology should not be missed. Get and use it. Amazing.

http://picasa.google.ca/

Need Bible software, look no further

I usually endorse free or open source. However, these guys recently earned any endorsement I can come up with. Here is the story;

About 2 months ago I finally purchase the NIV study bible for my PALM. I had been using various free bible packages and a very old one I purchased years back, but none of them had the NIV. Then i purchased an iPod touch and said goodbye to my LifeDrive (a very tough move). Of course now, I was lacking an NIV bible, again.

But wait. Laridian sent out an email explaining a new feature they have. Once you purchase a bible with them, they will allow you to change plateforms AT NO COST. That's incredible, and I started to get excited since I they built the software my PALM NIV was running on. An email to their tech support and they explaine how.

Then the trouble. It would not work. In a series of emails I discovered that my software came from Laridian, but the right to the NIV was purchased straight from Zondervan, not these guys. So I'm sad. They encourage me to contact Zondervan, and that they would like to help, but can't. Then, after no response from Zondervan and some time, I get an unsolicited email from their tech support. They've researched the product more closely and found that I do have the right to the content. They explain how, and now .... NIV on the iPod.

Now that's customer service and they have certainly earned my next electronic bible purchse. Thanks Laridian!