Apps for Real Time Collaboration

It seems that I hear more and more about folks wanting to use the iPads to help students put together group projects. So, sharing files becomes a bigger issue. Google documents work for a wide variety of real time collaboration apps, but they don't have much in the way of free form drawing and white board functions. A while ago, I  wrote briefly about using Conceptboard via Google Drive for multiple user brainstorming. Since then, I have bumped into the feature rich app, collaborative drawing app, You Doodle Pro which I wrote about in an earlier blog. However, I had hoped to be able to find something free that allowed multiple users to draw, type, and add photos without having to take turns. 

Just a warning... I've tried these out using two test iPads, but I haven't tried them actually in the classroom yet (except for Baiboard), so I'm not sure how they'll function in bigger groups. Let me know what you find out. :)

1. Talkboard. Basic drawing tools (pen, brush, fountain pen, and eraser). Good color choices. Login via Google and share easily via Bluetooth. The time delay between drawing on your iPad and seeing it on another is minimal. Smooth, clean, easy interface, and drawing on it feels good  especially with a stylus. If you want something simple that does its job well, I really liked this one.

Drawbacks: limited color palette and tools for the artists. No text boxes. No ability to import images. This is just for drawing together.

Here's what it looks like.

2. Baiboard. This one adds in more complexity with more features (generally), and you invite people to meetings via Bluetooth including a password if you wish. You can type, draw shapes, add images, and use clip art. However, the actually drawing tools are more limited than Talkboard with fewer colors and pen choices. 

Here's a sample board.

 

You start a meeting on a new board using "Start Meet."

You can also export and share in a variety of other ways.

   

This one seemed to be a really nice, all purpose collaboration app, with more flexibility than Talkboard. However, Talkboard did have better drawing tools. 

3. Share Anytime. This one got some really good reviews, has free and paid versions, and is as much a note taking organizer as a collaborative app. It has file structures and cloud services that the others lack. You get decent drawing tools, similar to Baiboard, clip art, inserting pictures and web pages, and a laser pointer. 

Its user interface is solid, but a bit more complicated to set up meetings with others since you need to email them an invitation (see below).

The initial downside is that it does require creating a cloud account with the company which takes a bit of time to activate. Not a huge deal, but it does take some time to get a student up and running. Once up, though, you get synced files that are stored in the cloud. The pro version (which I haven't bought) adds handwriting recognition and meeting organization tools but may require a purchased service plan.

I'm sure there are other apps out there for collaboration, and I'd love to hear what folks have found. 

For me, it looked like Baiboard was the sweet spot for versatility and simplicity of use. If you need better pen tools, Talkboard is worth a look unless you really want the full scale graphics manipulation in You Doodle Pro. Share Anytime looked solid, as well, especially if you want the cloud sync.

Normal app requisition procedures would apply. Enjoy!

You Doodle Pro: Drawing, Editing, and Sharing

Drawing, photo, and collage apps for the iPad are all over the place, and each person has their favorites. I certainly wouldn't contest your choice, and I'd love to hear what they are and why you like a special app best. I am certainly no artist, but I'd like to offer for your consideration an app that I just bumped into (temporarily for free, regularly $2 or so depending on options purchased) called You Doodle which comes in free and pro versions.

First off, there are TONS of photo editing, collaging, pen, shape, filter, frame, and stamp tools available. You have control of both background and foreground and can work with them separately or merge them together. The feature list can look overwhelming, but they've done a pretty good job of keeping the interface clean so you only have to work with the features you want. Except for some very specific tools in some if my specialty art apps, I saw everything I'd expect or want. Here's a snapshot, but there is a lot more info on the App Store.

What really caught my eye in the features list, though, was the ability to connect to other iPads via Bluetooth (Draw with Friends above) which is available in the pro version. I got to try the pro version for free through Apps Gone Free. There's lots of potential here for group projects of all kinds, and we're always looking for ways to streamline collaboration, for the students and ourselves. The way it works is you start up a drawing and host a session to which you can invite neighbors. In order to receive invitations, you need to have 'accept invitations' turned on.

Once the session is up, host and guests can see the drawing, but the host iPad retains drawing control until another user asks for it. Only one user can have control of the drawing tools at a time, but everyone sees the changes. See below for a quick one I did with my 5 year old daughter using an iPad and an iPad mini. The red bar at the bottom tells me I don't have control of the drawing tools.



There is also a chat window for the session (which I don't believe is automatically saved, but one could always screenshot it).

At first, I was disappointed that only one person could draw at a time, but given the large numbers of tools, it makes sense that multiple artists at the same moment would be unwieldy. Also, taking turns probably makes for a more structured discussion.

Just recently in biology, we had a mini project that involved a group of students building a food web together. I wish we had had this app at the time because it would have streamlined the group work. As an interesting aside, once you have downloaded the picture to link into the session as a guest, it remains in your copy of the app even when you disconnect from the session. So, a group could work on part of a drawing together. Then, each person would have a copy of the group's work that could be developed further by the individuals after the group session was over.

One caveat... As far as I could tell, the app doesn't save multiple work files, and you get one drawing at a time. So, if you have unsaved work on the screen and you join a session, I think the original work is lost. Ditto if you don't save your work. So, I think all work has to be completed in one continuous session, though you can certainly reload your picture from the photo album (although layers don't seem to get saved), and your drawing isn't lost if you close the app and reopen it. (If someone knows how to save the file in a form that saves the layers, please tell me!)

Overall, this is a neat app that I look forward to exploring a lot more thoroughly and can see lots of classroom applications to try with it. Anyone know of similar apps without some of the minor drawbacks?

Normal app requisition procedures would apply.

Starting with an App: The Cuban Missile Crisis et al.

Most of the apps I've dealt with so far have been general purpose apps, so I've been pretty much ignoring the wide variety of subject specific apps that are available on a huge variety of topics. At first glance, they seem like just a collection of resources - pictures, video, documents about a single topic. Though specific, they can be really good introductory material for a unit or a nice collection of common resources for a class to use as the starting point for a research project. Here are just a few examples.

"To The Brink" is a nicely organized, engaging collection of pictures, documents, and video about the Cuban Missle Crisis.

The "NASA" app has a whole wealth of information about NASA missions, past and present including launch schedules, sighting opportunities, video, and news.

"Explore Shakespeare" (paid app) offers students an easy entrance to the world of Shakespeare supplying analysis and context.



"Creatures of Light" is based on an American Museum of Natural History exhibit about bioluminescent creatures with neat videos, maps, and lots of 'gee whiz' photos. There are interactive activities, too, but it is mainly a fun, pretty comprehensive look at the different kinds of organisms that make their own light.

The list of interesting, specialized apps goes on and on, and one obvious question is what to do with them in the classroom. One thought would be to use the app to generate questions. In one sense, the app functions as a reserve cart in the library which is available to every student at the same time, leading to higher resource accessibility for your students. It can also serve as a basis for simulations of historical events, at least in the case of To The Brink. Mostly, they become part of a student's personal library of resources that is easy to use and locate. 

These apps are fun to browse and mostly free, but I wasn't exactly sure how they could be used effectively in the classroom in ways that a curated web collection could not be. Ideas, anyone? Or is this just another way to get (often free) content on the iPad?

PaperHelper: Approaching MultiTasking

By experience and training, I am fundamentally a PC user, so becoming one with my iPad has involved a lot of adjustment on my part. Now, though, I'm getting to the point where I sometimes try to poke my laptop screen to try get it to do something. I use the iPad all the time for organization, content creation, and virtually every aspect of my teaching day.

One bit about using a PC (or a Mac, for that matter) that I really, truly, do miss still is the ability to have two or more totally separate applications running in different windows but visible at the same time. Whether it is Word and Excel, Word and Chrome, or Excel and Micrograde, I almost always have more than one application up and running, and I like to see them at the same time.

Apparently, true multitasking isn't possible because of some limitations in iOS that I don't really understand. However, I bumped into a neat little utility called PaperHelper. For $2 (though I got it on sale for $0), you get a reasonably featured word processor that exists side-by-side with a browser window.

The tabbed browser (on the right) is simple, but it seemed to do the trick for me.

The word processor is better than it at first appears with reasonable formatting capabilities. Things that it has: DropBox compatibility, font and size changes, an on-board sketch pad (I didn't see how to insert the drawings into the paper.), dictionary, microphone, alarm (I wasn't sure what one would use this for.), and a citation utility (not EasyBib, but functional). Things that it doesn't have (that I could find): inserting images, bold/underline/strikethrough, tab control, and bullets.

Personally, I could see really using this to compose an initial draft of a paper in its formative stages when you're using the Internet all the time for searching and references. For any heavy duty formatting, you'll probably want to export the document to Pages or a computer's word processing program for final editing.

P.S. There are also a couple of apps available that give you two browser windows that you can see at the same time. If anyone finds other apps of this type, I'd love to see them!

The app goes on sale for free and is regularly $1.99. Normal app procedures would apply.