OnLive -- a better Office on the iPad?

Onlive Desktop is a new app for handling Microsoft Office documents. It is fast, it is sleek, but there are two reasons to wait: getting any document into or out of Onlive Desktop is a pain in the neck, and it is not at all clear if Onlive will survive Microsoft's licensing challenge. For more info, check out OnLive's train wreck: Office on the iPad and First look: OnLive Desktop Plus.

 

OneNote on iPad?

There is no good news for OneNote devotees. Your choices are the newly-released OneNote app by Microsoft, Outline app by Aqrate Software, or Mobile Noter for iPad. Outline allows viewing of any OneNote files in Dropbox, but does not allow editing. Microsoft's app syncs to cloud storage via your LiveID, but you can only edit the typed text part of the note; any handwritten notes are not only not-editable, they are not even displayed -- they show up as "[ink]". MobileNoter is free only for 30 days; after that you need to pay $15/yr if you want sync functionality. MobileNoter does not allow you to edit existing OneNote notebooks, just view them. [3/11/2012 Correction, thanks to oblacksmith: MobileNoter does allow viewing and editing existing OneNote notebooks. I still don't think this app is worth using since there are a lot of complaints in the reviews.]

So, what do you do if you have copious handwritten notes and like OneNote? To be honest, I do not know. There are good iPad apps for handwritten notetaking, but they do not have versions for Windows or Mac. Evernote exists on all the devices, but its support for handwritten notes via Skitch is kludgy, at best.  

Up to 5GB of additional free space on Dropbox

You can get up to 5GB of additional free space on Dropbox for trying their current beta version. I installed it on 2 machines with no troubles. The details are in their forum post forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=54396&replies=243. It is "beta" software, so be sure to make a copy of your current Dropbox content before installing the new version. Once you install it, just attach a camera or a flash drive with photos and choose "Dropbox" in Autoplay dialog. For every 500MB of photo/video content you let Dropbox upload this way, you get 500MB free space (up to 5GB total). After Dropbox is done uploading, you can delete any of this extra content.

Running a survey

If you want to create a survey, there are a number of good options. Google Forms works well if you are already using Google. If you want an alternative, I just found an excellent online tool that definitely beats polldaddy.com (which has previously been my favorite) by miles. It is kwiksurveys.com.

How my tablet and Dragon Dictation helped me stop procrastinating and write those interims already...

After sharing my experience with Dragon Dictation and interims with Dina recently, she invited me to blog about it.  I found the app to be very helpful but recognize that everyone works differently. If your biggest stumbling block with writing interims or comments is facing the dreaded BLANK PAGE, or you find yourself procrastinating up until the last few days, this may help:



I found that on the friday evening before interims were due, I had a pile of student work in front of me and lots of things to say about my students' progress, but kept struggling to sit down and just write. So I decided to give a dictation app a try. I had seen Jim Jordan use Dragon Dictation with some success, so I downloaded it and tried recording my thoughts. I figured out pretty quickly that I'd need to speak pretty slowly, and that felt awkward at first. But after a few paragraphs I had relatively few typos or misspellings. All you do is open the app, start recording, and once you're done you can copy and paste the text into a word processing program (I used Pages on my iPad).

The big bonus was that after a couple of hours of relatively stress-free work (just having a chat with your iPad really doesn't feel like hard work), I had a (VERY ROUGH) rough draft for most of my students. There was a lot of editing that needed to be done, but I'd gotten past my own worst hurdle, that first draft. Even substantial editing seemed easy to do, since mentally I was over that anxiety-inducing first step.

Drawbacks:
1. If you do this in public you may feel some concerned stares. You'll be talking to your tablet, and talking to it as though it's a non-native English speaker... Oh and you're a robot.
2. as far as I can tell dragon dictation has no understanding of punctuation pauses make no difference there's no capitalization at the beginning of a sentence you'll want to skim through the text soon after recording to make sure you can make sense of it
3. The software has some trouble with proper nouns, "Kate" and "Steve" were recognized. But it tried to translate "Aurelio" into "I really own". Easy enough to fix unless you have lots of students with similar and unusual names... and don't check your text as mentioned in drawback #2
4. Typos do occur, most will show up as such in pages so you can find them and fix them quickly. Some make it through not as a misspelling but just as the wrong word. For example, I commented on some of my students' reflections about the process of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, or "fracking" for short. I let you imagine what came up instead of "excellent job on your fracking paper...."

Turnitin's effectiveness

Interesting post on efficacy of Turnitin as a plagiarism detector: Plagiarize From Behind The Paywall.

A longer and more thought-provoking piece on this subject: (Moral) Hazards of Scanning for Plagiarists: Evidence from Shoplifting.

Bottom line: putting all your faith in Turnitin's effectiveness as a plagiarism detector is fool-hearty.