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Classroom Management Apps for the iPad

Posted on April 27, 2011 9:08 PM by Peter Kupfer Comment
Today someone on the physics modeling list serv asked for an app for a tablet with the following abilities:
- Allow me to create a seating chart showing student names and photos.
- For each student, I could click the photo and get a drop-down menu with user-created options (mine would be “on task,” “off task,” and “Notes”–the notes button would open an editing box where I could type notes).
- Each time a mark/comment was made, the date and time of the comment would be recorded in the database.
- I could then generate reports periodically with a summary of how many times each student received each mark.
- It would be nice if I could export points earned into a text file for importing into my grading program.
Two other important requirements that I realized after starting my research were that I wanted to be able to import my class lists from a csv file and I needed to be able to separate the classes by period as opposed to one long list.

I had wanted a similar application for my iPad, but I hadn’t really put any effort into finding one. So, I set out to evaluate the different classroom management type apps for the iPad.

As I started investigating I found that there were couple of themes categories that the apps fit into:
- Random Picker/Seating Chart Apps — There are several apps that are designed to just pick students at random from your class list.
- Just Attendance Apps — Several of these apps are just for attendance taking and possible seating charts.
- Behavior Tracking — Not necessarily designed for grades but usually for attendance and also student behavior and consequences.
- Full Grade Book/Management Apps — These apps includes the features of the others and then also function as grade books. They vary by the grade level they seemed designed for.
Random Picker/Seating Chart Apps

Pupil Picker was the first random picker app that I came across. It has a very simple interface and serves one purpose, to randomly pick students to answer questions in class. Pupil Picker wins some points because it offers a free version to test. In using that free version one drawback I found was that you could not import a class list from a csv file or from a spreadsheet. The author says that you can bring the students in if they are in a group in your contacts, but I don’t have any groups in my contacts and for some reason I can’t currently open my contacts, so I can’t test that. Another nice feature is that it allows you to mark whether the student answered the question correctly or not. This could work for the purpose of monitor productivity in a lab, but you can only pull the student up at random, you can’t pick a student from the list which would make monitor productivity difficult at times. Ultimately, this app does what it says and it seems to do it well.

Attendance Apps

Attendance is an app that is simply designed for taking attendance. The app costs $5, which seems excessive for just taking attendance when there are some cheaper alternatives, so I didn’t test it. The description says that you can important class lists and export the attendance data back out to a spreadsheet via iTunes or Dropbox. The program supports pictures and allows you to select random students to answer questions. You can see a video of the app here.

Smart Seat is an app that takes attendance, but its true calling is as your a seating chart making app. I have long wanted a program that would make a random seating chart for any OS and this app does this simply. I like to change seats every unit, so the geek in me wishes that it had the ability to save the old seating charts for comparison and I would be ecstatic if it kept track of who a student sat next to before and tried to randomize with that as a constraint, but that is probably a bit much. The official website says that you can import students names from a csv file but the app doesn’t support pictures. The app allows you keep different charts for each section or your course and to select a random student to call on. If you are just looking for attendance and random student selection, this app looks cleaner and is cheaper than Attendance.

Behavior Tracking Apps

I tried to evaluate Teacher’s Toolkit by downloading the free lite version, but it crashed repeatedly on me.

Full Grade Book/Management Apps

TeacherPal at this point is the app that comes closest to the requirements stated above (plus it is free). With TeacherPal you can import your class list using a simple comma separated value (csv) file or add them manually. You can also add a picture to each student from your saved picture folder. Once you have set up your class, you can easily make a searing chart for your students by clicking on their face until it wiggles (like moving an app on your home screen) and putting it in place. You can add a picture of each student (as shown below) and you can then click on the student’s face in the seating chart to mark them absent. Additionally, TeacherPal has a simple and simple to use gradebook for recording scores. The gradebook can be export to a csv and into a spreadsheet for merging into other desktop electronic gradebooks.

Teacher’s Attaché – This seems like a nice app that takes attendance and does something with grades. The app is more geared towards a college classroom, in that it lacks a seating chart, so I didn’t invest the $5 to evaluate it. However, from the reviews, it would seem that this is a pretty nice app for college professors.

Teacher Tool One — Sounds like a great app, but it seems almost too powerful and with too many features. In work with the free version, I had a hard time completing simple tasks and determining how to assign grades and work with students. It seems to be written for a German school system and that it would integrate with some other kind of SMS. For a price tag of $30 for the full version, it seems like overkill for what I am looking for.

Teacher Assistant Lite — This application seems more designed for elementary education or special education teachers. The students can not be arranged by group or period. The application seems best suited to tracking behaviors as opposed to tracking grades or students participation in a class on a single day.
This entry was posted in Computers Share Teaching and tagged attendance iPad Teaching Bookmark the permalink
Changing your iPad, iTunes library to a new computer…

Posted on March 12, 2011 9:40 PM by Peter Kupfer 3 Comments

This is just a quick post to help anyone else who was the predicament I was in and can not find a straightforward solution. I found myself in a situation where I ended up with a fresh computer with no record of any iTunes files and wanted to get my iPad synced up again. Or, it was as if I was syncing my iPad to a new computer for the first time. There are dozens of sites with this question, but no clear answer. I didn’t care about my music or movies, because I still had all of that on my computer, what I was worried about was saving my app data (i.e. Angry Birds data, notes I had written, or drawings I had made.)

My concern arose because when you first plug your iPad into a new computer and start to try an sync it you get a very scary message.

Granted this pic is from the iPhone, not iPad, but the message is about the same. When it says the contents will be erased, that is quite alarming. So, I searched around the Internet for a while and very few people addressed the issue of apps when it came to this. Most people were worried about their music, but I don’t have a lot of music and any that I do I have on my computer already. So what to do?

The first thing I did was that I made sure that I did not sync my iPad at that time.

The first step you do want to take after you plug your iPad into the computer is to right-click on your devices name and select transfer puchases.

This ensures that all of your apps are copied off of you iPad and into the iTunes folder (a sub-folder of My Music on Windows PCs) so that if your iPad does get erased you are covered.

[adsense]

Next, I forced iTunes to backup my iPad. This turned out to really not be helpful or necessary but it made me feel better. To force iTunes to perform a full backup I went to C:\Documents and Settings\{your username}\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup and renamed the folder there to backup old. Then, in iTunes I checked (or unchecked) the box next to encrypt backup.

This will take a few minutes.

Now, having transferred your purchases and backed up your device, you can sync it. Tell it to erase all of your data and it will simple recopy your apps onto your iPad and all of your files and saved games will still be there. I did not expect this to happen, but that is what happened for me. My iPad is jailbroken so I had perform a tethered re-boot, but everything was still there. The only downside is that all of the apps are out of place and your folders will be gone, but that is easy enough to fix.

If something goes horribly wrong, you can restore from the backup you made, but this will reverse the process and you will still not be able to sync to your computer.

Also, I think, if you only tell it to sync apps it won’t touch the music on your iPad. This is what other sites seem to suggest, but I didn’t try. What I did try though, was that I synced some different videos with the iPad from my computer, and I got the message about erasing things, and the sync didn’t touch my apps. So, I would think that just syncing the apps wouldn’t touch whatever music you have on your device.

Hopefully this helps you feel comfortable with the switch. Basically, the message is a little bit of overkill, as long as you have the apps you need on your computer as well as the iPad already.

This entry was posted in Computers and tagged backup iPad iTunes library new computer sync Bookmark the permalink
Angry Birds & Physics

Posted on March 5, 2011 11:49 PM by Peter Kupfer 2 Comments

For a while I have been trying to think of ways to incorporate Rovio’s fantastic game Angry Birds into my physics class. On twitter today a tweet sent me to the Sweeny Math blog to a post about using Geogebra to analyze Angry Birds. In short Mr. Sweeny had his students analyze the trajectory of an Angry Birds launch (I think he must have done a screen shot post launch) and then let Geogebra find the curve fit of the line. Now, I have been working Geogebra this year and really find that it is a powerful program for analyzing mathematical systems, but I don’t know that it is best tool for analyzing an Angry Birds video.

For analyzing video in class (and for fun) we use a freeware program called Tracker. Tracker is a pretty amazing program especially considering software of this quality can cost a lot of money and still not be as good as Tracker is. I didn’t really have a project in mind, so I decided to jump into this analysis as an open-ended question which are becoming all the rage in science classes. So, I went to YouTube to download an Angry Birds video. (I downloaded the video using Easy YouTube Video Downloader which is a FireFox Add-On.)

The basic premise of Tracker is that you click on a spot of an object for every frame of a video and Tracker than turns the grid of the video into an x-y coordinate plane and can compute the displacement and velocity of an object. Here is how the Tracker screen looked after I finished clicking:

So, now I wanted to get some data. This is where Tracker is awesome.

So, these graphs show the shapes and relationships that we would expect from a projectile launch: Constant velocity in the x-direction and acceleration in the y-direction. However, now, I wanted to do some analysis of the accuracy of the program. So, from here I was going to treat this first video as a control and assume that it was correct. In order for Tracker to return numerical data the scale of the video has to be set so that the program knows how “large” each pixel should be.

I tried to find an object in the video that would always be the same and so I settled on one of the yellow birds. I adjusted the size of the bird until the slope of the Vy v. t graph was -9.81 which should the acceleration of gravity.

In order to test if other objects on the screen would follow the same behavior, I tracked the motion of one of the falling pigs.

So, the acceleration of the pig was the same as the yellow bird, so it seems to work out.

From here I’m not sure where I would go next, one problem I can see is that depending on the zoom of the level I don’t know if I could use the same size of the yellow bird consistently between videos. I think if I could zoom in the closest level in each video in the game then I could use the yellow bird size across videos. After writing this post, I found that A Professor of Physics at Southeastern Louisiana University tackled this same issue and came to similar conclusions, but didn’t really provide any revelations into the issue of zooming in on the bird. He did remind me Tracker’s ability to track motion of a panning video, which may help since all of the Rovio videos on YouTube start with the default zoom. He did try to include a little more quantitative analysis in his second Angry Bird’s analysis, but made the assumptions as before. (In case you haven’t seen enough, here is a similar analysis of Super Mario Brothers.)

The next experiment I want to try is to determine the mass of the birds. This video wouldn’t work well for it, but if you could assume the density of the rock barriers and then find the volume (find the height and width using the scale and the assume the depth) then you could find the mass of the rock barriers and using the conservation of momentum you could find the mass of the bird. I am sure there are other ways to go, but that would be a fun start.

Here is the final result:

This entry was posted in Computers Physics Share Teaching Video Games and tagged angry birds Geogebra Physics projectile motion tracker video analysis Bookmark the permalink
Really Apple? Videos and Photos are Separate on the iPad

Posted on February 24, 2011 12:06 PM by Peter Kupfer Comment

I like my iPad and overall I am overwhelmingly happy the portability and ease of use of the device. However, there are a few things that really need to be changed in the way it works. I Bethune feeling that a lot of these issues are because the OS is still really based on the iPhone structure and they haven’t adapted it well to the tablet yet.

Today’s frustration came when I downloaded ReelDirector and wanted to test out the video editing capabilities. As anyone who has tried know that the photo and video syncing is a bit of a chore in iTunes to begin with but now there is another layer of frustration.

I went to into ReelDirector and wanted to add a video. I clicked add and then selected photo/video but was only presented with my photo libraries.

At first I blamed ReelDirector buy on their site they clarify the issue:

I understand how to do that, but I don’t understand why Apple chooses to make me put movies in the photo directory? Why have a separate videos app and a separate way to sync videos if this is the option I am giving? I should just be able to store everything in GoodReader and open the files up wherever I want.

In any event, I will use the work around, but I hope Apple changes this.

This entry was posted in Computers Share and tagged GoodReader iOS iPad iTunes ReelDirector Bookmark the permalink
The Daily: Finally an iPad newspaper; but is it good enough?

Posted on February 12, 2011 9:51 PM by Peter Kupfer Comment

I was so excited yesterday with all the buzz surrounding the first iPad newspaper, The Daily, which was developed by Rupert Murdoch. The model of a daily newspaper delivered to my iPad each morning, like my podcasts are delivered to my Droid while I sleep, should be the model of the future. The Daily was not receiving high praise for most of the sites that review this sort of product, Mashable, TechCruch, and others, but with a two week free trial, and two snow days, I thought I would give it a try.

After downloading the daily and loading up my first issue I was still feeling like this was a good idea. Off the bat, I was surprised by the focus of the content. Rather than being heavy on news articles, the papers major focus seems to be on celebrity gossip and sports. On some levels this makes sense as any major news is covered in a much more timely fashion by live websites, but I was still a little surprised. Judge for yourself by the table of contents:

The other big draw of The Daily was supposed to be the media content. The pictures I see are very beautiful, especially on the iPad’s screen, but the quantity’s lacking. I loaded up the story about the blizzard in Illinois and there were only four pictures!

And there are videos also, but you can only view the videos if you are online. For me, and I’m guessing a lot of others, like those who might ride a train, being online is not an option. I would like to see an option to choose whether you want to use the space that the whole issue would take or to leave videos online.

The deal breaker for me though is the delivery method of the paper. I do not have 3G on my iPad and I am often in places that d not have free public wifi, so I can not download the episode on demand. I was hoping (and under the impression that) this paper would bushed to me each morning. It turns out that the episode won’t old until is start the app each day. And the, later when I open it agin in the same day, starts downloading another issue. This is not a newspaper, and really is the deal breaker for me. If it can’t be pushed onto my iPad it does me little good.

So, in the end, the idea of the daily is a good one, but it needs more work to become a solid app worth the one dollar week subscription fee.

This entry was posted in Computers Internet/Web 2.0 Reviews Share and tagged iPad newspaper Rupert Murdoch The Daily Bookmark the permalink
Moving my AT&T U-Verse Around: What I Learned

Posted on July 26, 2010 1:05 AM by Peter Kupfer 4 Comments

Original post on July 26th, 2010 with an update on June 15th, 2011.

We are currently remodeling (really just painting) our office to turn it into IKup’s new “Big Boy” room and this necessitated that we move our AT&T U-Verse gateway (router) to a different location. We decided to move it to the living room next to the TV which had several benefits for us. First it allows us to hook up our blue ray player in the living room to the Internet for streaming of movies and Pandora, second it allowed us to put the network printer in the kitchen and receive a strong enough signal for it to work.

However, we were left with a problem. We decided during all of this to add a TV and blue ray player to the bedroom in the back of the house, but now the gateway that sends the TV signals is in the front of house, instead of in the next room like before. The new LG BD570 Network Blu-Ray Disc Player was going to be hooked up via WiFi, so that just left the TV. This seemed simple enough.

Originally the the green wire from AT&T was running, through the basement, to the gateway in bedroom 2 and then I ran a coaxial cable through the basement back to the living room to the DVR. The set top box was connected via an ethernet cable to the gateway. (Original Picture) Everything worked wonderfully. So, I thought I should be able to put the gateway in the living room, run an ethernet cable to the DVR and then run the coaxial back through the basement to the set top box. (This is kind of what is pictured in the after picture below, but I didn’t draw a full floor plan of the failed attempt.) Here is a rough floor plan of before and after:

This was a fine idea, except what when I tried this setup, recorded shows did not show up on the box in the bedroom. In the U-Verse system you have a DVR box where you can pause live TV and where all of your recorded shows are stored. This box can be attached to the gateway via coax with no problem since the recorded shows are stored on it. If you want to watch TV in other rooms you receive a Set Top Box (STB) from AT&T. You can watch live TV (but can’t pause) and recorded TV on the STB, but only (as I learned today) if you connect the STB via an Ethernet cable (not the coax). This is actually pretty cool that the video signals run via Ethernet cable and not coax.

Here is a summary of what I learned:

Lesson 1: To watch recorded TV on the non DVR (set top) box in the U-Verse setup it has to be connected via Ethernet to the gateway.

Additionally, I learned (I think) that you can only have the coax or the Ethernet cable hooked up to one of the U-Verse boxes, but not both. It seems to only be able to handle one link. I am not exactly sure if this is true, but it seems to be.

[adsense]

Lesson 2: To install an Ethernet wall plate you will have to strip off the end of an Ethernet cable and connect the colored wires to other colored wires (but the colors may not be the same).

So, I had one 50′ ethernet cable I could run through the wall, across the basement, back up to the bedroom and to the STB. (I just followed the old coax backwards.) Sadly, this cord was about 10′ short. At first I thought to try to use a router to fix the problem, but I didn’t really want to have to keep the router plugged in all the time. (Plus, when I tried it, it didn’t work.) So, I wanted to install a Cat 5 wall plate to basically just extend the cable. I headed to Home Depot to buy said wall plate.

The front of the wall plate looks simple enough as shown below, but the back blew my mind!

This picture shows the finished product but there were eight wires on the back of the wall plate and the colors of the wall plate wires did not match the colors of the wires in the Cat 5 cable!?! And, GE didn’t supply any instructions!! So, thanks to Google, I found a tutorial at Servers Servers to explain all the colors of the wires to connect. And even then, I had to follow a slightly different set of instructions down in the comments (there are a lot more comments now so I’m not sure which one I used but I think it was this one.) of that page because of my setup.

Once I had the wires connected to the wall plate, I plugged in the Ethernet cable to the new wall plate to the U-Verse STB and all was well.

Hopefully this will help you find a way to fix any problem you are experiencing. If you found this useful go ahead and leave a comment. Or, if you have other comments or advice for people who may be searching for the same information leave those comments below.

This entry was posted in Computers Home Owner Share and tagged AT&T blue ray coax Ethernet cable Home Depot Home Owner Internet network remodel U-Verse wall plate Bookmark the permalink
Fixing my File Sharing with XP and Vista: A Thank You

Posted on July 1, 2009 10:40 PM by Peter Kupfer Comment

Today I was trying to network between mine and my wife’s laptop. This was easy when we both had Windows XP. Now, she has Vista and I still have XP. I thought I had set up the networking properly, but alas, it wasn’t working. I enlisted the help of my good friend Google and found the blog of the Proud Geek. The Proud Geek had a great post about just this issue and after following the instructions, I was good to go.

What was tripping me up was what user to use on the sharing screen. I ended up setting the user to Everyone. This seems dangerous, but I have a WEP on my network so neighbors can’t get on and modify our files, so it was all good.

Thanks Proud Geek.

This entry was posted in Computers Share and tagged google networking windows xp Bookmark the permalink