Lunch & Learn: iPad for Beginners with Angel Brady and Janet Temos

Lunch & Learn

In the Lunch & Learn ses­sion on Wednes­day, Feb­ru­ary 20th, 2013, Janet Temos, Direc­tor of the Edu­ca­tional Tech­nolo­gies Cen­ter at Prince­ton, and Angel Brady, Instruc­tional Tech­nol­o­gist in the Human­i­ties Resource Cen­ter at Prince­ton, gave an intro­duc­tory talk for new users of the iPad, Apple’s famously pop­u­lar tablet.

Orga­niz­ing

Temos started the talk by intro­duc­ing the iPad’s inter­face, some­times met with cul­ture shock by long time users of desk­top com­put­ers because of the touch based inter­face, which has dif­fer­ent inter­ac­tions than a mouse based inter­face. Using two fin­gers ver­sus one and ges­tur­ing, or hold­ing down your fin­ger for an extra sec­ond have mean­ing on tablet inter­faces, and no easy equiv­a­lent on a mouse based inter­face. Temos noted that col­lect­ing many appli­ca­tions can make nav­i­gat­ing that large col­lec­tion more dif­fi­cult, but you can cre­ate fold­ers on your iPad to orga­nize those apps that go together, or to make sense of the way that you work. Janet has a folder just for pre­sen­ta­tion apps. From your home screen where your apps are listed, the clean inter­face may make you won­der how to do such a thing as adding a folder. If you hold your fin­ger on an app for a few sec­onds (a long press ges­ture), the apps start to ‘shake’, at which point you can move or delete them. Shak­ing is a visual indi­ca­tor on the iPad that you can make a change to the shak­ing items, such as dele­tion or mov­ing. To cre­ate a folder, after a long press, drop one app on to another. To add an app to a folder, after a long press, drag it into the folder. While your apps col­lec­tion may span sev­eral screens that you can swipe through, the dock (the area at the bot­tom of the iPad screen) remains con­stant. To store your most often used apps for quick open­ing, store them on the dock. When you are all done, hit the phys­i­cal home but­ton on the iPad to exit the ‘shaky’ edit­ing mode.

Man­ag­ing app processes and settings

Do a dou­ble press on the phys­i­cal home but­ton to see what apps are in mem­ory. You can press each icon to remove the app from active mem­ory, which relieves the proces­sor from hav­ing to man­age that app actively. You can cus­tomize the iPad dra­mat­i­cally via the Set­tings app. Add email accounts, join net­works, and change your sound set­tings, among many other options. Temos sug­gests that you explore the set­tings and their effects to get deeply famil­iar with your iPad. You can also change the set­ting of each app here.

Typ­ing

The iPad’s vir­tual on-screen key­board works when a Blue­tooth key­board is not present. Long presses on this keyboard’s keys often give short­cuts to alter­na­tive char­ac­ters and strings. A long press on O, for instance, gives many alter­na­tive ver­sions of the O such as var­i­ous accented versions.

App store

You can man­age and add to the installed apps on your iPad via the App Store. You must login to your iTunes account to buy, update and track apps, even the free ones. If you have to rebuild your iPad, you can rein­stall pre­vi­ously pur­chased apps. You can visit the pur­chased area of the App Store app to see what you have installed in the past.

Hard­ware add-ons

Temos sug­gested that while the iPad is a self-contained, fully work­ing object, you can get many ben­e­fits from the var­i­ous add-ons that you can buy for it.

Head­phones make for a more pri­vate audio expe­ri­ence. A blue­tooth key­board can make your iPad into a small, highly portable lap­top. A sty­lus can make draw­ing and writ­ing on the iPad far eas­ier than with your fin­ger. Var­i­ous don­gles, rang­ing from $30–50 allow you to send your iPad screen to VGA, HDMI and other video inter­faces, for dis­play on a pro­jec­tor or a TV. You can also use an Apple TV, about $100, which allows you to show the iPad on-screen via a wire­less dis­play tech­nol­ogy Apple calls Air­play. You can also use the Apple TV to buy and watch movies from Apple, or use your Net­flix, Hulu, and other media services.

Secu­rity and cloud storage

Temos briefly men­tioned that by default, you need only ‘swipe to unlock’ a run­ning iPad, which is the default, but that you can set a pass­word as an extra layer of defense so that if you lose your iPad or if it gets stolen, the finder or thief would need to guess or crack your pass­word to make use of your data. Brady told the audi­ence that you can add many cloud stor­age ser­vices to get access to those files. In par­tic­u­lar, she described how you can add Web­Space via the Web­DAV pro­to­col, which both Web­Space and the iPad sup­port. (http://helpdesk.princeton.edu/kb/display.plx?id=9924)

Apps

No talk about the iPad would be com­plete with­out shar­ing var­i­ous use­ful apps for the audi­ence to con­sider. Both Temos and Brady sug­gested apps that might make sense for fac­ulty, staff and stu­dents at Prince­ton. Brady and Temos pre­sented var­i­ous lev­els of detail on the fol­low­ing applications.

The Orches­tra (TouchPress)

This app allows you to explore the orches­tra in inno­v­a­tive ways, includ­ing writ­ten expla­na­tions of instru­ments from musi­cians, a follow-along ver­sion of the  score, and simul­ta­ne­ous shots of play­ers and con­duc­tor dur­ing the per­for­mance. The app focuses on works by Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz, Debussy and oth­ers. http://www.touchpress.com/blog/2012/12/our-creative-director-waxes-lyrical-about-orchestra/

Lynda.com

If you want to watch courses on tech­nol­ogy, busi­ness, and pro­duc­tiv­ity, includ­ing a fan­tas­tic list of pop­u­lar design appli­ca­tions like Pho­to­shop, this app is a great place to get your fill. Because of Princeton’s site license for Lynda, Prince­ton fac­ulty, staff, and stu­dents may use it for free. (http://lynda.princeton.edu)

Cam­era App

The iPad’s front and rear fac­ing cam­era allow you to take pic­tures or video of your­self or what’s in front of you. You can add a grid to help you to com­pose your shots. Con­nect via USB, use email, or use Photo Stream to move the pho­tos from the iPad to your com­puter or else­where. (http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/photo-stream.html)

Note tak­ing apps

Angel Brady pre­sented a set of apps specif­i­cally for tak­ing notes in the field, includ­ing Ever­note, Nota­bil­ity, and oth­ers. She detailed her find­ings in this post at http://blogs.princeton.edu/etc/2013/02/20/field-note-taking-with-the-ipad/

Video Man­age­ment, Video Host­ing, Video Stream­ing, Video Plat­form