JISC RSC Learning Technologies

I’ve already blogged about using my iPod Touch and Apple Wireless Keyboard as a portable note taking solution. In addition now, I’ve got a shiny new Dell Streak Android device (is it a big phone or a wee tablet – a bit of both!).

So the obvious step is to pair it up with the Apple Bluetooth Wireless keyboard. And it paired first time with no problem. Just turn Bluetooth on. You can do this by tapping on the block that contains the battery level/phone signal strength indicators. Then from the same menu, go to More Settings > Wireless controls > Bluetooth Settings, turn the keyboard on, Scan for devices. When the Streak has found the keyboard tap it on the screen and follow the onscreen instructions. That’s it.

I have a quick demo in the video below. I also mention some keyboard shortcuts.

In Part 1 and Part 2 we looked at ways of recording your Skype conversations with software and hardware. In this post we’ll look at free ways to host your audio files and turn them into a podcast. This process applies to any recorded mp3 file (or video file).

If we just put our mp3 file online it would just be an audio file online. What makes it a podcast is its distribution method. Podcasting is a contraction of two words, pod- for iPod and -casting for broadcasting. The pod bit is a bit of a misnomer because you don’t have to have an iPod to listen to a podcast. You can listen on any device that will play back mp3 files. The broadcasting bit is your distribution method done through something called RSS. You may have see little orange icons dotted around the web similar to the last icon in the image above. That indicates that the web page has an RSS feed. The good news is that you don’t need to be concerned with the technical aspect of setting up an RSS feed as there are applications that will do it for you. In this post we’re going to look at setting up a blog as a distribution method for your mp3 files.

Process

1. The first step is to upload our audio file to the web. There are quite a few sites that will host your audio files for you these day so I’ll just highlight the service that I use, blip.tv This is actually a video hosting service but it’s a little known fact that you can also host mp3 files as well. I actually use this service for most of the audio and video hosted on this blog.

Once you’ve set up a free account go to Upload > Web upload

Click on the Choose File button, locate and select your mp3 file. Then click on the Proceed to Step 2 button.

Your mp3 file will be uploaded to blip while you type in some additional information. It’s up to you how much you fill in here. It is, however handy for people browsing through blip who come across your files. When you’re ready click on the Publish button.

On the next page, it will give you a summary of the file you’ve upload. The bit we’re interested is right down at the bottom of the page under the Media heading. The web address here is the direct path to your mp3 file and we’ll be using that later in our Wordpress blog. Right-click on that and Copy link address (the terminology will vary slightly depending on the browser you are using).

2. Setting up your wordpress.com blog. As with audio hosting there are a number of free hosted blogging platforms including blogger, posterous and tumblr. Here, we’ll look at wordpress.com. So the first step is to head over there and set up a free account. Once, you’ve done that click on My Dashboard at the top of your screen.

Then click on Add New to create your first post.

Wordpress.com has a built-in audio player which lets display a small flash player to play audio files directly from within your blog posts. I’ve given the blog post a title. Added an image then added the code to play the audio file.

The code is [audio http://yourmp3.com/myaudio.mp3]. Just replace the address with the address you copied from blip.tv in Step 1.

So it should look something like this:

[audio http://blip.tv/file/get/Jiscrsc-JISCRSCScotlandNEMyStudyBar815.mp3]

The great thing about using a blog to host your podcasts is that you can put additional information here. So if you’ve mentioned various resources in your podcast you can post links to them here.

We also want to let people download the audio file without having to subscribe to your podcast through your RSS feed. To do that we need to insert a hyperlink to download the mp3 file.

On the blog it will look something like this:

Download MyStudyBar Overview MP3

In the wordpress editor, highlight the word Download and click on the hyperlink button and fill in the details.

In the Link URL box paste in your blip.tv address for your mp3 file. Then click on Update

When you’ve finished typing your post click Publish then view your Blog. You should see a something similar to the image below. The live blog post can be found here:

In Part 4 we’ll look at Google service called Feedburner. This service lets you customise your RSS feed and also has some useful tools including the ability to track the number of subscribers you have. We’ll then use that feed to publish the podcast in iTunes.

Again, if you’ve got any questions about this set up please don’t hesitate to get in touch :-)

This post started out as a quick overview of the pdf functionality in iBooks but I’ve added some extra information on how to convert your files into pdf format and at the end have added some free eBook resources.

In an effort to cut down on paper consumption I now keep a lot of documents on my iPod Touch. Especially for meetings. My format of choice tends to be pdf. I also convert web pages into pdf format for offline reading. To do that on a PC I use a small app called CutePDF Writer which converts anything you’d normally send to a printer into pdf format. Just print (Ctrl+P) in the normal way but rather than printing to your usual printer choose CutePDF Writer. You’ll then be asked to give it a file name and save it.

This functionality is built-in on a Mac. If you send anything to print  you have the option to save it as a pdf.

So for testing out the pdf functionality in iBooks, I headed over to JISC infoNet to grab one of their excellent infoKits. From their site infoKits “promote the effective strategic planning and management of information and learning technology within institutions”. Every so often my mailbox gets a little bit out of hand so I went for the Email Management infoKit. I downloaded the pdf version and emailed it to myself then opened up the email on my iPod Touch. I tapped the pdf attachment to open it then on the top right of the screen tapped Open in, then chose iBooks.

As I mentioned in the video above, if you don’t see the attachment and see a non-tappable image of the pdf instead, there’s a chance that you’ve got Stanza installed, another eBook reader. This appears to conflict with iBooks at the moment. You can read further information about this issue and how to resolve it here.

As far as pdf readers go the iBooks app offers pretty basic functionality. I tend to use ReaddleDocs for my pdfs which offers a feature called Text Reflow which repaginates the pdf making it a lot easier to read. ReadleDocs is a paid-for app and if you’re looking for a free app that does Text Reflow Goodreader lite is a good place to start.

Some free eBooks to get you started

There’s a whole wealth of free eBooks out on the web. Here some which you may find of interest.

A collection of free eLearning books (currently 28)

7 free eBooks on Social Media from makeuseof.com

11,000 free eBooks from the Book Depository. Just click on the Get Free eBook button next to the book title of your choice).

iBooks, first seen on the iPad is now available for the iPod Touch and iPhone. It’s Apple’s free ebook reader. Bit of a shame that it requires iOS4 so that rules out the first gen iPod Touches and iPhones.

It comes with a free Winnie the Poo book to get you started. I’ve found that the books in the Apple store are rather expensive compared to their paper counterparts. I think that’s probably true for most of the ebook stores at the moment. No idea why that is. Surely it’s a much cheaper distribution method for publishers. Maybe the likes of Amazon and Apple take a hefty cut.

Having moaned about the price, there are also free books available. Mostly stuff that’s out of copyright.

When reading the books you can change the font size and type, have an optional sepia background and you also have direct access to the brightness control.

The pages in a book can be bookmarked, annotated and searched.

In Part 2 we’ll look at reading pdfs in iBooks

I’ve used my small original GorillaPod tripod as a stand for my first gen iPod Touch from day 1. And it works well. It works better as a stand rather than its intended purpose as a camera tripod! I’ve got my bigger SLR GorrilaPod in today and Hugh’s got his iPad in so thought I’d see how it fares as an iPad stand and again it works rather well and is pretty stable, well on a flat surface anyway.

When the GorillaPod’s not being used to prop up various devices it’s being used as an impromptu copy stand – a great way to demo apps with a webcam or to record directly into something like Microsoft Movie Maker.

The Logitech 9000 Pro webcam is attached to the tripod with an elastic band which I think came with an old mp3 player.

I’m exploring the new features of my 3rd generation iPod Touch after upgrading from the 1st gen. In ye olden days I used to use a Palm T3 PDA with a folding keyboard to take notes in meetings and I thought I’d revisit this set up by pairing up my iPod Touch with my Apple wireless keyboard.

It’s very straight forward to do. On the iPod Touch, just go to Settings > General > Bluetooth. Turn Bluetooth on. Turn your keyboard on. Once the Touch has found the keyboard, tap on Not Paired and follow the onscreen instructions. Simple!

An added bonus of using an Apple keyboard is that some of the functions keys work – the ones for controlling music and the brightness controls.

The keyboard would easily fit in a bag. It’s light and compact. May be this could be a lightweight alternative to lugging a laptop round campus all day – well for everyday tasks anyway.

…when you’ve got a third generation iPod Touch. Ok, it’s a bit tongue-in-cheek but I can do a lot of what the iPhone does at a fraction of the price. Admittedly it’s not quite as convenient for some things but there are ways round that.

Which brings me to Sunday’s iPod Touch experiment. I wanted to put it through its paces as a field recording device posting on location.

My objective was to record some audio using the Audioboo app on the iPod Touch using the mic on the standard apple earphone set. I also wanted to post a photo to display on the Audioboo web site and on the iPod Touch app. Audioboo lets you record up to 5 minutes of audio and then you publish it to their site. They provide mobile apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch and Android devices. If you don’t have either of these you can also record or upload audio directly to their site.

Kit

One pretty old but trusty mobile phone – A Sony Ericsson K800i
Mobile broadband device with built-in wifi – A Huawei MIFI E5830
32Gb 3rd Gen iPod Touch with apple earphone set with built-in mic

Process

1. I took a photo with my mobile phone and emailed it to Photobucket, a free online photosharing site similar to Flickr. If you’ve got a photobucket account you’ll find your personal email address for posting to photobucket by email in your Account Settings. Scroll down to the Mobile Settings.

Note: this step may become redundant when the new 4th Gen iPod Touch is announced in September. The rumour mill suggests that it may have a built-in camera which would be great.

2. Fired up the MIFI to get a wifi connection. One of the great features of this device is that I can hook up to 5 wifi enabled devices so if it was a class field trip and files needed to be uploaded this would be one solution. Opened the Photobucket app on the iPod Touch and downloaded the photo I’d just taken to my Saved Photos folder. To do this I located and tapped on my photo, tapped the Share icon button shown below and then tapped the Download button. I would have preferred to use Flickr for this but the official Flickr iPod Touch app unfortunately doesn’t let you download photos to the Saved Photos folder.

3. Next I recorded the audio on iPod Touch using the audioboo app. Note, you don’t need to be online to record the audio. Finished recording the audio then tapped Publish. Filled in the appropriate details including adding the photo and saved it. And that’s it. It went online without a hitch.

Once it’s online you can copy and paste a bit of code into your blog so that you can play the audio there. On your blog remember to be in html view when pasting it in.

Below, is the result of the bit of copy & pasted code. A small audio player that will play your audio file.

In the Settings section on the audioboo website you can also set it to notify various sites when you publish a new piece of audio (a boo!)

Regator is a blog aggregator and blog search engine. The posts come from selected blogs chosen by Regator staff so it tends to cut o ut a lot of the chaff and returns better quality information. It tracks about 500 different categories in total and you can view the most popular or recent posts in any given category. You can also search for your own topics of interest across the blogs.

In this short review I look at the free iPhone/iPod Touch app. There’s also a premium version which, among other features allows you to sync with the web app and lets you save your searches.

As mentioned, there’s a web app so you don’t actually need an iPhone/iPod Touch to get the benefit from the functionality of Regator. I prefer the mobile app however and often use it when I have some downtown catching up on the latest posts with a cup of coffee.

Go to iTunes preview page for Regator

In Part 1 we looked at recording skype conversations using software. Now we’ll look at an alternative hardware setup. As mentioned previously this is the more fun way for me. As a former electronics engineer working in the audio broadcast industry this ticks a lot of geeky boxes for me and takes me back to my radio roots. Ahh, enough of the misty-eyed stuff :-)

This setup might be particularity useful if you or your learners are making a radio style podcast with local guests and remote guests calling in. You could pick up a budget mixer and mic for under £100.

And the good news is, it’s actually quite straight-forward to set up. The main component of this setup is the audio mixer. It doesn’t really matter what type it is as long as it has an AUX bus. That’s the important bit. It allows us to set up a MIX-MINUS or Clean Feed. More on that shortly.

My equipment list

Tapco 6306 6-channel mixer
Audio Technica AT822 Stereo unbalanced Mic
Mac Mini or Samsung NC10 netbook
Yamaha Pocketrak CX Audio Recorder
A set of headphones

The Setup

I’ve drawn a quick, simplified block diagram of the mixer below, omitting level, gain and eq controls. The diagram shows where the connections go to and from on your Mac or PC and the essential controls to set up a MIX-MINUS feed.

[Larger image of block diagram]

1. Attach your Mic to your MIC Channel. In this case Channel 1.  Set the Pan control to the Left. Turn the AUX 1 Volume up to an appropriate level.

2. From your Mac or PC take the headphone output and link it into a Stereo Line channel. Channel 3+4 in this case. Turn the Balance to the Right and make sure AUX1 Volume is at 0.

3. Take the feed from the AUX Send output of the mixer and put that into the Line-in of your Mac or PC. If your PC doesn’t have a Line-in, turn the AUX 1 volume down very low on the Mic Channel 1 and connect the output of AUX Send to the Mic Input on of your PC. Note if the levels are still too high you may need to add an attenuator to reduce the signal level. If you’re feeling adventurous you could make your own passive one from a couple of resistors.

4. Take the Left and Right Main outputs of the mixer and feed that into the line-in of your audio recording device. In this case a Yamaha Pocketrak CX.

5. Attach a set of headphones to the headphone output of the mixer. You’ll hear your voice in the left ear and the remote caller’s voice in your right ear.

6. Now your ready to fire up skype and set the recording levels. I usually do this by calling up the skype test call lady (echo 123). The meters on the mixer should bob about the 0 mark and avoid going into the amber and red regions or your recording will be distorted.

7. With levels set you’re ready to make your skype call and hit record on your audio recording device. Here, a Yamaha Pocketrak CX.

8. Once you’ve transferred your audio from your audio recorder you can now edit your it. I’ve detailed that in Part 1 Section 2. You don’t need to do the first step as it is already a stereo track.

In summary what we have done is to send your Mic feed to the left output channel and the remote user’s voice to the right output channel. We’ve made use of the AUX bus to send that output to the remote user minus their own voice hence the term MIX-MINUS. We achieved this by turning the AUX 1 Volume of Mic Channel 1 up and setting the AUX 1 volume of the Stereo Channel 3+4 (the remote user’s voice) to 0.

The actual mixer settings below.

Notes

1. In the setup photo I’ve got the mac mini and mic quite close together. That’s just for demonstration. The mac mini is normally as far away as possible from the mic so that it does not pick up the fan noise.

2. I’m using a stereo mic here. My first choice would be a mono mic as we don’t need stereo.

3. I discovered after doing a test recording with Craig that the Yamaha Pocketrak CX, in line-in mode only records in MP3 at 192kbps. When I’m recording again I’ll use my M-audio Microtrack which records in full uncompressed audio.

4. In the close-up photo of the mixer setup I’m using the Tape Output to send to the Yamaha Pocketrak CX to record rather than the main L & R outputs. Purely because I couldn’t find my 1/4in jack leads :-)

You can hear a sample recording with this setup here. I’m joined by Craig Mill, our eLearning Advisor for Accessibility and Inclusion to talk about MyStudyBar – a floating toolbar to aid learners with literacy related difficulties such as dyslexia.

And finally, If you’ve got any questions or queries about this setup please don’t hesitate to get in touch :-)

I have a first generation 16Gb iPod Touch. When I first got it, it didn’t get much use. It was an ok media player with some built-in apps and that was it…until Apple invited iPod Touch users to splurge £10 to join the App Store. That opened up a whole other world of possibilities and it’s been in daily use ever since. In fact, a couple a weeks ago I left it in the office over the weekend and suffered an acute bout of separation anxiety. Well not quite, but it did make me realise how much and how often I use it.

Another great gadget that works well with the iPod Touch is my MIFI, a 3G mobile broadband dongle with built-in wireless. So as long as I’ve got a 3G signal I can connect to the internet anywhere with the iPod Touch.

3D Brain App Review

Something I’ve been meaning to do for some time is to record short reviews of iPod Touch/iPhone apps I’ve found useful. So here’s the first, in possibly a regular series. It’s a free app called 3D Brain. It contains 29 interactive 3D brain structures with selected cases studies, info and labelling . It could be potentially useful for a range of disciplines that require a basic understanding of the functions of the brain.

Go to iTunes Preview Page for 3D Brain