TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings.
This is the third and final installment in the "Back to School: Writing Tools" series (parts Iand II are here). To round out our roundup, we'll take a look at some (possibly) unexpected solutions, as well as some utilities which can aid any writer. Read on for some final thoughts on the current array of Mac writing tools for students, teachers, professors ... and the rest of us, too.
TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings.
Continuing the Back-to-School "sub-mini-series" on writing tools, this second post covers some great tools for compiling all of your thoughts, ideas and research into cohesive, structured documents. If you've never explored this category of applications, you might be surprised what the available options can do to improve your writing efficiency and lower the general anxiety involved with writing 10-page reports or lengthy creative writing assignments. I'll highlight a few cool ways to get those notes and floating thoughts from your notepad and your brain onto papers with large A's on them. Read on ...
TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September.
Going back to school isn't all about the students; the educators are often just as excited or stressed out as the kids about the beginning of a new school year. What can make life easier on the poor teacher? Great Mac software! Read on for information on a grab bag of Mac and web apps to help out your favorite educator.
TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on for nifty supplies for any student.
Today only, RadTech is offering 20 percent off regularly-priced backpacks, cases, laptop bags and sleeves, including bags with photovoltaic cells to help charge your electronic devices. Solar panels on the bag can provide up to four watts of power for your iPod or phone.
Make sure to use the promo code SCHOOL88 when you check out to take advantage of the offer.
TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on for college-level help.
If you're a college researcher, grad student, or undergrad, Malkinware's new Reference Tracker 1.0 for Mac OS X might be just the tool to help you with your academic research. Just in time for Back to School, Malkinware is even offering a 35% discount off of the $44.95 list price through September 30, 2008.
Reference Tracker creates documents that store citations and references used in books, research projects, or essays, and creates Harvard or APA formatted reference lists on demand. You can also:
Create Full References in a single step
Reference Web Pages and Emails with a single click
Easily import existing Reference Lists
Integration with Microsoft Word and Apple's Pages
Easily Organize References
Export formatted lists to anywhere
Add Sticky Notes to References
There's no need to type out the details of a referenced book. You type in the book's ISBN, and Reference Tracker gathers the details from the internet automatically. When creating Web page or email references, Reference Tracker can pull the details from Safari, Firefox, or Mail with one click.
TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on for high school & college-level help.
I covered a few good research tools for students in my last post. Before I dive into some of the excellent writing tools and packages available, we're going to take a look at some methods and applications for putting thoughts, notes and references together in a format that makes the actual writing part much easier.
Whether you're taking notes as you research, collecting documents or actually mapping out the first draft, these tools can be vital for organizing research, overcoming writer's block and making sure that things flow smoothly once writing begins.
TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September.
Reader Kelly T wrote in to give us a heads up about iLearn, a new ezine devoted to using Mac technology in the classroom. The first issue, which you can find here, is free but future issues will cost $1US each and be available at the main site. Topics in the first issue range from Leopard in the classroom to iPods in education.
The first issue is full of great content. There's a full lesson plan on empathy that includes the standards met, tech skills addressed, and necessary materials. Finally, Kelly explains just how to use PhotoBooth and Pages to complete the lesson and assess the students' participation.
Our favorite article is the Ten Technology Time Savers, including document naming standards (which is huge on a shared computer) and set your daily apps to launch at startup.
Good job, Kelly! We're looking forward to future editions.
TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on for tips on saving money on software.
At the start of every school year, students, teachers and parents have a seemingly-endless list of "to-buy" items. It gets expensive, and software is often the last place people want to plunk down money. Fortunately, the world of academic software discounts can easily save students (and their parents) and teachers enormous sums of money.
Academic software is exactly the same as the "regular" software, but the box says "Academic License" and the price can be significantly, noticeably less. How much less? Well, in the case of Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium 3.3, the academic version goes for $594.95 (you can save an additional $200 if you buy the package with a new Mac at the Apple Higher Education Store), and the full version clocks in at a whopping $1799US. $600 vs. $1800 is a pretty big difference, especially for students.
Depending on the software title, you might have to be a college student or faculty member to take advantage of some of the best discounts, but more and more publishers are opening up the discounts to K-12 students and teachers.
Please note: While academic discounts are available in other countries, this guide is primarily aimed at US and Canadian students. All prices are in USD.
I've been buying academic software since I was in high school, and here are some of the tips/best practices I've picked up over the years ...
TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on cool software for K-8 classrooms.
Canvastic LLC has announced a new version of the Canvastic graphics, writing, and publishing tool. Canvastic is designed to be used in K-8 classrooms, and is fun and productive for students.
Canvastic 3.5 is designed for use on both PPC and Intel Macs (which is great, as many American schools still use older Macs). The student publishing tool includes drawing, text and presentation tools, plus an Audio Tool for voice recording, insertion of sounds and integration with iTunes. Audio tracks can be played in documents or presentations.
Other new features include:
Transparency and color tones in graphics and text
Teachers can enable or disable spell checking, and also keep students from "customizing" the dictionary
New brush shapes
The ability to import digital photographs
Additional templates, backgrounds, and art
As before, Canvastic presents a customized user interface depending on the grade level of the student. Canvastic 3.5 is a free upgrade for all registered users, and those with free site licenses can upgrade for 50% of the posted educational prices. Pricing ranges from US$39 for one user to US$949 for an unlimited school building license. Schools can do an unlimited pilot of Canvastic for up to 60 days, and many school districts qualify for a free site license for half of their schools.
TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on for help for professors and instructors.
Humble Daisy is offering 50 percent off its ProfCast software, which helps educators (or anyone else who presents via PowerPoint or Keynote) record slide-based lectures as podcasts, and share them via iTunes U and iWeb.
The promotion is only available today, August 14. Academic users will receive an additional 25% off over the 50% discount. Purchasing today also allows you to upgrade to the next version for free.
The software is $30 today only (normally $60). For Academic customers, ProfCast is $15 $22.50. Volume discounts are also available.
ProfCast is a universal binary, and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher. You can check out a 15-day demo, too.
Update: My mistake, folks: the $15 price was based on a faulty calculation I did -- commenters are reporting that the Academic price is $22.50. A thousand apologies for that.
TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on for high school & college-level help.
At any level of schooling, you eventually have to do a little research. There are probably those who caution against doing any of that research on the web, but if you're aware that faulty (and downright false) information exists and take the extra steps to ensure that what you're citing is verifiable, the net can be a treasure trove of information.
Hyperlinks and full-text search of a massive amount of information make the electronic frontier an ideal research tool. But you've heard all of that before, so read on as we look at some research tools specifically for Mac users (and we'll try to stay within a typical student's budget).
Just a reminder: We told you in June about Apple's education promotion where you can get a free 8GB iPod touch (worth $299) to college students who buy a MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, or Mac Pro. The promotion ends in just over a month, on September 15.
If you haven't placed your order yet, it's probably a good time to get your act in gear.
Note also that from the reports we've seen, iPod touch is not shipping with the 2.0 software update pre-loaded yet. So you'll have to shell out ten bucks for the software update.
Qualified students can also opt for an 8GB iPod nano.
On Sunday's talkcast, we figured it was all-but-certain that new iPod touch models and possibly laptops will drop right after this promotion ends. Keep that in mind, too.
Precious little information is available just now, but Stanford appears to be offering a course in the Autumn entitled "iPhone Application Programming."
Award-winning iPhone app developer Craig Hockenberry wonders aloud if Apple will even allow such a course to be taught, presumably thanks to the ongoing NDA mummalum that Erica wrote about earlier today.
If anyone has any more information about the course and its instructor, we're all ears: please feel free to tip us.
Update: Tipsters Quinn and Dave helpfully inform us that the course will likely be taught by one (or more) of the same Apple employees that teach a Cocoa Programming course on campus. Apple and Stanford have shared a close relationship: Whether or not that gets them around the NDA restrictions probably will require a lawyer to understand and explain. Thanks, guys!
Users of iTunes U, the free educational content channel inside iTunes, will have a lot more elementary education material to choose from -- the states of Arizona, Florida, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Utah have all added some of their K-12 material to the mix, and a number of school districts and museums from those states have also contributed videos and audio recordings.
Plus, it's a great way to distribute student work to a much larger audience. You can find most of the new content under the "K-12" tab on the iTunes U homepage within iTunes.
One of the hidden gems of Apple.com is the collection of free web seminars available 24/7 that cover a wide range of topics and applications. A few weeks ago, Mat posted about the iWork for Business seminar, but a lot of other new seminars have been posted recently.
While a lot of the newest additions are aimed at OS X Leopard Server users or for business users, many of the tips and techniques can be applied for home users too. If none of the new seminars strike your fancy, the existing library of seminars offers some really nice introductions for creating podcasts, using Final Cut Studio or Aperture, and managing a Mac-based network.
Although the video seminars are free, registration is required.
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