I’ve now consigned the ‘droid to a drawer for 7 days to see if there’s anything I miss. If there isn’t, it’ll go on ebay, and hopefully the proceeds will go part of the way towards an iPhone 4.

Why have done this?

A combination of poor battery life, numpty applications and it just not being an iPhone.

If I’d had an Android phone all along, I think I’d have been reasonably happy with the Desire HD, apart from the battery life. I took it to London with me yesterday. I took it off charge at just after 9am, and made NO calls with it. A couple of texts, but that’s it. I also used it for about 5 minutes with Google Maps to try to direct me to Kingston-Upon-Thames station, but as the ‘droid thought I was about 10 miles off the coast of St. Malo, it wasn’t a lot of help. Come 10pm, and the phone was absolutely dead. Not really good enough.

Ok, I can make it go longer with doing things like turning off mobile data, etc, but that’s hardly the point of a smartphone. I have found myself over the last few months consciously NOT using the phone to look something up on the ‘net because I have been worried that the battery won’t last long enough.

Numpty applications – by this I mean that none of the applications on the ‘droid look or feel complete or polished. Every man and his dog can publish to the Market, and they do (yours truly included). I found two apps on the ‘droid that I thought were really very good, as good or better than their iOS counterparts – Do it tomorrow and Evernote. But, the only reason for using Do It Tomorrow was because I couldn’t find ANY other half decent GTD-esque task manager on ‘droid that’ll sync with anything. Do It Tomorrow isn’t GTD at all, but it looks pretty and it syncs. I don’t need the pretty, but it helps, I find with me WANTING to use an app to keep track of stuff I have to do.

The music players and browsers available for Android are numerous, but none of them come close to being the complete package that “iPod” and Safari are on the iPhone. So much choice, yet actually no choice – nothing fits the whole bill. “iPod” is a fantastic implementation of a music player, no surprise, but Safari isn’t exactly the greatest web browser, but it does just work. If it doesn’t work in Safari, it doesn’t work on an iPhone, full stop. Unlike on the ‘droid where you think, I’ll just try Dolphin or Firefox or Opera, just in case they work.

So far (day 1), I really miss the speed of the Desire HD (but comparing it to an iPhone 3G is hardly fair), but that’s it. I do love Google maps on the Android, but that’s not enough to tempt me back.

Let’s see what happens over the next few days. Meantime, anyone who’d like to buy a mint HTC Desire HD with 32Gb SD card, let me know. Even better, swap it for an iPhone 4

However…

There are some great things about the Android platform. I can write code for it (badly) easily. I can customize seven kinds of hell out of it. I can get random apps to do all sorts of things.

But, I can’t get anything that says “quality”. I’ve not yet found even one app that looks like it’s spent more than 2 minutes having its UI worked on. They’re all functional, but all ugly, unpolished, and everything works differently. For example, the back button (god knows why you need one, but apparently you do) – sometimes it goes back to the previous pane in an app. Sometimes it takes you back to the home screen. Sometimes it does something else entirely. There is no consistency. The most obvious example of this is DoubleTwist – sometimes I press back and expect to go back to the Library/Album List, yet I end up back on the home screen. Other times I get to the Library. I think it’s to do with how I got to DoubleTwist in the first place, through menu or notifications.

Another thing that stands out – iPod vs a million and one different music apps that look like they’ve been designed by a death metal loving teenager. The iPod app has evolved over several years and just works nicely. All these Android apps are lacking in some way. I’ve only managed to find one that actually lets me sort by Composer (well, Writer, but it’s close enough) – Meridian. I didn’t think I’d ever say this, but this kind of thing really highlights the difference between Apple and Android and I think that for me, the Apple way is better – Apple is no choice, you take what we let you have or leave it. Android is have any old crap that someone feels like writing, see if you can make it work. With the Apple way, you tend to get a quality product, and in the “core” functions of the smart phone; phone, mail, messaging, music, camera, the iPhone wins hands down.

Other things that suck; HTC Sense accounts for facebook and twitter as well as normal accounts. The amount of polling the thing does unless you stop it. The mediocre exchange support; it mostly works, but things like having multiple calendars in one exchange account (I have Personal and School) just doesn’t work.

BATTERY LIFE. If I don’t give my phone a short burst of juice in the day, it’s dead come evening.

The killer – the lack of a decent GTD app. I’ve been spoilt by OmniFocus on the iPad and iPhone. Nozbe’s also very good. But, Nozbe on Android is fairly pathetic (it is only beta, so watch this space), and everything else just sucks. I’m back to using Remember the Milk, which isn’t my favourite, but at least it talks Android/iPad/PC/Mac.

Ok, things I do like. Notifications. HTC Sense/Launcher Pro with their multiple home screens and widgets. Very nice. All the google sync, the facebook integration. The Gmail application. Tweetdeck and Evernote are both decent apps.

Things that surprised me (good and bad):

• FlipVibrate – turn the phone over to put it in silent/vibrate
• I have yet to find the ability to have Flash useful. No website I’ve visited has *required* it.
• Uninstalling applications is rather more complicated than on the iPhone – having to go to settings, applications, etc. And I’ve got an app that won’t uninstall…
• The quantity of apps (and sometimes system functions) that crash
• How much I miss visual voicemail – thank goodness for HulloMail
• The difference in audio quality of the built in mic vs the iPhone. I recorded myself playing the organ with both devices. The HTC version is absolutely hideous, painful on the ears. The iPhone version is quite usable.
• WiFi Hotspot – fabulous. Obviously I didn’t have a 3GS or 4 so I’ve never tried it on the iPhone, except through MyWi.
• Even after a month, I find typing a most frustrating experience. I’ve purchased SwiftKeys (and the new beta), but they drive me insane; even though I’ve told it that my typing preference is to be accurate and not use completions, it insists on inserting words when i press space (and yes, I’ve changed that preference too, no avail)
• Having a choice of browsers to use is more frustrating than liberating, as none of them render anything particularly well; built in “Internet”, Dolphin HD, Opera, Firefox have all been tried and found wanting when held up against Safari.

So, you can probably tell what my answer to iPhone vs Android is – if you’ve been an iPhone user, stick with Apple. Going to Android will feel like wearing someone else’s dirty underwear. If I didn’t have an iPad too, this thing would have gone straight back. It was not a good decision, but at least I now have some experience of the “other side”.

For me, the sheer amount of choice on the Android platform just doesn’t work. Choosing between a mediocre app and another mediocre app isn’t much of a choice. I’d love it if someone (however unlikely it is that anyone reads this blog) out there could recommend just ONE app that really shines on the Android platform. Go on, please?

Fortunately, it’s an easy fix (I can say that now, having spent ages trying to diagnose) – go to your LDAP authentication settings in Moodle, and, under the Bind section, turn Hide Password to No.

Then, delete all the users from mdl_block_gdata_gapps in your moodle’s database that have status = ‘accountcreationerror’ – connect to the moodle sql database – on my system it’s called moodle, then type:

mysql> delete from mdl_block_gdata_gapps where status = ‘accountcreationerror’;

NOTE: this doesn’t delete your users from Moodle, just from the gapps synchronisation database. But, if you’re not confident about it, don’t do it, and the usual disclaimer (if anything goes wrong, don’t shoot the messenger) applies.

Then, get your broken users to login to Moodle afresh. They should sync over just fine.

It’s expensive. It also, with the age group we teach (7-13 year olds), gives the kids too much flexibility to fiddle; they like to create pretty instead of content. And their idea of pretty really isn’t pretty!

So, I want to replace it with Google Apps. We’ve got a Google Apps domain, and this is the only thing I’ve been using in IT lessons for the last 12 months.

The time has come though, to just not install MS Office on pupil accessible computers. I’ll give them OpenOffice available as a just in case, but the default option will be Google Docs.

I’m considering turning off logins too; given that all the kids’ docs are going to be in the “cloud”, there’s not much point in logging in. They’ll authenticate to the web proxy so I’ll know who they are for naughtiness purposes, and I’ll give them the ability to connect to their home directory for saving other work, e.g. sketchup, audacity, etc.

I just hope it works – I reckon it’ll take a year before they’re completely happy with the move, but I also reckon I’ll be able to save nearly £5000 a year on licensing fees.

Time to get writing a whole bunch of documentation.

If you search for, say Sedimentary Rocks, Chemical Elements, Poetic Meter, it’ll go off and look for everything that might be related to that search and stick it in a “square” that shows the relationship between items.

Why not use it to build up a square for your current unit, then share the link with your pupils?

How? Go to http://google.com/squared

Tags: tip, tow, squared, google

1. Frequent keyboard/mouse lockups under Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)
2. ActivStudio locks up under Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) – no mouse clicks accepted
3. No wireless support under Ubuntu 9.10 or Fedora 11

I started with Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) as this is an officially supported release by Promethean.
Hit a problem where I’d boot up and the keyboard and/or trackpad were unresponsive. Normally just the trackpad.

I managed to work around that – it’s well documented in various fora – by adding irqpoll to the grub boot options (/boot/grub/menu.lst) for the current kernel. (2.6.29, I think it was, from memory)

Got ActivStudio installed. All seemed great. Until I tried to teach a lesson. The board was very sluggish, stubborn to respond to writing, but only occasionally. I put it down to it being an old board. But then I found I could write on the board, but not click on any of the icons, or even close windows, etc. All very odd. Couldn’t find an obvious fix.

So, I tried to update to kernel 2.6.3x via several routes – first, just downloading a deb and installing on Ubuntu 9.04. No wireless support, and the promethean module wouldn’t compile either.

Ok, tried 9.10 beta, with 2.6.31 kernel. No wireless. Grr. Tried Fedora 11, still no wireless. I can’t say I was surprised, as they’re all based on the same kernel, and the change of behaviour is down to a rewrite of the wireless code in 2.6.3x, and NetworkManager, apparently.

So a bit of digging… And it looks to be a Dell specific bug – the wireless kill switch (rfkill) is reporting an incorrect status to NetworkManager, which assumes that therefore the wireless is disabled.

Well, that lead me to a Dell Firmware update for the Vostro 1520, to A03 – bugs fixed? “Fixed incorrect WiFi kill switch status”. Sounds promising. Oh, but you have to run the update from Windows… grr. So, I re-imaged my machine from our standard Windows build, which, fortunately, only takes 6-7 minutes on a gigabit connection. Installed firmware update.

Re-installed Ubuntu 9.10 beta.

Got Wireless!

Went to Promethean, added the Ubuntu 9.04 deb repository to /etc/apt/sources.list

Installed activdriver, activtools, activinspire, activresources-core-en. Sat back. Rebooted. And then started using my whiteboard.

All seems good so far in iwb on Linux land, with a few tweaks along the way to deal with my hardware oddities.

Mostly, this has been a straightforward exercise, but every now and then, an account pops up that just won’t create in Google. If I go to the gApps control panel, and try to add the user manually, I get “the user already exists”, but it doesn’t appear in the user list.

Solution – GAM – http://code.google.com/p/google-apps-manager/

I can create the problem users in GAM, and suddenly everything works. How odd!

Some examples of GAM usages – http://code.google.com/p/google-apps-manager/wiki/GAMExamples

What does this achieve?

My students can now login to Moodle, and once logged in, they have links in their sidebar (Blocks, as they’re really called in Moodle) which allow them to click through to Mahara and Google Docs WITHOUT HAVING TO LOGIN again. Even better, the SSO (Single Sign On) system automatically creates user accounts in Mahara and gApps if they don’t already exist for the user.

I know what Moodle is, but what’s Mahara?

Mahara is an e-portfolio system. I must admit to having completely dismissed it when I first read about it. I just didn’t get it.

But… Imagine each child you teach uploading the finished versions of their essays, projects, etc to their own webpage or portfolio, so that, at the end of the term/year/school, they have ALL their work collected together in one portfolio. Imagine other children or teachers being able to comment on and assess the work in that portfolio. Imagine being able to share that portfolio with the outside world, e.g. parents.

That’s what Mahara can do for you.

Why would I use Google Apps/Docs instead of Word?

Lots of reasons!

• It’s online – no more do students have to e-mail docs to themselves, or use USB sticks, etc.
• Collaboration – up to 10 students can work on a Google Document at the same time. Up to 50 can work on a spreadsheet. Each document has full revision history so that you can see exactly who contributed what. YOU could even collaborate on that doc with them – live marking, for example.
• Forms. Google Forms are absolute genius. Design a Form for gathering data using their friendly designer. That form is then published on the web, and any data entered into it is inserted into a row in a spreadsheet. All those ICT lessons where you wanted a dataset and had to contrive one are a thing of the past. Want to do a Geography survey? No problem. Want to do a poll of opinion about the quality of food at school? How about some AfL? All easily and beautifully handled by Forms. Check out Tom Barret’s 10 Google Forms for the Classroom at the bottom of this post for more ideas.
• Cost. It’s free, apart from the domain name (£10 a year?).

Yes, Word has more features. Yes, Word’ll let your kids generate prettier documents (and uglier ones too). But, to my mind, content is more important than “prettiness”. Collaboration is the new learning nirvana. Google Docs provides.

What do you need to get it going for yourself?

• Moodle install (ideally 1.9.5 or later)
• Mahara install
• Google Apps domain
• Administrator access to all the above
• Ability to upload files to the Moodle installation directory

The technical side of things is pretty straightforward – just remember to follow all the steps in the following guides to the letter.

Documentation:

Some tips:

1. Google Apps requires passwords to be 6+ characters. If your student passwords are shorter than this, then their accounts will not be created.
2. If you find that when you try to login to Google via Moodle, you get a “Invalid credentials” error, the chances are that you’ve not followed the instructions about certificate installation accurately.
3. When filling out the Google Apps SSO setup page, upload your certificate FIRST – those URLs that you’ve just typed in will disappear, so why duplicate the work?
4. Create local administrator accounts in both Mahara and Moodle just in case you mess up the authentication system – if you don’t have local (i.e. non-network authenticated) admin accounts, you could get locked out of your own systems!
5. If Mahara authentication stops working a few months down the line, check the expiry date on the SSO certificate. If it’s expired, copy and paste the key from Moodle into Mahara again. All fixed, hopefully!

So, what to do with your newly integrated apps?

Check out the following ideas:

Truth is, it will happen.

If I remember what it was I was supposed to be doing.

David Allen and his GTD fans would say I need a better capture system. By better, read always available.

My problem is not that I have a bad memory – but that I have no alarm system. If I bump into someone who asked me to do something, I slap my forehead and pretend I was just on my way to do said job – I can remember the conversation perfectly, I’ve not had a trigger until that point to recall the conversation. I just don’t get any subconscious prompt to say “Go do xyz for Person A”.

Part of the reason for this is that I work cross-platform – Mac. PC. Linux. Solaris. Paper. PostIts. The paper is my attempt to keep everything in one place. Never works – see above. PostIts is everyone else’s attempt to make me do things. But they stay in one place (under the wheels of my chair or stuck to a shoe, normally). So, it has to be computer-based. I’ve tried ToodleDo, but there’s no real alarm system apart from daily e-mails.

I do get myself organised about once a month. I grab whatever system I’ve not used in a while, shoehorn all my tasks into it, and get busy being organised for a few hours. But I don’t really get anything done, I just *feel* like I have.

Coupled with my dreadful task management skills, there’s the whole issue of notes. I like making notes in a notebook with a nice fountain pen. Preferably a nice moleskin or such like. But, invariably, my notes get intermingled with todo items, which never make it back out of the notebook. Plus, I can never find the notebook when I need it, or I’ve left it at school when I want it at home, etc.

I’ve tried big notebooks, small notebooks, Hipster PDA, Palm pilots, etc. None of them work. I’ve tried OmniFocus on the iPhone/iPodTouch, as well as Notes.

So, a combination solution’s needed, I think.

Evernote is looking the most likely candidate for me right now. I’ve been a fan of MS’s OneNote, but it’s Windows only, which is a pain, even when using it under Parallels on the Mac, it’s just too much of a pain to keep it mobile. Evernote isn’t as feature rich as OneNote, but it does have iPhone/iPodTouch, Mac, Windows and Web clients, which makes it about as portable as you can get. I always have my iPod with me; hopefully to be turned into an iPhone some day soon.

I’m going with, effectively, context-based notebooks; school, home, computer, with Task pages in each context, and then general notes.

There is still no alarm system, which is going to be a problem, potentially.

There are some workarounds – drag and drop the task note in each context to Outlook’s Todo bar, for one. But, that’s not a reminder for an individual task, that’s a reminder for a collection of tasks. I would, I hope serve to remind me to review my task list, I guess.

As each note seems to have a URL associated with it, I’m considering writing a URL scraper, then using something like remind to e-mail me whenever I have a task due.

It’s not ideal, but it’s better than anything else I’ve got out there. I think I will continue to keep a Hipster PDA on me, just in case; it’s easier for taking note of multiple actions in a meeting.

My only real concern with using a computer based solution to note taking is that it limits the way in which I can take notes. Mind mapping is one of my favourite ways of either taking notes or creating/notating ideas. Mindmapping is not a tool that sits well with the iPhone. It just about works on a computer, but it’s just not the same as using a pen and paper. Prezi, whilst designed for presentations, might just be a way forward there, but I think for recording purposes rather than creation; nothing quite beats pen and paper for quickly fleshing out an idea. My preference for mindmapping is to have continuous roll of paper to my right – start drawing on the left hand end, keep going ’til you’re done. Folding artist’s sketchbooks are quite good for this too as you can get the same effect.

Suck it and see, I guess!