#app-review

Day 8/90 Intro & Links As I recently mentioned in Second Brain Surgery, writing notes remains at the core of any Personal Knowledge Management toolkit. It’s the oldest principle in the personal productivity book: don’t use your brain to remember, and instead, write things down somewhere as soon as you think of them so that you can free your energy to think, knowing that nothing is ever…

Introduction

Coursmos is an educational app designed to be a platform that brings education producers and consumers together.  However, Courmos is promoting (and perhaps coining?) this idea of “microlearning”.  The set up at Coursmos is such that content developers create mini tutorials for whatever concept they’re trying to teach in a series of 2-3 minute video chapters.  Coursmos claims that they are trying to address the attrition rate so often associated with online courses, as dropout and failure rates are extremely high for this educational medium.  The Courmos team contends that this is due to lack of time and concentration, and proposes short mini tutorial videos as a fix.  Content producers can then decide to charge for their course, or release it for free.  The learning topics available vary from make-up lessons to introduction to computer science topics.

  While I think I personally disagree with their rationale for “microlearning,” (I think lack of concentration and time are only a few factors that create high attrition and completion rates for online courses), I think user generated content for learning materials is a popular and increasingly popular idea.

  The Coursmos Course Dev

At Coursmos, teachers can require that interested candidates pay for access to their course.  Coursmos has a recommended rate of between 1 and 5 dollars per course, taking a 30 % surcharge, and leaving the teacher with 70% of the revenue.  This seems comparable to similar platform services that I’ve seen.

Course developers create their video tutorials on a sleek and user-friendly interface.  First, teachers create a title and description for their courses, and finally choose a category from the scroll menu at the bottom.

Then teachers decide whether to shoot a video or upload a video from a preexisting file.  The platform                                                                   

is designed for videos of between two to three minutes in length, but can hold longer videos as well.  Once the teacher is satisfied with their lesson, they can press ‘Save Lesson’ to continue adding video chapters to complete their tutorial.

Coursmos Likes:

As seen here, the mobile editor is extremely user friendly and has high quality output.  The small video chunks are easy to download and keep the broken up content well organized and easily ‘resume-able’, especially as you’re able to export these mini-videos directly to your cellphone.

 Integration with their online page works well, and coursmos does a great job of classifying your interests and course progress, allowing you to list courses you’re interested in and tracking your progress through various courses.

 The large amount of material available at Coursmos makes it useful for many learners and educators, in many disciplines.  Other than Udemy, this is the only hosting site for video tutorials that I’ve seen that can be used completely free of charge. 

Another aspect of Courmos that I like is that it encourages teacher-teacher collaboration, as after each video chapter, viewers are given the opportunity to add “extensions” or extra video content related to the same theme that was represented in that section of the course.  However, I’ve seen few extensions, and think this is somewhat flawed in its creation, as students are likely the ones to be reviewing the courses, so they should be the ones adding more content.

          Critiques / Recommendations:

One issue I have with this course is that I don’t think mini tutorials will solve the problem of poor completion rates for online learners.  One of the biggest issues that exists in the field I believe is lack of interaction.  The fact that the video tutorials at Coursmos have been made more efficient does not create more interaction, and I think that this is essentially what’s at the root of the online ed problem.  One way this might be partially addressed in the Coursmos app is by allowing students to use the ‘extension’ space as a community participation board, where they can discuss issues and demonstrate solutions.

Another issue I have is that there is only one form of content delivery available for this App.  It seems like it wouldn’t be difficult to also include branches of reading and listening materials, but as of now, only video content is available.  I also think it would be beneficial, although somewhat cliché to add on a practice section, where teachers could create standard practice activities that include multiple choice, drag and drop, or fill in the blank type activities. 

Since all the output is based on video guides, it might also be useful for student to have a ‘note-taking’ section, where they can easily access a text component to write down useful facts they gain from the sections, and access this across video files. This will allow students to combine multiple resources on similar topics in a useful way.  Another way this might be done is by adding a “bookmark” feature for tagging even smaller sections of a tutorial, and housing this in a personal file that the student can name and create for later reference and compiling resources.

On Sunday„ the New York Times ran an editorial entitled "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Reader" discussing the mounting difficulties facing devotees of long-form fiction and other forms of book-length reading. The problem is not just our own ever-diminishing powers of concentration in a fractured world of "staccato communication" and "addictive entertainments," where reading a novel starts to appear as daunting as running a marathon. There is also the gradual but accelerating loss of the professionals who used to guide our readings choices— booksellers, librarians (whom the novelist Richard Powers described as "gas attendants of the mind), and the professional book reviewers who used to serve as cultural gatekeepers. These professionals have been largely replaced by the user-generated reviews on sites like Amazon and more community-oriented social networking/review apps (and sites) like Good Reads, which I have chosen to review.

Although lots of alarm bells have been ringing about what seems to be the eventual demise of brick and mortar book stores— we’ve watched Barnes and Noble morph from an evil behemoth that eats independent stores (remember You’ve Got Mail?) to a quaint holdover from times past— publishers themselves have remained relatively unconcerned. Book sales have dwindled alarmingly, but profits have remained pretty stable, partly because it’s cheaper to produce ebooks, but also because of increased emphasis on blockbuster releases and because of budget cuts that largely impact smaller, lesser-known works and writers— works that might be of enormous cultural value but are less and less likely to be “discovered.”

Enter an app like Good Reads, a combined reviewing/networking site/app where readings can submit reviews, create and share book lists, manage their reading, store ebooks, and perhaps most importantly get recommendations for new reading material. Some people (including, unsurprisingly, Amazon’s CEO) view this democratization of the gatekeeping process as a good thing— the shaking up of elitism which, in conjunction with the self-publication of ebooks will open up both reading and writing in new and exicting ways. 

Of course, it’s also true that earlier this year, Amazon bought Good Reads and also owns its major competitors, Librarything and Shelfari, creating a potentially dangerous monopoly that looks like a democratic community. Amazon can now target readers, for example, based on their Good Read reviews, and can do so because Good Read users (like Facebook users) are so seduced by the functions of the app that they voluntarily surrender privacy.

And it is a beautifully-designed app. As part of the process of registration, I was asked to rate 20 previously-read books from my selected genres (I chose classics and contemporary fiction). When I rated anything 4 or 5, the system’s algorithm generated similar titles, which was initially annoying and (with the classics) somewhat flattering. Once registration is complete, it generates recommendations (and will continue to generate recommendations, based on future networking and reviewing activity). The recommendations for the classics were very good, but the contemporary recommendations felt pretty random, perhaps because my tastes are so eclectic. The system also allows users to enter new titles through a built-in barcode scanner, which is kind of cool, although I’m not sure why you would do this rather than enter a title.

The app was also particularly cool for the “classics” genre, since so many of the recommended titles are in the public domain (not restricted by copyright) and can be instantly uploaded onto my bookshelf. So now I’m ready to get started on Les Miserables during my commute tonight! Except that the contents of this app are not available without an active Internet connection— which is a major limitation.

The main learning theory that this app embodies is, quite obviously, communities of practice. The app seeks to create a community of like-minded readers to provide the scaffolding once provided by professionals who were integrated into our lives. And it succeeds. But, as we learned when we read about communities of practice earlier in this course, these are not uniformly positive entities. Communities of practice can reinforce bias very effectively, and online communities can be particularly insidious in the ways they reinforce a prevailing ethos.

And this was the main fear of the Times editorial: reliance on user-generated content and a good algorithm might appear to support diversity, but in reality these tools tend to effectively reinforce the cultural status quo (especially when they are owned by Amazon) and make it even harder for new voices to be heard in all the noise— just as the “viral video” phenomenon tends to yield “Harlem Shakes” and “Gangnam Style” mega-hits that turns success into a massive lottery. This is also the same mechanism that makes other apparently democraticizing technologies (like Twitter) into excellent tools for political control, as we learned in our unit on the political uses of mobile networking.

Good Reads is an excellent, dynamic app— especially when compared with a static app like ebrary— the platform Adelphi uses for all its academic ebooks. Professional librarians have continued to insist that users come to them, and learn to navigate their systems and catalogs, and the ebrary platform, though it has a good search engine, reflects that mentality. (And even the good search engine is lost when libraries integrate the titles into their own OPACS.) 

The “discovery” function of Good Reads is quite good, but something is still missing. Similarly, I love the discovery feature of Spotify, but if I really want to hear something great I usually ask my spouse, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of music and knows that after I listen to the Bangles I might be happiest with Johnny Cash. No computer will ever know that.

                       Educational App Review- My Fitness Pal

 For my education app review I choose to do “My Fitness Pal.” My Fitness Pal is a free smartphone app and a website. The app was rated the best free program for maintenance, calorie awareness and food variety. It tracks diet and exercise to determine optimal nutrients and caloric intake for the user’s goals. When the user downloads the app the first thing they will have to do is fill in their information. The app will ask for the users: height, weight, gender, and how active the user is. All of this information helps the app calculate the caloric intake of each individual. The user will then have to put in what they would like to do, for example, lose weight, gain weight, or maintain weight. From here the user will choose, depending on what they pick, how many pounds they would like to lose/gain a week. This is how the app determines how many calories to tell the user to take in. After this is decided goals are created for the user. There are both fitness goals and nutritional goals along with the user’s diet profile. In the nutritional goals section it tells the user how many calories, carbs, fat, and protein consumed per day. Under the fitness goals it shows the user how many calories are burned per week along with how many workouts and how many minutes. When the user plugs in what workout they have completed the app will show how many calories they burn. This can be useful because some people may believe that they have worked out more than they actually did and many believe they burned a lot more calories than they actually did.

            After the user has all of the key information about themselves into the app they can start. The app on the smartphone has a scanner right next to the search bar. This is to scan the food or drinks that they eat. This is helpful because it allows the user to plug in the exact food that they are eating/drinking or both. If the food and/or drink does not have a scanner the user may type it into the search bar. Once they do so, they can find the correct food and then add it to their diary. Once the food is added to their diary it will deduct the amount of calories they just ate/drank. This will make the user aware of how many calories he or she has left for the day. I believe that when people see how many calories they are eating they are more conscious of what they put into their body.  This is similar to people who keep a food diary and physically write down what they eat each day, this makes them more aware and possibly do well on their “diet.”

            The app also has a section to save recipes and food that you have once had that was not already programed into the system. This way you are able to find it quickly and save it. My Fitness Pal also allows you to be friends with anyone else who is using the same application.  Using this feature, friends can help each other out and encourage one another. As a teacher I find this part of the app very useful because I am able to go on and see all of my students and if they are keeping up with their assignments. It also says how many days the user has consecutively logged in and tracked their information and how many days they did not. This helps me because I am able to know exactly what students I need to remind and keep pushing to do their homework. This is helpful in the classroom because students can record their food intake for a certain amount of days and analyze their nutritional intake.  They can then compare their nutritional intake to the recommended daily amount. The students will be able to see what they are lacking, what they consume too much of and what they do not consume any of!  The students can also analyze their physical activity habits. The students can then write a reflection on their nutritional and fitness findings.

            The intended audience is anyone who would like to track their fitness and eating habits to help them maintain/gain or lose weight. Anyone who is interested in logging their food and tracking their fitness workouts would benefit from this app. By using this app you will acquire the knowledge about how many calories you have to take in per day along with how much of each nutrient you are in taking. The graphs will also show you what percentage of carbohydrates, protein etc. you intake. All of this information is crucial to good health. Even students who are not in a health, physical education or biology class should be introduced to this app. This is something that will help children, teens and adults learn how to live a healthy lifestyle. LIFESTYLE is the key in this case. It is not a diet plan, it is a LIFESTYLE. Crash diets eventually fade; this is something that will help people learn how to eat the healthy way without depriving themselves or dieting in an unhealthy way.

            There are a few people who have created the “My Fitness Pal” app; Coach Stevo is one of them. He is a nutrition and sport psychology consultant at San Francisco Cross Fit. He is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist, has a BA in Philosophy from the University of Chicago, and is finishing his MA in Applied Sport Psychology from John F. Kennedy University. His specialty is habit-based training. He wanted to create an app where people can quickly accumulate a lot of data about their progress toward their health, weight and fitness goals, big and small, by recording what they eat and how much they move.

I believe that this app has great educational value. Being a health and physical education teacher, I use this for students to create a fitness and nutrition journal. Since students, for the most part all have smart phones; this is a new and improved way to have them complete a project. Any class that reviews nutrition or fitness could use this type of app to help students learn to track their physical fitness habits and their eating habits.

I personally do not believe that there are limitation to this app. The only thing I can think of is that fact that you have to personally put everything into the app, if someone does not really put in everything that they eat and all of their work outs they would not get accurate results. Another feature I like about this app is that there is a section called “APPS,” this section has a few different types of fitness pedometers or different types of fitness trackers. You can use this part of my fitness pal app to sync your pedometer or if you use a different type of tracker. For example, I also have the “Fit-Bit” this records your sleep, eating, steps, and calories burnt and I was able to sync this to my fitness pal to further enhance my health.  

The layout of this application is clear and easy to use. This is why I use this in my classroom because it is very self-explanatory and the students seem to have no problem finding what they need to find. They also like using the scanning part of the app to scan the barcode on the food. This app is easily accessible because you can download it on any phone (where you can download apps). However if you do not have a smart phone there is a website which allows you to do the same thing. So students are able to go online and use the computers if they do not have access to a smart phone.  

All different types of crash diets that people try all the time never work because they are not realistic the main thing that students/ adults/ children learn from using this type of app is the right way to eat. They learn how to maintain their caloric intake and they also are able to eat what they want as long as they stay inside their calories for the day. I use this app every day, if I forget to record something I eat I feel guilty! It is very addicting and once you start you really do not want to see those calories turn to red (meaning you went over for the day). 

This shows the different screen shots of the app:

Goals for the day   Search for food     Your Diary            Adding Food

This chart shows the persons weight loss progress:

This shows what you mainly consumed in that day: (this can also help the person figure out what they need to consume less/more of to help reach their goal). 

Close up view on what your diary would look like when you add food:

On the left is an example of what the app looks like on an android phone and on the right is what it looks like on the computer. The picture in the middle is another example of the food diary:

For this assignment, I chose to review an application called “3D Brain.” It is available through iTunes and can be downloaded for free onto an iPhone or iPad. “3D Brain” was created in 2009 by Vivid Apps and AXS Biomedical Animation Studio for the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory DNA Learning Center. 

I chose this application because of its relevance to my studies in speech language pathology as well as its ability to target more than one age group. When I took my anatomy and physiology of the speech mechanisms course, I found myself looking for supplemental material to aide my studying and course work. Having applications such as “3D Brain” allows a student or teacher to analyze a 3D model of the brain and to study its regions, structures and functions. Being a visual learner, I feel that it gives you a realistic representation of the brain, as a whole as well as isolated segments. This application can be used to better understand the brain and how it relates to education and learning, speech pathology, psychology, health studies, etc. I feel that this application would be appropriate for high school students as well as college students (both undergraduate and graduate) and professors. 

The application itself is easy to use. When the application is open on an iPhone or iPad, a color coated 3D image of the whole brain is the first item seen. A toolbar on the right side of the screen allows for quick and simple navigation. If the icon labeled “structures” is selected, an alphabetized list of structures, regions, lobes and cortexes will appear in a drop down menu. For example, if “Broca’s Area” is chosen, the area will appear in a purple color on the brain. You can zoom in and out as well as move the screen left to right. The “Info” option on the toolbar provides information such as an overview, case studies, links, as well as associated functions, disorders, and damage. The only limitations that I noticed with this application are that it does not have a text to speech or read aloud capability and it does not have every part of the brain listed. However, all of the important parts of the brain are listed and explained with great detail. 

As explained in the introduction, this application can be used high school and professional studies. The interactive component of this application allows for a variety of views of the brain rather than a flat, black and white picture in a textbook or notebook. A reason why I really like this application is because it is constantly updated which allows for the most current information and research. A person using this application will be able to enhance the material present in a classroom or for an exam as well as visually understand the structural makeup of the brain. 

“3D Brain” can definitely relate to mobile learning today. From personal experience, I find that it is easier to download applications to help my studies when traveling rather than carrying all of my textbooks and notebooks. It is very helpful and allows the learner to have the “hands on experience” that we have explored in this course through our various readings and blogs. As we have learned throughout the course, mobile learning is becoming more and more prevalent in education. This application applies to the community of practice concept that we learned about. The study of the brain would be the common “concern or passion” and with this main focus, information and insight can be shared with other students or professors sharing this interest.  

      I chose Doodle Buddy and Book Creator as my app reviews because both are quintessential apps to have for iPads in schools and you really can’t use one without the other – they go hand in hand. What I love about these apps is that they are free and can be used by students of any age/grade level. They can also be used by students different learning styles and needs. These apps are perfect for almost any subject area and students can use whatever online resources they want to include.  Students can create fiction stories, informative stories, or even historical biographies. Doodle Buddy and Book Creator are the perfect apps for storytelling.

      Doodle Buddy: Doodle Buddy is created by Pinger, Inc., who also created an app for texting and calling for free. The app has a simple, easy-to-use interface making it super kid-friendly. Buttons that are similar to other image-making applications can be found on the bottom of the screen. There is a selection of different backgrounds to choose from or you can upload a picture from your photo album to use as the background. You can use stencils, insert shapes, text, color, and even change the painting tool and size. Despite its features that appeal to younger users, anybody can create a picture from this app. In order to create a digital book, you would need to design the pages using Doodle Buddy and then save them to your photo album.

      Doodle Buddy is feasible and simple, not distracting or complicated. Younger students from grades K-3 may need assistance in saving and uploading, but those functions are easy to use too. One obvious limitation of the app is the inability to use the brush tool like a real paintbrush. Of course, there is a distinct visual difference between the two because an iPad is not a typical painting medium to “paint” on. Otherwise, the app is a useful program for creating pictures. The app touches upon a number of UDL Principles, like principles 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3, for providing options for perception.

      Book Creator is the app to use to create the format of the stories and is subsequent to using Doodle Buddy. Created by Red Jumper, Book Creator is another app with a plain interface so that you can put your stories together without any fuss. After you choose your book shape, you can insert photos, take a picture to put into your page, or add text and sound. If you already used Doodle Buddy and created the images for your pages, you can simply add the pictures to each page (don’t forget to make your cover page!). Then, you can apply text the same way you would see in a real book. To give the story more of an “e-book” feel, you can add sound. Instead of recording and uploading sounds from a separate program, you can record your story in the app. I added sound for my informative book on Polar Bears because I wanted my students to hear the words while they were reading them. Sound helps students who need auditory representation. It is also a wonderful chance for students to show off their artistic work.

         Like Doodle Buddy, Book Creator does not contain any can distractions – an absolute plus for the younger students who will need a little more guidance with uploading pictures to their pages and recording within a certain time frame (to prevent empty space/background noise). Book Creator echoes UDL principles 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 6.2, 6.3, 7.1 and 7.3. Students will be using Book Creator to construct their stories and their text input reflects their language fluency. Putting the story together also requires strategizing, which teachers may want to take into account. Teachers might assess how students use sequence of events in their stories. Teachers may also want to see that their students used literary elements appropriate to their grade level. I created a rubric for my lesson plan using these two apps, making the expectations clear for students as they are making their stories. Once you put your story together, you can upload it to iBooks where it will be converted into an e-book and can be played as an e-book.

       Using these apps to create e-books in the classroom allow for a constructivist approach to learning. Since it is so hands-on, students develop their stories based on choices and design, and essentially “learn along the way” because of the apps’ functionality. As proven in Mayer’s article, “Five features of effective multimedia messages: An evidence-based approach”, students will apply their ideas or subject knowledge and develop stories that connect the images and text together so that readers will have an accurate understanding of the content. Also, because students can incorporate narration, which is the essential sociability characteristic that Mayer mentioned, the presence of a social being engages the reader even further. While children and adults alike can use these two apps to create the perfect story, schools may want to consider these apps for ELA classes since they foster creativity and are perfect for developing language and writing fluency.