Mobile Madness

With the sun shining so brightly in the UK my thoughts have turned to mobile computing and how we can move away from the shackles of the desktop computer. Now it is obvious that laptops and net books free you from your desk. The beauty of these is that they have full functionality, would presumably have all the relevant software loaded, can have all your documents loaded and using mobile broadband have always on broadband. However, regardless of how small these are, they are still relatively bulky, so it is true mobile computing I am considering today. How can we use Smartphones to support us as lecturers, and how can we best advise students on how they can use them to support their learning whilst on the go?

Smartphones have many obvious features to support mobile working such as calendars, push email, and always on Internet access. In fact with most mobile providers allowing unlimited data packages the Internet is permanently at our fingertips. Oh, and let us not forget that our smartphone can also be used as a phone. I think many of us forget this when deciding on which smartphone to purchase. Not that I am going to advise on that, as personal preference and your own research should make this decision for you.

I feel the most important thing which gives mobiles their versatility and usefulness are the apps which can be downloaded for the 4 main OS types. Although these are more plentiful for the IPhone, many others such as blackberry and symbian are rapidly catching up. The app which I am going to talk about today and which I ahve found most useful is Quickoffice or Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite to give it it's correct name. This useful tool allows you to view, edit and create Microsoft Office Documents such as Word (Quickword)  and Excel (Quicksheet) on your smartphone, or in my case my IPod touch. It also allows you to view PowerPoint presentations. I have found Qucikoffice to be easy to use. Viewing, even large, files is a joy. To zoom in or out you use the 2 finger pich and Qucikoffice will keep your document in ratio therefore no scrolling to see whole lines. The real beauty of Quickoffice, however, is the abilty to link seamlessly with cloud storage such as MobileMe, MobileME Shared, Google and Drop Box. I was able to set up  alink to my MobileMe account in seconds and it immediately became a folder in Qucikoffice. I was working on my theses in Minutes from initial set up to finding, opening and working on the document. A more detailed overview of Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite can be found by clicking below:

Overview

One of the other obvious, but extremely useful features of Smartphones is the ability to take pictures and videos and share these with others through sites such as Flikr, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. These can provide photologs of student work, be inserted into word documents or PowerPoint presentations, record stages of a project amongst many others. Smartphones can also be used to share ideas and information through sites such as facebook, twitter, my space Bebo, LinkedIn, and YouTube amongst others. I am not going to go further into these today as I have covered these in previous blogs.

Finally, I started this blog before the email with this link appeared in my Inbox. Great minds think alike

Death of the Desk

As always I would welcome your comments on how this could be developed further. I am learning a lot from the your ideas. The power of our shared knowledge is, as always, greater than our individual response.