Getting to Know Your Mac (January 7, 2010)

Get familiar with the powerful tools and features of any Mac computer in this introductory workshop. Explore the basic features of OS X and discover the five system preferences you should know. Practice using Safari, Mail, Address Book and iCal and get started with iPhoto. Also get tips on how to back up your files and find new applications. This is a hands-on class, so bring your Mac laptop if you have one.

Sign up here. $49.00 for 3 hour session.

Apple iPhoto Workshop (February 4, 2010)

Apple iPhoto 11 is a popular photo management and editing application in one. In this hands-on workshop, get familiar with the iPhoto interface and learn how to import images, create albums and edit/enhance photos. Also discover the many ways to share your photos with family and friends. Students will receive instructional videos that review concepts covered in class. Bring your Mac laptop to class if you have one.

Sign up here. $49.00 for 3 hour session.

Because Apple Magazine is solely a digital publication, it can offer a lot more content, minus the paper, ink and publishing costs. Subscribers get more for their money because Apple Magazine is a weekly publication, released every Thursday or Friday in the Zinio app.

The only magazines that I subscribe to now are ones I can download and read on my iPad. The size and orientation of the device is perfect for magazine reading, and best of all it means I don’t have stacks of paper issues taking up closet space in my home office. It also means that when I subscribe to a magazine on the iPad I don’t have to wait weeks to get the first issue.

Apple Magazine enables me to write longer and more detailed articles about Apple related hardware and software. But best of all, it is great to see my writing laid out in professionally designed pages, unlike the simple webpage and blog postings that I usually get published in. Don’t get me wrong, I like writing for web publications, but magazines still seem to offer a more professional edge.

Some of the topics I have written about so far for AM include “iPad vs. the MacBook Air,” “iPhoto for the Holidays,” “Using the New iOS 5 iPhone Camera Features,” “Automating Your Mac”, and “iPad at School.”

Apple Magazine is a startup publication and thus it needs subscribers. In a few weeks the publishers will start providing free trial downloads, but in the meantime you can buy single issues through Zinio for $4.99; 12 issues for $39.99, 26 issues for $49.99, and a full year subscription for $89.99.

When I get done with writing assignments for the day or sometimes evening, I simply don’t have very much energy to write personal blog posts. Even though I am finally using Dragon Dictate to write most of my articles, the writing still involves research, exploring or figuring software or a website, and sometimes the difficult task of just formulating my thoughts and dictating them on the screen. Dragon Dictate types faster than I do but unfortunately it can do little more than that.

I will return tomorrow with another post an update about my new job assignments. I don’t think anyone is reading this, but for some reason I feel the need to maintain the site.

If you’re a teacher or educator of any discipline, and you want to really engage your students and help them think critically, then you should integrate popular culture and media literacy into your courses. No one escapes our media entrenched society. Media and popular culture help shape our values, stereotypes, prejudices, and political views. Media is both a powerful story telling institution and a means of information consumption. But it is also a tool to manipulate and misinform those who uncritically consume it.

During my years of teaching, I used the pedagogy of popular culture and media to teach writing, reading, and critical thinking. My students analyzed advertising messages, wrote essays and research papers on controversial issues related to violence in the media, gender stereotypes, bias in the news, and the art and power of story telling. Every student was engaged because they all shared experiences and opinions of popular songs, movies, televisions shows, teen magazines, and video games. Even when I had to teach classic novels such as The Great Gatsby, we studied the work alongside watching Oliver Stones’ Wall Street—both of which focus on class and the American Dream.

Thus, I’m a proud to share the publication of Rethinking Popular Culture and Media, which includes two of my previously published articles (“Seventeen, Self-Image, and Stereotypes,” and “Examining Media Violence”) about how I used media literacy in the classroom. I’m honored to be published alongside the progressive teachers, activists, and educators like Bob Peterson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Bigelow, Linda Christensen, Wayne Au, and Herbert Kohl.

Rethinking Popular Culture and Media makes for a great introduction to the subject. Google the keywords “media literacy” and you will also discover an abundance of resources put out by the Center for Media Literacy, the New Mexico Media Literacy Project, and the National Association for Media Literacy Education (of which I was a board member for a few years.)

The publishers of the collection, Rethinking Schools, has consistently been in the forefront of progressive education, and has been unwavering to its dedication of encouraging and helping teachers infuse student-centered and multicultural education in the classroom.

Rethinking Popular Culture and Media is written by and for teachers. If you have never considered this type of pedagogy in your classroom, you’re missing a powerful way to reach and engage your students.

For better or worse, the Internet is largely a visual medium. I would image that just as many images as words make up the web content of the Internet. Images are powerful and they often covey a messages and capture our attention a hundred times faster than words. So this begs the question, which is a better way to view posts on Twitter, the traditional, linear, text-dominate way, like this?:

Or in a more traditional newspaper styled visual and text medium format, like this (from the Flipboard application for the iPad)?:

Or this approach based on www.paper.li:

When I browse Twitter updates using the Flipboard, I experience Twitter in a much more pleasing way. While the traditional linear text interface works pretty well on my iPhone, it’s absolutely boring for browsing Twitter on my computer or iPad.

I wish Flipboard could be turned into online website for Twitter and Facebook, as well as for RSS feeds. The multimedia, magazine style of the application is precisely designed for how media should be passed along and consumed.

What do you think? Should there be two types of Twitter sites?

I’m happy to report that one of my favorite topics to write about has finally been published a book length guide titled the Awesome Guide to Mac Automation.

This guide is for Mac users who want to get more done on their Mac with less work. It includes step-by-instructions for using Apple’s smart automation technology, including smart folders, smart albums, smart playlists, and it’s free automation application, Automator.

Among other things you’ll learn how to:

• Use smart folders to manage your files and folders
• Using iTunes’ smart playlists to organize your music
• Find the photo your looking for with iPhoto
• Sort your email without any effort, using Mail.app’s smart filters and folders
• Using Automator to script without any programming knowledge

The guide is free, and I’m in the process of writing a professional version of the guide that will introduce advanced automation programs, including Quickeys 4.0, Hazel, and AppleScript.

The guide can be downloaded for free from MakeUseOf.com.

Well, I just discovered a few days ago a little Mac gem simply called, Alarms. The app is accessed in your Mac‘s menu bar, and when you click on it, you can had ToDo’s and alarms in a calendar timeline interface that runs across your desktop.

What‘s so cool about it is you don’t have to input dates and times. To manually create a calendar event, you double-click on the date, input the name of the event in the text field.

Then you drag the box to the left or right to set the time.

But it gets easier. Say you want to set an alarm for an online webinar you want to attend (that is, link to). Instead of having to input a name and date of the event, you can simply drag the URL for the webinar into the Alarms calendar, and set the date and time from there. Absolutely no typing required. When the alarm goes off, you can click to open the designated web page.

With Alarms, however, you can’t set notifications for say 15 minutes before the event starts. So if your event starts at 3p.m., you would set the time for say 2:30p.m if you need to reach a certain place by 3:00.

The Alarms interface tucks away until you need it. It presents a simple Growl notification and specified sound for date and time notifications. If you need to check your calendar, simply click on the Alarms icon and the timeline calendar interface drops down for viewing. When you’re done, it slides back up. It’s very unobtrusive.

One big draw back to the application is you also can’t set recurring times in the Alarms calendar, as you can with iCal. And though the developer says Alarms syncs with iCal, it’s not clear how that works.

The features lacking in the program keep it from being a total iCal replacement, and thus its $15 price tag might not be something you’ll want to pay.

Alarms could use some additional features, but I plan to get a full license because it’s a little—pardon the pun—time saver and a lot less hassle to use than iCal. Alarms is the kind of application you wish were imbedded in the Mac OS X system.

Ohhh…the challenges of writing.  Most people dread it. Many of us had poor grade school experiences of English teachers demolishing our work with countless red ink error corrections and question marks all over the papers we stayed up late writing the night before. We dreaded subjects we had to write about and the revisions we had to make—the entire process was like cleaning a messy room. The pain and arduous process of good writing is what makes simple cell phone text messaging and 140-character Twitter posts so much easier.

So why is writing so hard? Well, partly because it’s not as natural as talking. The old adage that says, write like you talk is not quite valid. Good writing is not always like we talk. We don’t talk in complete sentences. We constantly correct ourselves. We utter our thoughts. And if just can’t articulate we what we’re thinking, we can always say, “You know.”

Why Good Writing Is Hard

Good, coherent writing  is not like talking. Writing is a process. It’s messy. It’s uncertain. It doesn’t add up like 2+2=4, even though there are grammar and spelling rules. Writing is somewhere between an art and a math equation, and that’s what makes it hard. There are rules that we can apply to make our writing good, but writing requires a sense of style and timing that makes writing interesting.

As a writer, my skills have grown over the years, simply because I write nearly everyday—not just for myself, but for readers. It’s one thing to keep a personal diary or blog in which you can choose not to focus on communicating your thoughts but to use writing to document your experiences and what’s on your mind. When you write for readers, it’s different challenge. You want your writing to be read. You’re trying to communicate information to others in way that makes that information easy to understand.

If you’re a fiction writer (which I‘m not), you’re trying to both entertain your readers and draw them into your fictionalized world. If you’re a serious fiction writer, you know your readers won’t waist their time with a poorly written story.

When a reader reads a book or even an article, he or she is entering into a contract with the writer. The reader is agreeing to give over his/her time to read what the author has to say. The reader expects the author to make to make the time and experience of reading worthwhile. By the same token, the author wants the full attention of the reader.

That’s the challenge of writing is to make topics interesting, comprehensive, accessible, and rewarding for readers.

The process of producing good writing is what I will cover in part 2 of this topic.

(Photo acknowledgement: Dave )

I could easily do an entire website about e-reading devices, and if I did,  iAnnotate PDF would be at the top of my list as the best app for reading and annotating text on the iPad.

Recently, the developers  of iAnnotate put out a press release about how their app is a required iPad program for first-year medical students at Standford. I can certainly understand why. I actually prefer iAnnotate over Apple‘s iBook and Amazon’s Kindle app—the latter two in my view are mainly for reading novels, not books and documents that require lots of annotating.

With iAnnotate, you can wirelessly import PDFs via the developer’s Aji Reader Service app, the file-sharing service, Dropbox, or through a wired connection between iTunes and the iPad. You an also directly download a PDF from within iAnnotate browser itself. I’ve imported and opened PDFs as large a 500 pages without a problem.

Now, sure, iAnnotate doesn’t have the fancy bookshelf interface of iBooks and the Kindle App, but once you learn the power of its annotation features, a fancy bookshelf won’t be something you care much about—though it would be nice.

If you compare the bookmarking and highlighting tools of iAnnotate with iBook and the Kindle app, you will quickly see why and how it outshines the latter too e-readers. The Kindle app, for instance, only allows you to highlight in one color. When you review your My Notes & Marks in the Kindle app, the annotations are almost indistinguishable. You can only see the first highlight that you made on a page. It’s very rudimentary.

iAnnotate provides much more. Not only can you color-code you annotations, but there are other annotation tools at your disposal, including a pencil marker, notes, and book marks that can be both color-coded with their own custom titles. Each annotation mark includes its corresponding page number. (Seriously, Apple and Amazon need to get these developers on their team.)

On top of all this, you can actually email your annotations, or you can export a PDF with all your annotations in tack.

Reviewing my notes and annotations is seriously more efficient in iAnnotate than even with old-schooled paper markings.

The developers of iAnnotate have added features in the last several months, and I suspect they’re not finished. I’ve only touched the service of what this app can do.

Since I started using iAnnotate, as well the Instapaper app, I have literally stopped printing documents to read in paper version.

You can get a free download version (iTunes Store link) of iAnnotate PDF, but if you read lots of PDFs, I guarantee you won’t be disappointed by the full pro version (iTunes Store link).