Kibbles & Bytes Blog

With Back to School shopping kicking into full gear, it got me thinking about how different academic institutions have become with all the technology available to us now. Check out what one school did to utilize arguably the best technology out there!

Last year, Abilene Christian University decided to give out iPhones and iPod touches (students’ choice) to all incoming freshmen. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it turns out that the school did a lot of research before deciding to do this, and it wasn’t just a gimmick.

Some details of the promotion:

* *ACU handed out 957 devices to incoming freshmen, 169 to faculty and 182 to staff*
* *Incoming freshmen were given a choice between an iPhone, an iPod touch, or neither*
* *About 36% chose an iPod touch over an iPhone*
* *Podcasts, class polls and various communication channels were provided by the school*
* *Students, teachers and staff were able to utilize a web portal (accessible through an iPhone/iPod touch or computer web browser) that offered curriculum overviews, syllabi, account information, Google Calendars and more*

As a result, everyone seemed to agree that the program was a success and that the students’ grades, attendance and class work all benefited.

Pretty cool, huh? I love my iPhone, and if and when I get myself back in the classroom, I plan to have my mobile device in hand to help me get those straight A’s!

“Go on over to the good folks at TUAW to read the whole story.”:http://www.tuaw.com/2009/07/24/acus-iphone-initiative-a-year-later/#continued

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*Tell us, students and teachers, do you use an iPhone or iPod touch in the classroom? If so, how?*

(Be sure to click my name at the *beginning of the article* to email me… we’ll feature your responses in next week’s Kibbles & Bytes!)

Apple has added a 2TB Time Capsule to their line today, and it’s available for $499–the former price of the 1TB Time Capsule. The 1TB Time Capsule has dropped to $299.

What is a Time Capsule? As Ed mentioned above, it’s a hard drive and AirPort Base Station in one. You can back up your hard drive over your Wi-Fi network, and it’s pretty seamless using Time Machine software in OS 10.5 Leopard. (You’re backing up, right? You know no one wants to lose a paper they pulled an all-nighter on…)

We’re also featuring both refurbished and new recently discontinued 500GB Time Capsules, starting at $169.99.

Find out more:

“*500GB Time Capsule, refurbished*”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/74079 – $169.99
“*500GB Time Capsule, new*”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/73304 – $249.99
“*1TB Time Capsule*”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/73303 – $299.99
“*2TB Time Capsule*”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/74275 – $499.99

You may want to grab one before all the Small Dog employees do! 🙂

I’ve written about how to get more from OS X’s built-in spellchecker and Dictionary and Thesaurus in the past. We continute to recive requests to cover this subjeckt, so here goes!

Both OS 10.4 and OS 10.5 have a decent built-in Dictionary and Thesaurus, based on the Oxford American Dictionary. There are several ways to use it. First, you can browse to your Mac’s Application Folder and click on Dictionary. You can also launch the same Dictionary and Thesaurus as a dashboard widget.

Or, you can launch the Dictionary application by right or Command-clicking on any word, and selecting “Look up in Dictionary.”

You can also launch the Dictionary in-line in most documents by holding down the Command-Control-D keys, all at the same time with your mouse over a word (the Command key is the Apple key, next to the Spacebar.)

The spellchecker is a little different then the When you misspell a word–or type one that doesn’t appear in the standard Apple Dictionary–Mac OS X highlights it with a dotted red line. Replace the word with the correct spelling by right-clicking on it (or select the word with your mouse and Control-click on it).

You can also open the open the spellcheck pane and cruise though a document, checking for misspellings. Hold down Command-Shift-; all at the same time and choose “Find Next”.

If you know a highlighted term–such as Waitsfield–is spelled correctly, and you don’t want Mac OS X to highlight it in future occurrences, choose the “Ignore Spelling” option from the list. Mac OS X removes the highlighting below Waitsfield wherever it appears, and won’t underline this word again if you use it subsequently in your current document.

If you want all text-based Mac OS X applications to know the correct spelling of Waitsfield, you can customize the Mac OS X Dictionary to include this correct spelling of the term. To do so, choose the “Learn Spelling” option. Mac OS X adds this spelling to its Dictionary. If you later want your Mac to unlearn this spelling, I recommend downloading the free “Dictionary Cleaner app”:http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/28239/Dictionary-cleaner application. This adds a small preference pane to your System Preferences panel, where you can easily view and remove the custom words you’ve added to the Dictionary. You can download this app “by clicking here.”:http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/28239/Dictionary-cleaner

Sometimes OS X’s built in Dictionary doesn’t know the correct spelling of a mangled word. In this case, I paste the word into Google’s search field, and use Google’s very good built-in spellchecker. Note that you can also right-click (or Control-click) on a word and choose “Search in Google” to seek the correct spelling via Google.

“Wordnik”:http://www.wordnik.com/words/apple is a new way to learn about words, including spelling, definitions, and synonyms.

Wordnik wants to be a place for all the words and everything known about them. We’re addicted, that is, compulsively dependent upon, that is, devoted to Wordnik!

Traditional dictionaries make you wait until they’ve found what they consider to be “enough” information about a word before they will show it to you. Wordnik knows you don’t want to wait–if you’re interested in a word, they’re interested too!

Their goal is to show you “as much information as possible, just as fast as we can find it, for every word in English, and to give you a place where you can make your own opinions about words known.”

It’s that time of year again. We’ve kicked off the back-to-school shopping season with a dedicated “Mac to School”:http://www.smalldog.com/mactoschool shopping page, featuring discounts on everything from Apple computer bundles, iPods, iPod stereo systems, software and more.

While these offers are geared toward the needs of students, anyone can purchase them. Except for a few Adobe academic titles, there are no requirements to be affiliated with any school or university.

Check out the special offers at “Smalldog.com/mactoschool”:http://www.smalldog.com/mactoschool!

_Dear Friends,_

This week it’s Ed writing for Don, who was last seen wandering into a mysterious crop circle, looking up into a strange light flooding the sky. He’s supposed to be back next week–we’ll see.

On Thursday Apple introduced an new version of its neato Time Capsule, now with two terabytes of storage. Time Capsule is both a wireless backup device along with a built-in Airport Extreme wireless router. It works beautifully with Time Machine, Apple’s automatic backup program, which is included with the Leopard operating system. Two terabytes of storage is pretty huge, certainly enough for most households and even many small businesses. Kali writes more about this update below.

I welcome innovative programs like Time Machine and devices like Time Capsule that streamline and automate computer backup. Too few people realize that all the precious data on their computer is stored on a delicate stack of magnetic platters spinning thousands of times per minute. Unfortunately, it’s a fact of modern life (and all mechanical devices) that a computer’s hard drive will eventually fail. In most cases when that happens, all data is either permanently lost or very, very expensive to recover. Maintaining a solid backup regime can make hard drive failure an annoyance rather than a crisis.

In addition to using Time Machine with a Time Capsule, I’ve been testing a few of the online data storage plans, including Mozy.com, iDrive.com, and Carbonite.com. I’ll review these in a future Kibbles and Bytes article.