Hasta La Gadget!

Shakespeare has been brought kicking and screaming up into the iPad generation, with the launch of a new set of apps intended to leverage the tablet’s multimedia flexibility with a splash of Leonardo DiCaprio. The Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth apps, the handiwork of developers Agant and Cambridge University Press, match the classic texts with audio recordings featuring actors such as Michael Sheen and Kate Beckinsale, interactive timelines showing key themes, and glossaries to better understand arcane English.

The timelines show the progression of key elements of the story – death, love, light & dark, and conflict – through each of the acts and scenes, with the ability to tap into each point and go to the relevant part of the script. It’s also possible to pull out the sections of the play that each character is in, and track their own progression through, while detailed notes explain what’s happening and why it’s important.

If you’ve ever forgotten which thane is which, there are “circles” which in effect take Google+ back to the seventeenth century, and show how each character’s relationship maps out in each scene. Word maps show the most frequently used words by scene or character, and there’s support for highlighting and search filtering.

We caught up with John Pettigrew, who led the project at the Cambridge University Press, and who explained that the two initial plays are just the start of the app journey. The Press plans to go through Shakespeare’s back-catalog, focusing initially on the best-sellers and those which are most used in educational settings, before moving onto other possibilities such as Milton and texts in Latin.

As for why there’s no video, only audio and photos from various productions, Pettigrew said that the team’s research indicated watching a play alongside the script actually took readers away from the text itself, whereas audio helps put Shakespeare’s words into context. A dedicated app rather than a multimedia ebook, meanwhile, was selected simply because – despite Apple’s work on iBooks Author – even they couldn’t fit in the interactivity the team wanted to deliver.

Both Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth are available from the App Store now, priced at $13.99/£9.99.

Shakespeare gets an iPad upgrade is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

How was your week? We got to spend a couple of days trekking around the Carnegie Mellon campus in Pittsburgh, PA to check out some of the latest projects from the school’s world renowned Robotics Institute — a trip that culminated with the bi-annual induction ceremony from the CMU-sponsored Robot Hall of Fame. Given all the craziness of the past seven days, you might have missed some of the awesomeness, but fear not, we’ve got it all for you here in one handy place — plus a couple of videos from the trip that we haven’t shown you yet. Join us after the break to catch up.

Continue reading Butlers, lunar rovers, snakes and airboats: the best of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute

Butlers, lunar rovers, snakes and airboats: the best of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Oct 2012 12:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What do you get when you attach a point-and-shoot, display, microphone, RFID reader and a bunch of big buttons to a clear plastic box and stick it all in a classroom with a bunch of three- to five-year-olds? Carnegie Mellon’s CREATE Lab calls the creation Message from Me. It’s a way of engaging early education students with technology, developing language and social skills and helping keep parents abreast of their school day activities.

The tool encourages kids to record a thought or take a picture and send it to a parent by pulling a card with their face on it down from the wall and scanning on the RFID reader. Parents can get updates via text message or email from kids who are often unable to pass along such information at the end of the day. According to the lab, the machines have already been installed in nearly a dozen schools in the Pittsburgh area — and from the looks of the boxes on the floor in the CREATE Lab, plenty more are on the way.

Continue reading Message from Me offers dispatches from early education, we go eyes-on (video)

Filed under: Displays, Networking

Message from Me offers dispatches from early education, we go eyes-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft has revealed the pricing for its Office 365 version for college students, Office 365 University. Cloud-based and very similar to the desktop variety of Office, Office 365 University has low pricing and a subscription term that compliments the user’s student career. The product can be snagged for $79.99.

The low price is for a four-year subscription, making the total monthly cost $1.67. Students who elect to continue their education or who stay in school longer than four years can renew their subscription for another four years at the same cost. Also included in the price is 27GB of SkyDrive storage, to which files created with Office 365 are saved.

Office 365 University provides access to six applications: Word, OneNote, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, and Access. Like the regular variety of Office, college students can get Office 365 access for free by purchasing Office University 2010 (Windows), and Office 2011 (Mac). Both products are priced at $100.

Microsoft has upped its game recently by making Office 365 HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant, something med schools require. This gives it an edge over Google’s education office apps, which are free. So far, Duke, Emory, Thomas Jefferson University, and the University of Washington have all jumped on the Office 365 wagon.

[via Information Week]

Microsoft unveils Office 365 University pricing is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Apple executives will put the spotlight on the iPad’s educational value tomorrow at its planned San Jose event, according to a new Bloomberg Businessweek report. The report cites “a person with knowledge of the planning” of the event as the source, but doesn’t go into further detail about how specifically they’ll be promoting it from an educational perspective. But if Apple’s introducing a lower-cost iPad mini as expected, the benefits in terms of institutional purchases are obvious.

At a reported starting price of around $329, the iPad mini would be a full $170 cheaper than the latest iPad, and $70 cheaper than the current selling price of the iPad 2. That’s bound to attract interest from educators, given that iPads are already being adopted by many school districts in the U.S., both in pilot programs and in full-scale deployment, as in the San Diego Unified School District, which is deploying around 26,000 iPads to students this year.

Apple has also been pushing education initiatives on the software side in the past couple of years, with dedicated iTunes U applications for instructors, teachers and students, and an iBooks publisher geared towards creating interactive, rich media-filled digital textbooks for educational use. That attention isn’t going unnoticed – back in August, IDC released a market share report regarding worldwide tablet shipments and noted that education in particular is a vertical where interest in Apple’s tablet is on the rise.

Promoting the iPad as an educational tool will likely involve not only highlighting the device’s past and current success in this area, but also making a concerted, forward-looking sales pitch as well. Others have clearly noticed that the education market is a clear area for promoting tablet growth, like Amazon, which recently added to the existing appeal of its bargain-basement Kindle Fire pricing (a souped up version of last year’s model retails for $159) with a new free Whispercast mobile device management platform that lets schools easily deploy updates and content to a whole fleet of Kindle hardware, with support for Kindle Fire Android software coming soon.

Apple has first-mover advantage, which is important with education markets, since the processes involved in making institution-wide IT procurement decisions can take quite a while to get rolling, and it’s hard to switch horses mid-race. But Amazon’s clearly playing hardball with education, which not only leads to higher device sales near-term, but also exposes whole new generations to a company’s devices early on in life. Education could be where the sparks really fly as Apple diversifies its tablet lineup, and it’ll be interesting to see how the company girds for that battle on stage at tomorrow’s event, should this report prove accurate.