Holiday Gift Guide: iPad Apps for Students

The usual suspects are here including Evernote and Papers, but there's a few apps that I hadn't heard of before.

Goodbye Textbooks, Hello iPad

While this story is about K-12 rather than higher-education, it does have some interesting points about the use of iPads as a substitute for paper textbooks.

Maybe it's because I am so paranoid about my own iPad getting scratched or broken that I cringe a little bit when I think about it being passed around by a group of third-graders...

YouTube launches education-only site

YouTube has launched a new education-only site.  It looks to me like the emphasis is on providing a safe way for schools to allow YouTube into their classrooms without running the risk of students being exposed to inappropriate videos or inflammatory user comments.


 While doing lectures on phenyton kinetics I've shown this video of a patient having a seizure in order to help students understand what they are treating.

Have you used YouTube in the classroom?

Game-based Learning - Right Around the Corner?

Since 2005, the nonprofit association EDUCAUSE has been publishing annual Horizon Reports that describe areas of emerging technology that will significantly impact higher education in the near future.


In the 2011 Horizon Report, published earlier this year, 6 areas of technology are described that are projected to be adopted into higher education in the next one to five years.


Electronic Books and Mobiles (1 year or less)
Augmented Reality and Game-based Learning (2-3 years)
Gesture-based Computing and Learning Analytics (4-5 years)


We have seen a lot recently about electronic books (i.e., the iPad) in higher education as well as in K-12. But, what about these other technologies?


The use of augmented reality, projected to be adopted in the next 2-3 years, has been demonstrated in medicine, but what how is it being used in other areas? Game-based learning is also projected to be adopted in 2-3 years - Is anyone using games at their institutions now? Do you think 2-3 years is a realistic projection?

How the iPad is succeeding in healthcare

TUAW has a link to a Wired story about the medical market manager for Apple.

It's not a big surprise, since the medical industry is tech-friendly (which is right where Apple wants to be) and has deep pockets to fund upgrades. But it is interesting that Apple has chosen to actively pursue medicine. We can probably expect to see more universities and hospitals embracing the iPad and Apple's devices moving forward.

Some interesting comments following the story about these alleged "deep pockets".

Get diagnosed by spitting on an iPhone

File this under "I'll believe it when I see it"

Korean scientists reckon that the capacitive touchscreens on our phones and tablets could help diagnose diseases from what's floating around in your mouth.  It works through the screen's ability to detect minute capacitive differences in disease-carrying liquids placed on its surface. Experiments by Hyun Gyu Park and Byoung Yeon Won at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology in Daejeon managed to detect chlamydia microbes in three different concentrations.

 Read the full story at Engadget.

Diagnosia, a search engine for medications

TechCrunch has a short piece about Diagnosia receiving start-up funds for their search engine.

Diagnosia basically aggregates those little leaflets you find in packets of prescription drugs and puts them online in a user friendly and accessible format across multiple formats and languages. The attraction to doctors is that none of this information is usually online, so this makes it way asier for them.

They note that similar services are already offered by Rxlist, Drugs.com and Epocrates.