Kudos on the review, Brad!

My 2010-MBA has limited battery power, but I got the HyperJuice external 60Wh battery to charge on the run, it has also USB-power, and I also chose the kit for charging in my car. So now I decide for myself what to listen to when I drive – from my iTunesU or Uctv.tv downloaded archive.

The nice thing about Keynote is that you can save any files you make on Keynote as Power Point presentations. This would allow them to use their presentations on Windows computers that only have Microsoft Office. The way to do this is when you are saving your file, click on the checkmark box that says: “Save Copy As” and choose “Power Point Presentation.” This will save the file in a format that Power Point can read.

Power Point presentations are able to be opened and edited by Keynote as well. I do want to warn you that ocassionally fonts, animations, or formatting can be a little messed up at times when going between Power Point and Keynote, but for the most part it works very well or the presentation can be fixed with a couple minutes of retouching when going back and forth.

As far as understanding Keynote, some things are a bit different than Power Power Point, but I do feel that if your kids can figure out Power Point, they should do fine with Keynote after a bit of experimentation.

At my school we only have PC’s. I wish we had Mac computers, and I am pushing for that to be what we consider for our next update, but for now we use Power Point and Microsoft Office. I prefer iWork and Keynote, but currently our school curriculum teaches Microsoft Office mainly because our computers are PC’s.

Hope that answers some of your questions! Thanks for the feedback on the post.

What do you recommend to your students?

It would be nice to have that extra hard drive space, but it came at a too high of price for me. Though it is a hassle sometimes, I am getting more used to using the external hard drive for bigger files. To me it is worth the $240 in savings (after the price of the external drive). If I had lots of extra cash laying around it would have been something I would have paid the extra for.

You could be me – I could have posted the same response! I use those same apps as well, but I also rely on OmniFocus and FileMaker Pro. I look forward to some more posts about using computers in education,

Thanks,

Thanks for your feedback.

I can’t tell you how useful the Evernote app has been to me as a teacher. It is so nice to have an app that allows me to sync lists, notes, ideas, web clippings, pictures, etc… from one computer to another and to even have access to all these things on my iPhone. I keep my “To Do” lists, phone messages, and ideas for school on Evernote. It is always nice to know I have access to them and can update or change them from any of my devices.

Dropbox is also a very useful Mac app for teachers and faculties. I have a shared Dropbox with my entire school faculty on which we store all our important school files, notes, records, and calendars. This makes it very easy for us to share documents regardless of whether someone has a Mac or PC and for all of the teachers to have access to all of the school files from their home computers as well.

Another app that has been really great for school use is the Keynote Remote app. Using WI-Fi, this app turns your iPhone into a remote from which you can control your Keynote presentations. This has come in handy for me all the time for teaching classes.

I am looking forward to the cloud updates that are coming to Apple this fall. It will be nice for my calendar, contacts, etc… to sync between all my devices automatically as well.

Any other workflows that you suggest for teachers?

Bob