Navigating September has been challenging. New classes, new students, creating new assignments, grading, preparing for lectures and shuffling my kids to their never ending 5-day-a-week-activities. I know, I have no one to blame but myself but I decided to adapt and see if the ipad could be my companion as I sat through soccer practice (4 days a week - no I am not kidding), ballet class or music lessons.
Armed with my 4 month old friend I sat in the waiting room of the ballet school. I turned it on and thanks to the free wifi, I got online without a problem. Using Safari, I went to Solostream.com. I was thinking of having my students use blog software as an introduction to formatting text for web design. Solostream has a bunch of videos they call wordpress 101 and I wanted to see if it was a worthwhile endeavor. After a few attempts (I didn't remember my password), I got in and clicked on the video. Error message. You need the new flash plugin to view this video.
Turns out flash isn't supported on the iPad. Here are Steve Jobs thoughts on Flash. (Summary for those who don't want to read it: Flash lacked full support for touch screens, it created security and performance issues, it ate into battery life and it created an extra layer between the developer and the operating system.
Disappointed. I googled it. Maybe there was a workaround. I found the Photon Flash Player for ipad which is a flash video player for the ipad. But it isn't free and well, I just spent way too much money for ballet lessons so I was going to pass. But for those of you who aren't as cheap/broke as I am here is the link. It's only $4.99 limited time sale (regular $9.99).
So watching videos on Solostream…fail.
But I was not going to give up. I went to another site. Lynda.com. Not only did I remember my password on the first try, I was able to watch the videos easily on the ipad without having to download anything. Then I was curious to see if it would work on another site I use for training—learnable.com. It worked just as easily. So I guess on the bigger tutorial sites that are not using flash videos, it works really well.
Who hoo! I popped in my earphones and happily listened to the instruction. I usually take notes when I watch these training videos but since I wasn't sitting at a table it wasn't the perfect scenario for note taking. But not dragging my laptop and getting work done during what I had considered lost time is as good as it gets.
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