Almost anyone that works in a school these days is required to keep track of a lot of data these days, and I am no exception. Among other things, I have a list every student in the school to keep track of their log-in information and I also keep an inventory of all the technology hardware in the school.

Up to now, this has meant me printing large amounts of paper so I can double-check each teachers inventory, make the necessary changes on the paper I printed and then go back to my computer and update the information there. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could carry some type of device with me with which I could update the information there?

With the iPad and the app Bento, I can do exactly that. Happy days are here at last!

Bento is an easy-to-use database program I’ve been using on my Macs for a few years now and what I’ve been using to keep long lists of information. It was good, but there was that missing piece to the workflow.

I thought the Bento iPhone app was going to be the answer, but I didn’t find it particularly useful. The screen was too small and it didn’t show me the lists of information I needed to see.

The iPad app is a whole different story. It imports all the lists I created on my desktop and makes navigating between them a breeze. If I want to see a list of students in a particular room, I can get to that quickly. I wasn’t able to see that on my iPhone.

I can also add a student or edit any of his information right from the iPad. Even more impressive, I can sync the changes over wifi back to my desktop with just a click of a button.

I have noticed a few glitches in the sync function as I’m trying to sync all my data with my computer at home as well as at work. I’ve noticed if I have a group of information (a library, using Bento’s terminology) only on my iPad, it will delete it when I try to sync it. It needs to exist on the Mac. Similarly, I had some sample libraries I deleted on my iPad, but after I synced, they had reappeared because they still existed on one of my computers. It’s probably much easier to manage if you sync the information on your iPad and one computer instead of two.

But if you need to track a large amounts of data, I recommend you look into Bento. I know it’s going to make things easier for me as well as save a whole bunch of paper!

Flipboard is an innovative new app which gives you a much better way to read your Twitter and, to a lesser extent, your Facebook accountss. What it does it take all the updates, the pictures and the links to articles the people you follow have posted and then puts them into a magazine type format.

For example, here is the “front page” of my Facebook feed this morning in Flipboard :

I can now tap on any of the pictures or text which will let me see the full entry, let me see any replies and let me add my own reply. It’s really well done! I’d about given up on both Twitter and Facebook but this might change that around.

There’s also some other preselected feeds you can add, but I haven’t added any of those. I already have enough things to read and unless someone puts together a great news collection, I’ll probably just stick to my Twitter and Facebook accounts.

There are a couple of things that should be improved. First, the Twitter integration is a lot better than Facebook’s because in Facebook it’ll only show your friends’ updates and not the updates from the pages you’re a fan of. I’m a fan of some news organizations, TV shows, podcasts, and musical acts and it would be great to get those updates in Flipboard and make it much more like a magazine.

Another quirk in the program is you’re never sure when it’s going to update. I launched it this morning and all the Twitter updates were the very same ones that were there six hours before. It wasn’t until 15 minutes later when I relaunched the app that I saw new entries. Maybe a refresh button could be added?

One other improvement I would suggest: Less clicks! If someone links to an article, there’ll be a short excerpt shown in Flipboard along with it’s headline and a picture if it finds one. If you click on that, it’ll show a full screen version which has the headline, the pictures and maybe four paragraphs of the article. To see the full article, you have to click again and it’ll take you to the website where you can finally read the full article. I’d like some kind of way to see the full article after that first click.

But if you have an iPad, definitely download this app and give it a try. After all, it’s free! You can see how developers are figuring out how to use that extra space the iPad gives them and making it more than just a big iPhone. Instead of giving you a long list of items to scroll through, they’re figuring out how to present things in more innovative and attractive ways.

I’ve just got back to my hotel after my first full day at ISTE 2010. It went well. Things don’t really get going until tomorrow for me. Today, I tried to find my way around the city and figure out where everything is at the convention center.

Here are some highlights of Day 1:

* The opening keynote was not well received by the attendees. It was given by Jean-François Rischard, a former Vice President of the World Bank. Which is too bad because he has a lot of expertise and knowledge. The basic message was that the world political systems are currently not able to apply solutions to very serious problems (or as columnist Thomas Friedman calls them, “suboptimum solutions”), so we’re going to depend on today’s young people to come up with innovations to save us. I mean, talk about adding relevance to our curriculum!

Unfortunately Mr. Rischard was not a very charismatic speaker. His presentation was full of lists and PowerPoint slides such as this one

which he went over in some detail. He has some good insights and I would’ve liked to have heard more about his past experiences as he tried to solve some of these problems. (Doesn’t the World Bank have some influence in these areas?) As it was, I really didn’t get a lot out of it.

* The Conference Kickoff didn’t break any new ground – it basically just went over all the great things ISTE does – but it was a lot of fun. Mario Armstrong, who covers technology for NPR’s Morning Edition, was an energetic host and the event reinforced my conviction to not let things get in the way next year. We have the infrastructure and the knowledge to make Edgemere a model school when it comes to using technology to help students build their own knowledge. Let’s do it!!

* This year I’m staying in an official conference hotel, which makes things easier because they provide shuttles that take me from the hotel to the conference site and back, saving me the trouble of driving or walking (or using Google Maps for the mass transit information, like I had planned.)

* The hotel I’m staying in is HUGE. It’s 11 stories big, has it’s own parking garage and seems to be bustling with activity all the time. The rooms are nice, but from the inside lobby it looks particularly ugly. Just rows of horizontal floors stacked to the ceiling, sort of like one of those old hotels but this is all inside.

Since every floor overlooks the lobby, it also is not the place with anyone thar has a fear of heights. I’ve developed a mild case of this and it freaks me out a little every time I have to leave my room!

Here’s a picture I took looking down towards the lobby. It’s as close as I could get to the ledge.

I have a feeling Alfred Hitchcock could’ve made good use out of this hotel a movie. Freaky!

* Before I left, I purchased the GPS Drive HD app for my iPad to help me to get to my hotel and anyplace else I would want to drive to. It was my first time using any type of GPS device and it was fun. It was amazing how well it kept track of exactly where I was in the city. The information on the map was clear, the voice directions were loud enough and I had enough information at the right time to figure out what to do. Being in a different city, there was one time where I was in the wrong lane to go to the street I wanted to, but the app quickly figured out a new route and everything worked out.

* Since I’m going to do all my writing for this conference on my iPad, I decided I needed to go to the Apple Store so I could get a wireless keyboard. So I decide the best time to go is Sunday morning, right when the store opens at 11 AM. I end up getting to the store at 11:05 and although the mall itself is fairly empty, the Apple Store is already bustling with activity! I wonder if that’s normal or if it’s because of all the conference people in town like me.

Anyway, I find the keyboard and I can’t figure out how to pay for it. There’s not one cash register in the whole store. Finally, I ask someone how I’m supposed to pay for it. She points me with someone and he starts putting in information on his iPod Nano, even using it to scan in my credit card. Finally he goes off to print my receipt and that was it.

* The wireless keyboard works great by the way!

See you tomorrow!

Location:California St,Denver,United States

One of my favorite new uses for my iPad is for reading, whether it’s blogs, newspaper articles and books, and I find myself reading more than I have in years.

For books, I’ve been using the two most prominent apps in that category – Amazon’s Kindle app (not to be confused with their Kindle reading device) and Apple’s own iBooks. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and although I’d prefer to have all my ebooks in one place, I’m probably going to end up using both for the foreseeable future.

Both offer a similarly pleasant reading experience. They’ll both take up your iPad’s screen so you won’t be distracted, and you tap to bring up additional menus and, with another tap, they go away. Both will allow you to increase or decrease the size of the text – a very nice feature. They each allow you to download books straight to your device and will save your place for you when you exit the app.

The favorite feature of mine that they both do is allow you to download samples of the book so you have the chance to read a very generous excerpt of the book so you can decide whether or not you really want to buy it. I always hated it when I bought a book at the bookstore only to discover that it didn’t grab my interest when I got it home. So I would try to sludge through it because I felt obligated to read it because I spent money on it. Now I make it a point to read the whole sample so I’m sure I’m going to like it before I purchase the complete book.

There are a few differences however. The Kindle’s main advantage is the much greater number of books Amazon has in their ebook store. Another advantage is that Kindle lets you add your own notes to a book and exports it out to a webpage that you can make public. (Currently you can only highlight sections in iBooks. The ability to add notes is coming in an update, but there’s been no information on whether there’s any way to share them.)

There’s two reasons I prefer iBooks though. When you put your iPad in landscape, you get a nice two page format which is preferred way to read. Also in iBooks, you’re able to get definitions of unknown words by tapping on them. I don’t use this feature often – I prefer to ‘go with the flow’ when I’m reading rather than stop but sometimes my curiosity gets the best of me and, in those cases, that’s nice to have.

So when I’m looking for a book, I try to find in the iBooks bookstore first, and then I go to Amazon’s website and see if it’s available for the Kindle there.

Speaking of the iPad, I have to say my favorite app on it has to be the New York Times Editor’s Choice. I think it does a great job of bringing the experience of reading a newspaper in a digital format. No, you don’t get the tactile feel of leafing through the physical pages (or the ink on your fingers), but you do get the headlines, the photos and the placement of the stories in an eye-catching way which often will convey the story’s importance.

Instead of scanning a list of stories on most online news websites and stopping to read only the stories on topics I have an interest in, I find myself taking a close look at all the stories the Editor’s Choice app gives me. I don’t go on and read the full articles of all the stories, but I do read a much higher percentage of them.

It doesn’t present the whole paper and doesn’t give any option to see or search the NYT archives (presumably that’s coming in a subscription app), but what’s here is still pretty great. Just this weekend, I’ve read great stories about -

• The rise of flag football as a sport for girls in Florida high school
• Why college is overrated
• A housing boom in some cities where foreclosure rates are high and there’s already a glut of houses lying empty
• A lengthy profile of Times Square bomber suspect Faisal Shahzad

And many more! I’m looking forward to all the great information I’m going to find out tomorrow and in on-coming days.

When the iPad was first announced, it seemed like the most common reaction I heard was, “What am I going to use that for?”

I knew right away. While I liked all the capabilities and the portability of my iPhone and it was the device I had with me when I was in my living room while I was relaxing at the end of the day, it wasn’t ideal. It was too small to comfortably read a lot of text or do a lot of typing with. Very soon I figured out I would use my laptop at my desk, I would use my iPad in the rest of the house and I would take my iPhone with me whenever I left the house.

So in late April, I finally ordered it. I ordered a 16 GB model with 3G, and it was finally delivered on Wednesday.

So far, I’ve really been enjoying it. As a reading device, it is a much superior devise to read books and longer newspaper articles on it then a laptop or a mobile phone. The text is sharp (and adjustable!), and my eyes don’t feel strained after reading on it for long periods. Besides that, I’ve used it to check email, do some light web surfing and play audio. I haven’t watched any video on it and this blog entry is the first time I’ve tried to write anything on it.

Like the iPhone, I find the iPad’s keyboard a bit of a limitation, although I find it preferable to the small physical keyboards you find on many cellphones and the Kindle. Even in landscape mode, the keyboard is still too small to fit all your fingers to type with. Instead I’ve starting using a two-fingered method which seems to work fairly well, though not nearly as fast as I can type with a conventional keyboard. (I do have an older Apple wireless keyboard but my iPad couldn’t pair with it.)

Otherwise, the battery life is impressive as is the quality of the audio it plays from it’s miniscule speakers. Fingerprints are very noticeable when the device is off or in sleep mode; when the screen is lit up, I don’t notice them at all.

My only regret is not spending the extra money to get the 32 GB model. I easily filled up the 16 GB I have now and don’t even have any movies on it. I haven’t activated the 3G on it, I’ll try putting that to use next month when I go on a trip to Colorado and Minnesota.

“Should I get one?” you might be asking. It depends. If like me, you’ve been wanting a good e-reader, this would be an excellent choice. Or if you spend a lot of time on iPod Touch or iPhone apps but often wish the screen were larger, than an iPad is definitely for you. Otherwise you may want to hold off for awhile and see what kind of apps get developed for it.