As I reflect on the various tools available for students today, I've been exploring the relevance of certain tools in the context of flexible content creation in and outside of the classroom.
No hasty conclusions yet, but one of the parameters I believe should influence choice, apart from the obvious one of getting students and teachers to explore the tools themselves, is the capabilities such mobile tools should support, not only for current uses, which may or may not be very transformative, but also aiming for an environment which promotes rich learning environments.
It seems clear, in light of all the 21st Century skills we keep discussing, that allowing for the most creative flexibility for our students is a key component in our future decisions.
Secondly, teacher comfort with the capabilities of the technology, for their own use as well as for suggesting some of the paths students can take with technology, will allow for deeper and richer technology use.
So, my reflexion is about the various ways we can offer a content-creation environment, tools and practices and figuring out the most cost-effective way to achieve this, without sacrificing what will allow the transformation of our learning environments.
This reflexion is continuing, but as I was exploring a few tools and ideas today, I came upon this post from the excellent Fraser Speirs, which mentions the "GarageBand test". A quick, informative read.
I was already trying to compare the environments offered by the Nexus 7, iPad, iPad mini and others in the context of content creation and collaboration. This gave me the idea to look at the top paid apps on Google Play and the iOS App Store. I figured either would offer the best tools for each platform that people are willing to pay for.
The results are quite interesting:
Here is the list on the App Store as of Nov 30, 2012 (Canada store)
1. Angry Birds Star Wars
2. Pages
3. The Room
4. GarageBand
5. Bad Piggies HD
6. Sky Gamblers
7. Offroad Legends
8. Minecraft
9. Wreck-it Ralph
10. Angry Birds Space
11. iMovie
12. Numbers
13. GoodReader
14. iPhoto
15. Tetris for iPad
16. Keynote
17. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse
18. Where's my water
19. Walking dead: the game
20. Scrabble
Here is the list on Google Play
1. Swiftkey 3 tablet Keyboard
2. Minecraft: Pocket edition
3, Angry Birds Star Wars HD
4. Wreck-it Ralph
5. The Amazing Spider-Man
6. DocumentsToGo Full Version Key
7. Camera Zoom FX
8. Quickoffice Pro
9. Tunein Radio Pro
10. Officesuite Pro 6+ (PDF + HD)
11. SwiftKey 3 Keyboard
12. Where's my water?
13. Poweramp Full Version unlocker
14. Titanium Backup Pro Key
15. HD Widgets
16. Beautiful Widgets
17. Grimm's Snow White
18. ezPDF Reader PDF Annotate Form
19. Devil's Attorney
20. Grand Theft Auto
I've bolded the content creation tools. It became quite obvious that at least in the Paid category, there was a lot more diversity in the available tools to create rich content.
But not only that, but the quality of the apps are worlds apart.
Even at the word-processing level, Pages offers a lot more in the lines of rich content, than say, Officesuite Pro 6+ which seems to be the best one for Android. Manipulating objects, fonts, tables, inserting shapes and lines and overall useability and responsiveness of the app is so much better and easier. Not perfect, not for professional word-processing experts, but great for students and teachers for most day-to-day work.
But when you start exploring the other tools, like Keynote or Numbers, the Office suites on Android are simply inadequate compared to the Apple apps. Of course, education customers also get to pay the same price for either Pages+Numbers+Keynote or Officesuite Pro, but they get a lot more for the price.
Then, the big important part: rich content. GarageBand, iMovie and iPhoto are in this list and they offer such great creation environements. You can do 80% of what the equivalent tools do on a Mac on some of these. iMovie is the exception. It is a nice product for quick movies, but far from being as complete as the Mac counterpart. And there are many other such tools. I'd love to see some stats on the percentage of content-creation apps on all platforms... think of drawing apps, sketching, music creation, misuc notation, photography, 3D, graphing calculators, astronomy and science, etc.
If there are any more and better creation apps for Android out there, I'm very interested in finding out. This is by no means an extensive seach, but I find it quite telling. But please, leave comments if you have interesting alternatives and suggestions! Perhaps the free apps on Android offer richer environments? I do hear that Evernote is better on an Android tablet... but that's one case. Are there more?
