Video: NetSupport v10.5 at TCEA 2010

I had a good conversation with Marcus Kingsley, CEO of NetSupport, about what's new at the company at TCEA 2010 last week.

Video: eInstruction at TCEA

I had a great conversation with Bill from eInstruction while at TCEA last week in Austin, Texas. See for yourself...

Video: CDI Computers At TCEA

I had a great time at TCEA last week, I'm just getting to editing the video footage now. Here's a conversation I had with Mike from CDI, a company which refurbishes computers and resells them to schools and districts.

The iPad in Education, and I'm Off To TCEA

Everyone is all abuzz about the new Apple iPad, as the whole world seems to be just about any time Steve Jobs steps out onto a stage, of course. This announcement was a particularly funny one to me, because if you read any tech blogs or notice any tech related stories at all, you probably saw that it was rumored for about the past year that Apple would be coming out with a touchscreen tablet device, which the company denied, denied and denied again and again, or refused to comment, or refused to confirm or deny such a rumor. So any notion of suspense or surprise was something of a joke. But we ooh and ahhh anyway.

But that aside, the iPad does seem to be an amazing piece of technology, but it's caused more head scratching and speculation than wonder. This was no iPod, iPhone or iTunes. Will consumers go for it? It's larger than a smartphone, smaller than a laptop...what is it for, exactly? Web surfing? Gaming? Some claim it will be a major gaming device in the near future, but from what I know of gaming, I highly doubt it. It might create its own gaming niche, but don't expect this to compete with an Xbox, Wii or Playstation.

Interestingly enough, education could be the bright and shining future for the iPad. e-textbooks are a fledgling market, and there's been a lot of speculation about the Amazon Kindle in education, but here you have a competitor at the same starting price, with a whole host of better features, full color, video, Web browsing, gaming, to name a few. This PC World blog post is a good discussion of the topic.

As with anything, though, the test will be in the content available. If the iPad can truly deliver with textbook reading experience, and publishers sign on en masse, allowing students to, for example, download textbooks with embedded Web resources, integrated videos, note taking and annotation tools, recording classroom lectures and discussions right in the related chapters, etc., this could be huge. But if those sorts of things don't happen to make this device truly unique and vastly more engaging in a way that laptops and textbooks could never equal, it could be something of a dud. As a textbook reader anyway. 

Well on another note, next week I head to TCEA in Austin, Texas. Should be a great conference, as last year's was. I have a ton of appointments lined up with a lot of the major players in ed. tech so I'm looking forward to learning a lot and letting you know what I find out! Hopefully I'll have some time to blog!