
It’s more convenient, and it gives the researchers better data, because a phone’s GPS feature can send along exact location coordinates (and the app encourages users to take a picture with the phone’s camera). Then the research team built an iPhone app to let citizen-scientists participate at the scene. At first he asked people to write down the location and details about the carcass on a scrap of paper and upload the information to a Web site when they got home.
Goodreader app davs drivers#
An iPad version takes advantage of the larger screen of Apple’s tablet computer.Ī professor at the University of California at Davis is asking drivers to help him with his research on roadkill by logging any dead squirrel, possum, or other critter they see along the highway. Some professors take pictures of their students on the first day of class and put them in the app.

It literally puts names to faces, if professors add photos supplied by the college.

Several professors said their favorite feature of the app (which now sells for $4.99) is a flashcard function that helps them learn the names of their students. So far he has earned about $20,000 from the more than 7,500 people who have virtually shouted “Here.” He called his task-specific app Attendance and put it on the iTunes store for other professors, charging a couple of bucks (and adding features as colleagues suggested them).
Goodreader app davs software#
He couldn’t find any software to keep those paper check marks on a smartphone, so he wrote his own app about two years ago, in a two-week burst of coding. “What would happen is invariably I would lose that piece of paper halfway through the semester.” “I used to use a piece of paper,” he said.

Reed, a professor of computer science at Capital University, in Ohio, saw his iPhone as a way to streamline the process and keep a digital backup. Taking AttendanceĬalling roll may not seem like an activity that needs an upgrade. I have highlighted the apps in each category that got users’ highest marks. Here are the six scenarios that people mentioned most often. That’s what I discovered when I put out a call on Twitter, as well as to a major e-mail list of college public-relations officers, asking about the areas in which professors and college officials are making the most of their mobile devices. They find ways to adapt popular smartphone software to the classroom setting, or even write their own code. Some of the most innovative applications for hand-held devices, however, have come from professors working on their own. Some professors say they find that carrying the Internet in their pocket helps them collaborate, teach, and collect data in new ways that include e-mail but go far beyond it.Ī handful of colleges are running expensive pilot projects in which they give out iPhones or iPads to students and professors to see what happens when everyone goes mobile. The downside: Having that ability can mean working more than ever-answering student e-mails while in line at the grocery store, responding to a journal editor during lunch. Smartphones or tablet computers combine many functions in a hand-held gadget, and some users are discovering clever ways to teach and do research with the ubiquitous machines.įor many on campus, checking e-mail on the go is the first killer app of the hand-held world. But many professors (and administrators) now do just that in the form of all-in-one devices. Not long ago, it seemed absurd for academics to carry around a computer, camera, and GPS device everywhere they went.
