Unfortunately, a serious problem was identified when setting one of the tablets to charge one night.  I plugged the USB Micro B power supply into the port when the tablet was still powered on and noted the battery symbol did not switch to the “AC Charging” symbol.  So I powered down the tablet just in case the battery was so depleted that it needed some quality charging time.

I checked on the tablet later and noticed it hadn’t charged at all and the AC adapter plug was cold instead of warm, indicating the power supply was not working.  Fearing a faulty cable I checked it for damage, kinks or other physical abnormalities but it all seemed fine.  I then checked the USB port itself because it felt unusually ‘loose’.

It was quite difficult to see what could be wrong but I compared the port with my Android smartphone which also uses a USB Micro B port.  I could then see that the pins had lost their mount and were still attached to the inside, but loose.    

A little Googling uncovered a 15 page thread on the Lenovo Forums entitled: Warranty refused : broken USB port   

Some quotes:

Ok, this is the final straw for our company’s rollout of these tablets.

After 3 days use, the internal USB pins broke on the tablet.  Lenovo have said this is a consumer issue and not warranty and will effectively charge the full cost of a new tablet to “repair”.  - by justguy

I got my 18382BG five weeks ago. From the start the charger only worked when tilted slightly upwards. Now the black pice inside the micro usb broke off and came out with the charger. I am used to chargers like these from other tablets and cell phones and never had an issue and never misused any of them. – by knochentrocken

I don’t want to be alarmed, but we’ve just received an order of 700 of these after a too short trial period. We are in education after all. About 30 teachers have used them for a week, and four report charging issues. I have only looked at one so far. The one has broken USB pins. I’ll check the others shortly. These are adults. Can’t wait for students to get them next week. – by tcarter0

Lenovo support staff have also contributed to this thread, helping those who initially had warranty refused on this issue.  Apparently the Lenovo warranty repair centres have been notified to treat USB issues as in-warranty.  We shall soon see for ourselves!

A telephone conversation with Steve Gordon at our closest Lenovo Warranty Service Provider – Computerworld Wales in Cardiff – directed me to Lenovo UK Tech Support. We are awaiting the label and packaging to be sent so we can call the courier for collection.

Looking up the warranty for the device has also highlighted a separate issue.  Even though we have only owned the tablets for a week, the 12 month warranty expires in October 2012 (only 8 months left)!

A quick call to LaptopsDirect Customer Service confirmed that the warranty commences from the manufacture date unless proof of purchase is provided.

Earlier this week Leia had converted one of our review forms for use with the app Documents To Go. This was a great solution but the designer in me was niggled by some loss of formatting and even though I didn’t see a print out, I guessed it might not be as nice as our current forms, which had the full functionality of Microsoft Word.

This had me wondering if there was a signature capture app which could be combined with forms. Wouldn’t that be fantastic, to use the Lenovo Thinkpad tablet pen to capture those all important signatures?

After testing a bunch of apps and devising a few work arounds when the free apps didn’t do quite what I was looking for, I finally stumbled upon the SignNow App.

It will allow us to use any of our previous documentation, whether it is a Word doc or template or PDF and add text and the all important signature, before saving it or emailing it to others, e.g the learner and employer.  How fab is that?

It’s almost essential for devices in an educational context to be shareable without excessive time spent configuring.  I can see why so many of the schools doing it have gone the route of supporting learners to get their own devices rather than buying in school sets as the following two examples show.

While they do cost financially, iPads are proving to save the district money in a number of ways. Of course, paper costs have been substantially reduced. Hooker documents some of the savings in a recent blog post (http://eaneswifi.blogspot.com/2011/10/swiss-army-knife-of-education.html), noting savings on document cameras, video cameras, still cameras, and newer mobile laptop carts. Even apps themselves are much less expensive than software we might have purchased for the same function. They are also saving teacher time—valuable this year when our budgets have been reduced, and teachers are tasked with more responsibilities. Having a common device, and being able to access email, grades, student documents and create lessons all portably, has really improved the workflow for teachers across the campus.

One of the questions the district faced initially was regarding personalization. While the iPad can work somewhat effectively as part of a “cart” setup, the most powerful use of the tool is as a personal device. So as a district, we chose to allow both students and teachers to make the devices their own and rolled out a limited set of consistent agreed-upon apps across campus. (We are using Apple’s Volume Purchase Program for additional apps that various departments or campuses need or want for their curriculum.) While this might pose a dilemma for some districts, it has created a tremendous sense of ownership as students and staff customize it for their own learning needs and classroom use.

Evolution of a 1:1 iPad Program

Student ownership. We had the choice early on to either externalize ownership to the students or keep the ownership of the machines on the books of the school. In our case – and after much study – we decided to externalize the cost and have families purchase their laptops through the school. We provide financing options to our families. As a private school we have this opportunity. I realize that in many public schools the machines must be school-owned. In visiting with other schools who have school-owned 1:1 programs, the breakage rates seem to be higher. In general our breakage rates have come in below expected numbers for the students. Yet, interestingly, the staff break their machines at a rate four times that of students. If our students want to put stickers and other stuff all over the machine, they can have at it.

Reflecting on a Year of 1:1

A similar problem in a corporate envrionment with smartphones is being researched by VMWare at the moment and their solution of running various virtual machines on the same device might turn out to be the slickest solution.  Eseopcially since Android itself appears to have no immediate plans to support multiuser.

Another setting which looked useful but rather baffled me was the automatic brightness option.  (And for ‘automatic’ read ‘random!).   In theory this automatically sets the brightness based on the ambient light levels.  In practice it made the screen fade to dim at random moments and after doing some background reading might also have been responsible for the screen blackout during setup which I’d put down to not giving it a thourough enough charge before starting.

None of these issues are really deal breakers especially as both assessors using the devices are fairly comfortable with IT issues, but they could be offputting when giving the devices to less confident users.

Another experiment with it carefully uncovered gave somewhat better results.  And using the front facing camera works fairly well.

Rear facing camera with mic unobstructed!

And using the front facing camera as we might in an observation.

It came out very quiet so sorry about that-  Should have experimented with the mic setting first probably.  Hopefully it will work without a dedicated mic – recording ad hoc videos is one of the main things we want to do with them!  I also need to keep my eyes open until AFTER stopping the recording.

Well, some fiddling with the setting on the in built mic has not produced much improvement which is a shade disappointing.  It’s a bit better with the dedicated audio recording software and with the clip on collar mic that came with it, but the need to faff with that could be a drawback when using it for recording learners in the workplace and definitayel for doing recorded discussions with more than one person which is one of the main uses we hope to put it to.  I don’t think it’s the Lenovo specifically here – the little Acer that I only just started playing with has the same issue.

This is from the Lenovo using Soundcloud with the clip on mic.

In fact my phone seems to pick up better than either.  Perhaps by the nature of it – phones being designed to talk on after all!  Below clip is from my phone (Samsung Galaxy Ace with Soundcloud, no mic)

On the plus side the web access is very good on the Lenovo, all the various media, embedded calendars, video, Prezis all play without fuss.  Should be an interesting few months getting these embedded.

The much awaited official Moodle Android App is due for release any moment and requires Moodle 2.1 or higher.  Additionally Moodle 2.2 onwards has the MyMobile theme especially designed for mobile devices.  The bad news was our Moodle was lagging behind on version 2.0.4.  At the time of our last upgrade Moodle 2.1.1 was available but would not work on our webserver because it requires PHP 5.3.2 and we were restricted to PHP 5.2.

Fortunately, our web host, United Hosting had announced they were due to upgrade the servers from 5.2 to 5.3 on 10th January, so we upgraded to the latest Moodle 2.2.1 on 16th January.

Everything went smoothly with the upgrade  With a little bit of configuring the MyMobile theme also works very well – though we needed to adjust the fixed width of the Google Calender and will also need to redesign graphical navigation so all elements adapt well to various screen widths.

We also upgraded to the latest Mahara 1.4.1 which supports the MaharaDroid app. MaharaDroid enables Android phones to share or upload content to Mahara and requires a minimum of Mahara 1.4.

Unfortunately we are experiencing a few browser and operational inconsistencies with the latest version of Mahara, particularly with regard to editing uploaded files in Portfolio Pages.  We are investigating:

• Firefox 9.0.1: On some PCs the edit buttons not working on File uploads (but inconsistency between alike versions)
• Chrome 16.0.912.75: Edit and Select buttons not working in the File uploads

[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] [WAR] 8d (lib/errors.php:464) An exception was thrown of class PieformException.
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] [WAR] 8d (lib/errors.php:464) THIS IS BAD and should be changed to something extending MaharaException,
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] [WAR] 8d (lib/errors.php:464) unless the exception is from a third party library.
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] [WAR] 8d (lib/errors.php:464) Original trace follows
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] [WAR] 8d (lib/pieforms/pieform.php:528) No function registered to handle form submission for form "files"
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] Call stack (most recent first):
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] * Pieform->__construct(array(size 12)) at /home/administrator2/public_html/mahara/lib/pieforms/pieform.php:161
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] * Pieform::process(array(size 12)) at /home/administrator2/public_html/mahara/lib/pieforms/pieform.php:71
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53] * pieform(array(size 12)) at /home/administrator2/public_html/mahara/artefact/file/index.php:38
[18-Jan-2012 14:26:53]

The Mahara Bugtracker does not list these issues – the closest bug being Bug #891436 which mentions the same PHP errors.  I have made small customised changes to the Resume artefact as documented here, but I do not think it is at all related, so I will submit our own bug report.

Out of interest the demo Mahara site http://demo.mahara.org/ does not have the same issue using the same browsers, but I am not unable to confirm if the Mahara version is exactly the same version 1.4.1.

Also identified this bug:

• Internet Explorer 7 to 9: Hyperlinks to uploaded content on portfolio pages only click-able on baseline of text.

And this is replicable on the demo Mahara website – this bug also needs submitting to Mahara Bugtracker.

Update

Reported to Bugtracker

Summary				Importance	Status	Heat
	918262	Clicking links to uploaded files in Page view using Internet Explorer		Undecided	New
	918259	Select and Edit files in Chrome and sometimes Firefox – different to Bug #819102?		Undecided	New

Further Troubleshooting

I updated Bug #918259 to reflect the fact that it wasn’t a bug after all.  The problem was caused by missing or corrupt files in the folder mahara/lib/pieforms.  :-)

The selection being offered was a bit smaller than expected, and of the three stands we mainly looked at (Samsung, Toshiba, and Lenovo) everyone seemed to have wheeled out the big guns for demonstration rather than their entry level offerings.

We were fairly tempted to change tack slightly and admired an exceptionally large smartphone from Samsung, a 5″ Galaxy Note – small enough to use onehanded but big enough for fairly easy reading, web browsing, and form filling. The Galaxy Tab devices at 10″ were lovely but unfortunately they wouldn’t be drawn on price, they work entirely through resellers and I suspect it might be well outside the planned budget unless they do a smaller version.

Toshiba offered a software management tool with the tablets to enable distribution of sets of apps and management and lockdown of access to web, marketplace etc which looked potentially useful as a time saving in getting set up.  The AT100 was around the £290 mark – a little higher than we’d planned but a bigger formed factor than we’d expected in the budget.  Fairly tempting.

Lenovo had a lovely handwriting interface integrated with Docs To Go which had very good recognition and a very slick looking setup but topped out the budget as the most expensive we looked at.

All of them ‘beeped up’ with the barcode badges to send more information, so a bit more browsing over the current week should bring us to a decision.

Moodle – a biggy.  We use Moodle a lot, but just at the moment our Moodle isn’t particularly well optimised for mobile use.  This might not be an issue on the actual tablets (it’s fine on a netbook), but if we want to look at the broader mobile picture it needs looking at.  There’s an official Moodle app for iPhone which is coming to Android “any time now” and two work in progress efforts (Mbot and MPage) both of which require Moodle 2.2 upwards (and we’re still on 2.0 pending an upgrade of our PHP version on the webserver!).  Server side the customisation for mobile also requires the update 2.2 for best results, so that’s on my colleague’s to do list!

Mahara - similarly we use the Mahara electronic portfolio which has a very new app to support direct uploading it which needs version 1.4 of Mahara and we’re on 1.3.  I suspect there might also be configuration issues related to the single signon we’ve got set up between Moodle and Mahara since direct log-on to Mahara doesn’t work well (if at all!)

Voice recognition – Possibly asking too much but I’m sure other people have had more success with voice recognition than we’ve had so far.  Any good apps out there for speech to text, that could be used to genuinely replace typing for lower literacy learners?

And in the other direction – text to speech tools.  The engine is installed but doesn’t seem well integrated – we’d ideally want something including reading of webpages, documents and to really put the icing ont he cake, OCR scanning from the camera.

Quizzes and surveys.  This one is just a research issue I think.  I was eyeballing Socrative which appears to be very similar to the eInstruction system we use for quizzes and survey’s in class.  Unfortunately it’s still in private beta.  Anything similar out there?

QRDroid – QR code scanner.  I use Google Goggle for this myself, but this one scores very well in the marketplace and seems to have a bit more functionality

Dictionary.com – Reference for learners, and will do voice input so hopefully can be a spelling aid as well.  The voice input works better with some staff and produces the occasional bizarre output like “manhunt this month” for “assessment”!

MindMap Memo and Mindjet for Android – Several of us here at ITeC are hooked on mindmapping, using Bubbl.us and Mind42 mainly, neither of which have an app so I looked for alternatives.  There are hundreds so these choices are a bit pot luck, but on there because I liked the ease of creation of new links with MindMap Memo (just swish your finger from an existing node) and the fact the Mindjet will export in a heirachical text format – something I use a lot.  Would be particularly interested to hear what others have found useful here

DroidScanLite – Integrates with the camera to turn snaps of documents etc into PDFs or images and share them to various services.

Wunderlist – Shared task scheduling.  The plan it to have a list per learners that both they and the assessor can add targets, tasks and comments too. Thing recently marked as completed show up in a special section so can be viewed by the assessor and checked (and marked as not complete after all if needed!).  Has both web and app interface and will integrate with a Facebook account if wanted saving a bit of setup.

Evernote – I seem to be behind the game on this one, I know loads of people who swear by it and it gets loads of coverage but I’ve never used it.  It might prove to do some of the things we’ve looked at other apps for.