Apps – The WANTED List

So we’ve worked out a set of apps we’re going to give a go (always subject to update and change!) but there’s a few gaps remaining…

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?