Friday, September 24, 2010

Our itouch APPS-- What we're using in 2010

I am working on upgrading and organizing our ipods so teachers can check them out to use with students (we have a set of 30) - and I thought I would post the apps we currently have, in case you are interested.  I'm currently searching for new Apps and I will post updates to this post...

ArithmeTick
Dictionary.com
Discovery News
ESPN Spelling
Fairy Tales by Grimm
Free Spanish Tutor
Grimm's Fairy Tales
iBird Explorer
Idioms Lite
iThesaurus
Math Drills Lite
Math Flash Cards
Musee du Louvre
The Oregon Trail
Peterson Field Guide to Birds
Shells
Spanish Dictionary
Trace
US Historical Facts
2010 World Fact Book
2010 World Maps

Thursday, September 2, 2010

David Pogue-- i-Pad v. Kindle Debate

August 30, 2010, 5:23 pm

Another Way to Look at the iPad vs. Kindle Debate

Last week in The Times, I reviewed the Amazon Kindle 3. It’s head and shoulders the best e-book reader on the market — at least among the ones that use an E Ink screen.
In comparing the Kindle with the Apple iPad, however, I noted that Amazon’s e-book catalog has 630,000 books available — compared with only 60,000 for Apple. (Apple, for example, doesn’t have any books from Random House, the largest American publisher.)
A number of readers, however, sent me notes like this one:
“David: Your article makes a point that I have seen made before, and which seems to me both misleading and irrelevant. You say: ‘… just in case you were indeed considering the iPad primarily for its e-book features … the Kindle’s catalog of 630,000 current books is 10 times the size of Apple’s.’
“So what? I have an iPad. I have the Kindle app on my iPad. I buy almost all my e-books from Amazon because, as you say, they have a better selection. Now I have access to the Apple library, the B&N library and the Amazon library on one device. And PDFs. And while I’m reading, I can always zoom over to Wikipedia and look up some term or event that I’m not familiar with. My spending at Amazon has increased drastically since I got the iPad.”
He makes the point pretty clearly, but here it is again: Because both Amazon and Barnes & Noble offer excellent e-book reading apps for the iPad (for their own proprietary e-books), the size of Apple’s e-book library is essentially irrelevant.
True, you might prefer Apple’s e-book reading software, with its gorgeous depiction of a handsome wooden bookcase laden with your full-color book covers (even though Apple shamelessly ripped off this interface from Classics, Delicious Library and other existing apps).
But my readers are quite right: thanks to the Amazon and Nook apps, the size of Apple’s bookstore really shouldn’t be a factor in your buying decision.