paulbailey.us

iphone in the classroom

just a quick friday post on using my new iphone in the classroom.  its already become indispensable for teaching music related classes and lectures. here are a few of the new apps that i’m already using on a daily basis.

remote

like it says its a remote in your hand.  i can walk around the room and play any playlist/song off my laptop. there is one slight catch though. you have to have the computer and the iphone connected to the same  wireless access point to work. in theory this works great at home, but at in the classroom I have had problems getting the phone and laptop to “see” each other. it this is the case all you need to do is create your own wireless network (from your laptop) and connect the phone to it.

stagehand

finally CSUF has caught up with the modern world and now has “smart classrooms” with LCD projectors. for me this means that lecturing (which i’m not very fond of) is much easier courtesy of the stagehand iphone app, that allows me to run my keynote (the much superior osx “powerpoint” app) presentations from my iphone. one of the great things about this is that i can read my “presenters notes” and control the slides from my iphone.   my macbookpro and iphone need to connect to a wireless network to run a keynote presentation.  its also a bit fussy if you put the macbookpro to sleep,  and i have found that the iphone will lose the connection to the macbook and you have to quit all the programs and start over for them to see each other. (hopefully this gets fixed in the future)

update, 10/09/08

connecting the iphone to keynote can be a pretty complicated process. here are a few tips that can help.

1. launching stagehand (osx keynote manager) will also open keynote.

2. test the connection of your iphone through the wireless network in the room you are teaching in. for example on the csuf campus your mileage may vary. it works fine in my office and only 1 of 3 classrooms i teach in. i have found if the wireless access points are not setup correctly, even if you can connect to the wireless access point your iphone may not be able to “see” your macbook

3. while giving a presentation using keynote its possible to jump between using the itunes remote and the stagehand program on the iphone. the only small problem is that the stagehand program will reload the page you started on from the beginning. not to much of a big deal, you just have to load each bullet point again to get to the next slide.

i have to add that the combination of controlling lectures and music through the iphone is really powerful. not only it allows me to get my head out of the lectern, but also vamp a bit and spend more time on musical examples because i’m not fumbling with a mouse or a stereo. i also can look down at the phone and take a peek of my presenters notes (not on the slides) to keep my lectures on track when i start to ramble.

Itm MidiLab

i still am getting used to using itm midilab in the classroom, but overall it can allow me to wirelessly control any midi device using the iphone. so far i have been using it as a wireless midi keyboard to control my b4 organ softsynth (native instruments). overall I prefer using organ patches as drones to illustrate intervals and chords instead a classroom piano. I also could use it to looping patches in a program like ableton live by linking any square on the iphones 8×8 grid to any button in ableton.

[?]

Related posts:

1. welcome (beta)
2. spring break good, part II
3. primespot radio show, 9pm tonight married male compser seeks…
4. venice beach today

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 1:05 pm. It is filed under Uncategorized and tagged with ableton, B4, iphone, ITM Midilab, remote, stagehand, teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.