iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

I use a lot of visuals in my work. I prefer to use my own photographs and to draw my own illustrations. When it's not practical or possible to use my own work, I rely on a handful of websites that provide copyright friendly images. Those images are licensed as public domain or Creative Commons Attribution.

Images that are licensed as public domain do not require any citation. When a creator gives his or her image a public domain license, he or she waives all rights to the image, including the right to attribution. A Creative Commons Zero License (CC0) is another way to state that the work has been put into the public domain.

I share during many talks that creativity is a mindset not an art set. The elephant in the room is once you buy into the mantra, what steps can you take to act on the mindset? There are so many cool ways to build up our creative abilities. What I am striving to do with all my work on the Educated By Design project, is to discover ways in which creative exercises can compliment development of fundamental literacies and competencies to make our students and ourselves more capable of doing great work.

For those who have yet to see the work from Stephen McMennamy, you are in for a treat. His ability to look at the world around him and find creative connections in seemingly divergent of objects is uncanny. 

Apple's biggest challenge with the iPad is convincing people who already own one to buy a newer version. I've been using my iPad Air 2 everyday since 2014 for reading news, checking Twitter, and watching videos, and I could probably keep using it until it stops working.

I don't actually need a new iPad to continue doing any of these things, but I've finally found a compelling reason to get one: photo editing. 

Apple is making photo editing way more simple in the new Photos app in iOS 11 — and it's the only way I want to do things now.

Photo Mapo is a cool iPad app that allows you to add maps to your photos.You can use it to add context to photos you include in your instruction and create mapped collections that can be easily shared with others. Photo Mapo, as we have indicated in an earlier post, is on sale now for free and only for a limited period of time. This deal is valid at least in the Canadian and American iTunes App Stores. Hopefully it will be still free by the time you are reading this post.

Need to get pictures from an SD card or digital camera to an iPad? If you want to import photos from a digital camera or SD card directly to iPad, then you can do so easily as long as you have the proper equipment. In this case, you’ll need an adapter that works with the particular iPad model. The rest is quite simple and you can import photos from an SD card or camera to iPad using the built-in Photos application.

Pexels is another good website where you can access and find free photos to use in your instruction. Photos in Pexels are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) which allows you to re-use them for personal as well as comercial purposes and usually without the need for attribution. You can also edit photos you find on Pexels the way you want. You can crop, annotate, and add filters.

IF YOU’RE BUILDING an app or website and you need a photo of a pineapple, a beach in Okinawa, a young woman wearing sunglasses, or a monk feeding a tiger, check out Unsplash. The vast online repository features 200,000 high-resolution images, every one of them free to download and use however you like. Create an ad, illustrate a Medium post, assemble your next album cover, whatever.

Some big names have grown hip to Unsplash. When Facebook launched its Slack competitor Workplace, it turned to Unsplash for marketing photos. Visit the Apple App Store and you’ll see Unsplash photos in the screenshots of many apps appearing in the “featured” slot. But you don’t have to be a tech company to quickly and easily mine the Unsplash archive. The company just made its primary developer tool available to everyone for free.