Suffolk governors move into 21st century?

If you are a school governor you probably have a large cupboard or filing cabinet full of paper. Minutes of meetings, agendas, head teachers reports, LA papers etc Not only does this waste a lot of trees but it takes up space and unless you are organised makes it hard to find stuff.

I have recently been testing an iPad to see how it can be used for serious work, we all know it's great for fun things like video, social networking, web browsing and it brought an idea to mind. Why not ditch all the paper and do it all electronically? So for our next meeting I am not taking any paper, just an iPad with the documents for the meeting in PDF format so I can read and make notes on them using the iAnnotate app which I am about to review in my second round of iPad apps post.



As you can see from the screenshot above you can read and make notes on the papers just like paper documents and you at least have a good chance of not loosing them!

Suffolk County Council helpfully publish the papers on the web but these are in Word format that easily gets garbled on mobile devices so I have converted the papers to PDFs and they are available here on Google Docs if you want to give it a try!

I am going to ask Suffolk if they will consider an opt-out from receiving paper copies of the papers and if they will publish them in PDF format themselves.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

iPad Apps Part 1 Social Networking and Blogging

I wrote a Review of the iPad shortly after it came out but didn't have one until recently. I pretty much agree with my own earlier review although I find the iPad much more useable with a case that tilts it up.

So what apps have I used? I'll start with Facebook, Twitter and blogging and then move on to some more business apps and rant a bit about why I can't access the filestore and why it isn't more joined together!

Twitter

I started off using Twitterific which has both free and paid for versions. This is a decent app and does most things you need. Incidentally I have used Tweetdeck on the iPad before but it still seems to be buggy from reports on the web.

After a while I read around the reviews and thought I would try Twittelator which was well rated but looked to have an odd user interface. In fact the UI at least in landscape is brilliant and this is now my favourite Twitter app on any platform. £2.99 cost is good for what you get.


Facebook

You don't actually need an app for Facebook as the web version works just fine on the iPad but at £2.99 the Friendly app is worth a look. It is pretty similar to the iPhone app but has some really nice touches like a lovely full screen photo browser complete with slideshows and integrated Facebook chat. There are some rough edges like no commenting on photos although at least there is a button to open Facebook web page to do this. If you are a big Facebook user this app is worthwhile.


Blogging

Blogger website only has limited functionality from the Safari browser on the iPad and won't let you insert photos or rich text functionality. Thankfully there is a decent app called BlogPress for £1.79 that works with blogger and all the other main sites.



Also useful for blogging is a photo editor to crop, rotate and manage photos. Adobe Photoshop Express is a free app that does this.

I've written this review using BlogPress on my iPad!