Apr 4 2012

The Khan Academy lost in the app off, HTML5 Takeover and Much More…

On one of ACS Egham’s recent Teacher VS Student ‘app off’ – when unfortunately said teacher – myself – only drew 2-2 it was interesting to see that very few students had seen or heard of the Khan Academy. At that point a number of weeks ago all I was able to show was a Shortcut to the website and so the 1 minute ‘app off’ demonstration did not show off the site to any great extent. However just recently there has been much furor in the educational community regarding the release of the Khan Academy native application. On downloading it does makes the whole user experience of viewing, searching and watching a specific video that much more alluring and when I re-publicised the app through gmail to all Grade 11 students there was a greater sense of interest and feedback. However it does make me wonder at how well students are able to navigate, choose and then use efficiently such fabulous resources. Something worth reviewing further as our iPAD trial continues.

On a different note I have been interested in the recent rise and rise of HTML5 and how this may in the long term negate the need for native apps on smartphones and also enable greater flexibility and creativity from those creating resources as they do not have to specifically go through a filtered and expensive ‘app store.’ As you can see below I searched and tried to find some interesting HTML 5 sites and was surprised to find that there are not actually that many quality applications out there. I found the following: –

Kleki – a fun and very responsive art application which does not show the same feature rich nature as some of the native apps but does show the possibilities…
Financial Times – every bit as a good and slick as the guardian native app!
Coolendar – still trying to sync this with my calendar so unsure yet as to how effective this is…
Chalk – simple and fun
Desmos, Graphic Calculator – probably the most promising for our students and a web app that could be utilised by Maths students and teachers from day one (will be passing it onto the Maths teachers on our trial to see what they think)

So from my brief research it seems that HTML5 could be very promising if as yet with few examples of web apps that can really be useful to our students. See gallery below – click on an image for a close-up.