Chris Hamady

In 2001, I was the computer teacher, music teacher, and technology coordinator for Regina Coeli, a K-8 parochial school in Toledo, OH. Apple had just released iTunes for the Macintosh and I had just begun a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction: Educational Technology. I was excited and supercharged to make my mark in education.

As I began to explore iTunes, one feature in particular caught my attention. The automated computer generated visualizations that iTunes creates, synced in time with the music. It was during this time that I was also introducing my music students to "programmatic" classical compositions. Programmatic music, or program music, is music specifically written in such a way that it conveys to the listener a story. A good example of program music is Aaron Copland's, Appalachian Spring.

I wanted to help the students more easily understand the concept of program music. I decided that the best way to do this would be to spark their imaginations as much as possible. I wrote a lesson plan that went a little something like this:

The students would listen to a piece of programmatic classical music that was playing in iTunes. iTunes would also be creating a visualization based upon the playing music. I asked the students to write a one page paper describing what they thought the music was about. They could either listen to the music for inspiration, or look at the visualization. 

The lesson was a success. The students did such a fantastic job participating and demonstrating incredible imagination and creativity, I thought that I should share the lesson with others.

I wrote up the lesson plan a day or two after having presented it to the students. I wanted to send it to Apple as they not only owned and published the iTunes software, but they also had a division in their company that specifically focuses on educational technology. I had heard rumors that Steve Jobs' email address was steve@apple.com so that is the address that I mailed my lesson plan to.

A week or two went by and soon I forgot that I had sent this email to Steve. One day, while I was cleaning up my classroom at Regina Coeli, the secretary called my room and asked me if I wanted to talk to Apple Computer. Soon after I heard a female voice tell me, "We received your lesson plan…Steve really liked it and sent it to us. He asked us to send the students in your class some Apple t-shirts and Apple pens. How many do you need?" 

I was flabbergasted. I never really thought that he would actually read my email, much less act upon it. Here I was, a brand new doctoral student in educational technology, truly unsure and insecure about the decision that I had made to leave music and focus on education, and I just had a life changing experience with one of the most powerful, dynamic, forward looking human beings on the planet.

We are not made in one day or in one year. We are not made in one moment or in one event, but there are certain key happenings in our lives that have the unbelievable power to move us, validate us, or act as catalysts to enlighten us, encourage us, or inspire us. If Steve can read this blog post, I hope that he realizes that this one small thing that he did, was one huge moment in my life.

Thank you Steve.

Chris Hamady

All of the materials mentioned in the OCEA presentation can be found here:

http://www.chrishamady.com/journal/2011/4/27/ncea-presentation-materials.html

Poll results:

Please contact me if you have any questions. I would be glad to answer them.

CH

My wife and I took the children recently to Sam's Club to pick up a few items. No sooner had we gotten in the front door when we were confronted with a large display for the ION AUDIO iCade. This thing is a BlueTooth joystick/arcade cabinet controller for the Apple iPad. My children and I really wanted to buy and experience it so we made a deal with my wife in order to get it! ;)

The short story: it really does a fantastic job of replicating the feel and atmosphere of a 1980s arcade game machine. My children and my wife played the iCade for hours the first day we had it, and now I've finally been able to get my hands on it. Here's a link if you want to check it out.

http://www.ionaudio.com/products/details/icade

You'll see from this photo and this photo that the iCade comes unassembled. Putting it together should have been an easy task that included using an allen wrench and a number of allen-headed machine screws to screw the different pieces together. The nut portion of the fastener was embedded in the wooden iCade pieces. I had a serious issue connecting one of the machine screws to one of the embedded nuts. It literally took me 15 minutes of working diligently to get those pieces together.

Once the iCade was fully assembled, the lid lifts up off of the iCade and one slides the iPad into the assembled body of the game system. Here is a photo of what the iCade looks like fully assembled with the iPad inserted into it.

The first thing I noticed about it was that the joystick and the buttons had a very authentic feel and response like the old-school controls of the 80s arcade systems. The gameplay was very similiar if not nearly identical to the way I remember them from decades ago. Speaking of games, there is one serious negative with the iCade: No PacMan!!!!

The iCade instructions tell the purchaser to go to the App store and download Atari's Greatest Hits. Within that free download, one has the ability for in-app purchases of games. I purchased a single game for 99 cents intially. After seeing how fun and well the iCade worked, we opted to purchase the entire Atari set of 100 games for $14.99. The complete set includes famous titles such as Milipede, Centipede, Pong, Asteroids, Tempest, Missle Command, and many others.

Now for the bad news. Pac Man is not an Atari game. It is made by Namco. The iCade website had detailed instructions for developers to customize their games to include the ability to correctly function with the iCade's controls. I took a chance and purchased Pac Man for iPad. No love....it does not have iCade capabilities.

Next, I emailed both Namco and ION AUDIO asking them to expedite the process of getting Pac Man on the iCade.

Here is my email to them (only showing version sent to Namco):

"I just purchased Pac Man for iPad. Please add iCade (http://www.ionaudio.com/products/details/icade ) support for their bluetooth controller. Your game really lacks the 80s fun I used to have without it. I'm about to write reviews of iCade and Pac Man and publish them... Will you commit to supporting the iCade in the future so that I can publish that info?
Thank you.
Chris"

ION AUDIO's response:

"Hi Chris,
Thank you for your interest in Ion Audio!
The application you are referring to is not currently supported on the iCade. We would all love more games to be supported though!

In order to have it supported, the App developer would need to contact us so that we could work together to create the settings so that the app will work correctly with the iCade. If you would like this to happen, please contact the developer of the specific Pac-Man app you purchased and let them know. We would love to have more games work with the iCade!

Best Regards,
Gregory Holmes"

Namco's response:

"Hello Chris,

Thank you for contacting Namco Bandai Games America Inc. Customer Support.

We are considering supporting this device in our future game releases where it makes sense. Please note that our retro arcade titles, such as PAC-MAN, are handled by our Japanese office. We have passed along our interest to support this device for the retro arcade games but the decision will be theirs to make. We can't promise you anything at this point but we are at least looking into supporting the iCADE.

Thanks again for taking the time to reach out to us. We hope you continue to enjoy our games.

Regards,
Namco Bandai Games America Inc. Customer Support"

Pac Man for iPad is a fun game, although the on-screen joystick is a bit wonky to control. It really does not come close to the fun that could be experienced if Namco would use the available developer information found at ION AUDIO's website and customize Pac Man for the iCade. I'm hoping that Namco takes advantage of this opportunity to both enhance their game, as well as create an avenue to sell more copies of it. I am grateful that Namco took the time to forward my request on to the division that handles Pac Man. Thank you to both ION AUDIO and Namco for their prompt responses to my emails.

Other than this one negative (not ION AUDIO's fault), the ION AUDIO iCade is a fun, well designed, and fully functional old-school arcade system. If I had to rate it I would give it an 8 out of 10 star rating.

CH

UPDATE- I'm changing my rating to 10 out of 10. Pac-Man is now an iCade-supported application!!! See Pac-Man Now Supports the iCade.

Thank you to all of you that attended our NCEA presentation. As promised, I will be uploading the many things that we discussed during the presentation to this blog post.  Thank you again. Please contact me if you don't see something here that you would like. Twitter- @chamady Email- chamady AT centralcatholic.org

Presentation slides in Apple Keynote format

Presentation slides in Microsoft PowerPoint format

One Connected Community Laptop Research Article (PDF)

Proceedings Journal Article from 2010 SITE Conference on 1 to 1 Computing at CCHS (MS Word format)

Free Open Source Software page (web site)

Mac or PC in Education (web site)

Laptop Insurance Form (MS Word format)

Laptop Loan Agreement (MS Word format)

Online Communication Policy (PDF)

Laptop Care Video (.mov)

Music Video (YouTube)

CH

Last evening, after arriving home from the SITE 2011 conference, I was excited by the prospect of being able to update all of my iOS devices (iPod touch, iPad, iPhone) to iOS 4.3. My main reason for wanting to do so, was the awesome upgrade to Home Sharing included in this new release. For as long as I've had an iPhone and an iPad, I've wondered why users of iOS-based devices couldn't stream their iTunes content from their computers to their Apple mobile devices.

Once Home Sharing credentials are entered on your iPhone or iPad, any iTunes media stored on a computer with Home Sharing enabled, can be streamed to any iOS device when both devices are on the same wired/wireless network. Seeing that all of my media content is stored on a single computer (more info on that here), I wanted to be able to have access to it WIRELESSLY! After months and months of requesting this feature, I was now looking forward to finally getting to try it out.

The first thing that I did was backup all of my iOS devices. Detailed information on how to do that can be found here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1414

Next, I began the process of upgrading all of my iOS devices to iOS 4.3. This is accomplished by syncing your iPad, iPod touch or iPhone with iTunes and then clicking the "Check for Update." button.

iPhone 4

Once that was finished, I opened up the iTunes app on my iPhone 4 to see if I could find my Shared media. iTunes did not show any shared media. I next opened up the iPod app on my iPhone and again could not find any links to shared media. This was bewildering (see my proposed solution at end of article). I checked online and couldn't seem to locate any information on how to make this happen. Finally I decided to check in the Settings app. Inside Settings-iPod I found an area labeled, "Home Sharing." I entered my iTunes email address and password here:

Once that was done, a new item appeared in the iPod listing. Shared:

Clicking on this listing gave me a choice of "shared" iTunes libraries to choose from:

I chose the library associated with my Mac Mini media center as it contains every piece of media that I own. Once that was done, I was able to see all of my music and movies that were being shared from iTunes running on the Mac Mini:

iPad

The steps to make this happen on the iPad were roughly the same, but for some reason Apple has decided to put shared movies into the "Videos" application instead of the iPod app. I'm not quite sure what Apple's reasoning is for even having a Videos application? What is gained by introducing a lack of consistency and different user interface on these two EXTREMELY similar iOS devices?

The fact that a link to Shared content does not automatically appear in the iPod app, is a cause of concern for me. Wouldn't the more intuitive and usable solution have been to show a Shared content link within the app, rather than having a user navigate to Settings-iPod and enter Home Sharing information prior to this link appearing?

In my scenario, clicking on the always-showing "Shared" link could bring up a dialogue box asking the user for their Home Sharing information at which point the shared libraries would appear. If Apple had done it this way, it would have created a much simpler and usable procedure imho.

This actually created a pretty fair amount of discomfort for myself and Vic Orly, who is a very competent Apple technician. If it took two geeks like us 15 minutes to figure out how to set up Home Sharing, as well as locate the Shared videos on the iPad (as a result of inconsistencies between the iPhone and iPad interfaces), what will it take for someone with less technical skills to make this happen?

Aside from these small usability glitches, I'm very grateful that Apple has included this functionality in iOS 4.3 and it seems to work very well. Thank you Apple!

CH

Update: There seems to be a glitch in the shared movies when trying to navigate them from my 1st generation iPad. The first dozen or show movie titles continue to repeat as I scroll down all of the movie thumbnails. I can tell that the movies are different, but their correct titles do not display. iPhone 4 displays all shared movies correctly.