Byline from Phantom Fish is another new iPhone app that could prove quite useful for teaching and learning. Essentially, it’s an RSS reader that hooks into Google Reader and has the ability to store pages locally (on your iPhone or Touch) for offline reading.

Byline puts hosts of RSS and Atom feeds at your fingertips by pulling content from your free Google Reader account, which of course keeps track of your favorite websites.

The good news, especially for Touch users, is Byline’s utilization of cloud-computing to provide an offline browsing feature that gives you instant access to complete web pages.

In addition, Byline will archive the pages linked to by your starred items and notes. This allows you to save any news item you read and any website you visit for offline browsing.

For more, check out Ars Technica’s recent review of Byline.

Yesterday the folks at Teleread reported that the Stanza ebook application may be downloaded for use on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

According to Lexcycle (the provider of Stanza), this app provides built-in support for a number of document formats, including “HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, and Rich Text Format reading, as well as all the major eBook standards: unprotected Amazon Kindle and Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT, Palm doc, and the International Digital Publishing Forum’s new epub Open eBook standard.”

Lexcycle has this to say about taking your ebooks on the road with your iPhone, iPod or PDA:

“Stanza features the ability to export your reading material to a wide array of formats that can be read on your mobile device. Its native export to the iPhone makes it the first product that can convert all of your digital texts to iPhone “bookmarklets” that sync with your iPhone for reading anywhere — no internet connection required.

Stanza can also export to MobiPocket, enabling you to use the popular MobiPocket Reader to read your exported book on your Blackberry, PocketPC, Palm OS, Nokia Series 60, Sony Ericsson UIQ, and many other mobile devices.”

Download the application at lexcycle.com.

Yesterday, in an interview with ExtremeTech, Apple’s President of Marketing, Greg Joswiak refuted early assertions that GPS-based driving directions on the iPhone 3G are impossible because of the GPS transponders’ size and left the door to copy/paste functionality open.

Joswiak stated that “Apple has a priority list of features, and they got as far as they could down that list with this model”—essentially suggesting that Apple doesn’t have anything against cut and paste; they just judged other things to be more important. Apple’s willingness to entertain the idea of cut and paste functionality for the iPhone is obviously good news for those of us interested in using the device as a tool for teaching and learning.

Responding to questions about GPS driving directions, Joswiak asserted that the iPhone’s GPS is “just like the GPS in other phones, many of which do provide driving directions,” but there are some “complicated issues” preventing driving directions at present “It will evolve. I think our developers will amaze us.”

For more, be sure to check out ExtremeTech’s full article.

As you know, Apple’s iPhone App Store went live last week, and a number of new applications look to be pretty handy tools for teaching and learning. Perhaps the one with the greatest educational potential is Stage Hand, which allows you to control your Keynote presentations from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Stage Hand also shows you the notes for your current slide for those moments when you need a quick reminder and allows you to tilt your iPhone to view a miniature of the big screen on your small screen. You can also draw your audience’s attention with the Stage Hand highlighter: tap anywhere on the screen to spotlight your slide with a choice of graphics and colors.

For Stage Hand to work, you’ll need a small helper application, Stage Manager, running on your Macintosh. Stage Manager communicates with iPhone or iPod Touch devices to control your presentations. The application also requires Keynote ‘08 part of the iWork ‘08 suite, on a Macintosh computer with OS X 10.5 “Leopard” or later. Windows/Powerpoint is not supported.

To read more about or download Stage Manager and Stage Hand, visit Wooji Juice.

TUAW reports that the iPhone firmware 2.0 enables users to easily take and share screenshots of their iPhones without having to download any additional software. To take a screenshot, just hold down the home button while quickly pressing the sleep/wake button at the top of the phone. The screen will flash and an image will be saved in your Camera Roll. iPhone users can easily share screenshots via email with the share option in the Photos app.

This could be a pretty handy tool for teaching and learning, especially for university training sessions or instructional websites. iPhone screenshots might be used to demonstrate educational, social and administrative uses for the device on campus to students, faculty and staff.

For more iPhone tips, check out the iPhone 101 section at TUAW.

Yesterday, our friends at Flux posted a very interesting video of Grainne Conole’s recent presentation entitled “Disruptive Technologies or New Pedagogical Possibilities.” Conole’s presentation, which was delivered at the Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2008, explores some of the web 2.0 developments and their implications for learning, learnersand education. If you have the time, it’s certainly worth a watch.   

Yesterday, Campus Technology posted an article about the new initiative organized by Stanford University School of Education and Innovations for Learning, a Chicago-based nonprofit, which will bring the $50 Teachermate Handheld Computer to extremely underserved children in Latin America.

Teachermate is a compact mobile learning tool that resembles a hand-held game and is intended for early elementary students. It uses a 500 MB NAND flash card for storage and has a 200 MHz 32-bit ARM9 processor. The device can be charged with an AC/DC adapter or through a USB connection to a PC. All stories, instructions and other content in the system are in both English and Spanish. Students can record words on the screen into a built-in microphone and can then compare their own voice recordings to the computer’s rendition of the story. A variety of math game activities are designed to reinforce basic numeracy skills.

Campus Technology reports that the first implementation of the handheld computer system will be in Baja California, Mexico in collaboration with CETYS Universidad en Mexico. A pilot of the handheld computer for reading and math education will be launched in September in cities in Mexico where many poor migrant populations are concentrated. CETYS Universidad’s Education and Engineering School will also develop local content for the Teachermate handheld computer while its Business School will develop and enhance scalability and sustainability models.

Paul Kim, CTO for Stanford’s School of Education, states: “Mobile learning technology loaded with innovative educational content for basic literacy and numeracy seems to be in a dire need in many regions of the global community today. For those who have no opportunity to watch TV and do not own a single book, a mobile learning solution may be a viable educational option.”

For more information, be sure to check out the full article at Campus Technology.

Users of iTunes U now have a lot more elementary education material to choose from—a new initiative launched by several state education agencies, along with the State Education Technology Directors Association (SETDA) will create a home for K-12 educational content within iTunes U.

The initiative, which launched July 1, brings the creation of a K-12 destination to iTunes U with a broad range of content from a number of state and district agencies—including Arizona, Florida, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Utah—as well as museums and other educational institutions.

T.H.E. Journal reports that according to SETDA, the idea of the initiative is not only to bring state and district resources to K-12 educators within their own states, but to provide nationwide and global access to educational content, curricula, learning materials, news, best practices, and other resources.

“This comprehensive collection of quality digital content offers teachers and students a single location to access resources on topics from Florida history to the Navajo language to nano technologies,” said Mary Ann Wolf, executive director of SETDA, in a statement released Tuesday at the NECC 2008 conference in Texas, where the initiative was unveiled. “Teachers can now access these resources in real-time to support teaching and learning. The new K-12 resources on iTunes U address the critical need to engage students through technology-based resources in the core curriculum areas.”

For more, be sure to check out T.H.E. Journal’s full article.

Over the long weekend, Apple posted a handy support document that explains how to replace your original iPhone with a new 3G iPhone. Basically there are two tracks:

1). In the US you don’t need your original SIM as your original “account information will be transferred to iPhone 3G’s included SIM when you purchase iPhone 3G.”

2). Outside the US, “you can use your original iPhone’s SIM with iPhone 3G.”

Once your transfer is complete, all you have to do is back up your original iPhone to iTunes 7.7 and then restore that backup to the new iPhone 3G. This should transfer all your saved SMS messages as well as email accounts, notes, etc. Once that’s done, you should probably erase the old iPhone with the new secure erase option.

Yesterday, the Google Talk team released a new web client that doesn’t rely on Flash, making it possible to chat with your GTalk contacts via your iPhone.

As you can see, the iPhone-optimized GTalk client’s interface is clean and simple. It allows you to set your status at the top and automatically sets to away if you close the Mobile Safari window. It also offers a scrollable list of contacts. At the top of the chat window is a drop down that will list any other open chats and let you switch among them.

Ars Technica reports that a significant problem with the app seems to stem from the client’s use of some sort of JavaScript or other method that keeps the browser constantly loading. Whatever mechanism is being used, running the GTalk web client seems to run down the iPhone’s battery much faster than expected based on some informal testing in Ars Orbiting HQ. Even with iPhone 3G’s improved battery life, that could still be a deal-killer for heavy users.

Still, it’s a step in the right direction. With Jabber transports, its possible to chat with users of other protocols as well, so it could be a one-stop solution. This feature might also make it a handy tool for chatting with students and colleagues, who likely utilize a number of different chat clients.