Post XXIV. Scanner Pro.

Scanner Pro is an iOS app that turns your iPhone or iPad into a portable scanner. This app is extremely helpful when, for example, there are two simultaneously studying students in one family (I am in that kind of situation now). Imagine, you and another family member need to read the same textbook on the same day. There are two options: You can wait your turn or scan the required chapter and read it on any device. I personally like the second option more because it allows both of you to be on the same page and discuss the material you read.

Scanner Pro digitize papers into PDFs, and the result of scanning is quite more clear and beautiful comparing to traditional scanners. You can customize the scanned documents any way you like, form files and folders, and change the place of the scanned pages. Scanner Pro is integrated with cloud storage services like GoogleDrive and Dropbox. Moreover, the app enables you to constantly back up all the files you scan.

The developer of Scanner Pro, Readdle, celebrates its 8^th birthday now, so you have a unique opportunity to download the app for $2.99 (its usual price is $6.99).

Watch the video below to see Scanner Pro in action.

Post I. Pocket

Hello everyone,

Thank you for joining me in my blog!

I have no experience of being a blogger, similarly to some of you. A quick research on this topic has showed that there are trillions of blogs on the Internet, and many of them are not very informative. The proportion of helpful suggestions to the blog posts that I would call vacuous is approximately 1:4 (of course, this conclusion only relates to those blogs that I saw).

With this in mind, I would like to contribute to the “bright side” and, therefore, will do my best to make this blog helpful rather than, hmm, entertaining. I plan to post about the technologies that can be of use for an instructional designer, learning professional, or performance improvement practitioner. I also intend to expand my knowledge of the Web 2.0 topic via library search and will share my findings here.

To start, I recommend you to become familiar with a wonderful tool for organizing web pages that you would like to read off-line or to save forever in one accessible place. The tool is called Pocket. What I like most about it is that it is highly intuitive; it will take you several minutes to figure out how the tool works. As a Pocket user, you have an opportunity to save web pages by directly inserting links in the list under your account or there is a more convenient way of saving via the Pocket button that you can insert in any web browser. I use the second way majorly. Another great feature is that you are able to tag all the web pages you save. My list of “pocketed” web pages is very long, but tags enable me to find the needed information immediately. Finally, I would like to emphasize that the Pocket application for cell phones is even better than the website. And you can use Pocket for free, although they have a paid version.

The majority of the web pages saved to my Pocket list are educational resources and the articles I researched for my master’s studies. It is very convenient to have them tagged so that I can find any of them in seconds. 

This is a screenshot from my tablet demonstrating the design of the Pocket application. Sorry for the name of the categories being in Russian. They are saying "My List" and "Archive". 

As you see, the application design is minimalistic, and I really like that.