Education
Back to School: Academic software
Apple’s going Back to School! We’ll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on for tips on saving money on software.
At the start of every school year, students, teachers and parents have a seemingly-endless list of “to-buy” items. It gets expensive, and software is often the last place people want to plunk down money. Fortunately, the world of academic software discounts can easily save students (and their parents) and teachers enormous sums of money.
Academic software is exactly the same as the “regular” software, but the box says “Academic License” and the price can be significantly, noticeably less. How much less? Well, in the case of Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium 3.3, the academic version goes for $594.95 (you can save an additional $200 if you buy the package with a new Mac at the Apple Higher Education Store), and the full version clocks in at a whopping $1799US. $600 vs. $1800 is a pretty big difference, especially for students.
Depending on the software title, you might have to be a college student or faculty member to take advantage of some of the best discounts, but more and more publishers are opening up the discounts to K-12 students and teachers.
Please note: While academic discounts are available in other countries, this guide is primarily aimed at US and Canadian students. All prices are in USD.
I’ve been buying academic software since I was in high school, and here are some of the tips/best practices I’ve picked up over the years …
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Popularity: 10% [?]
Back to School: Canvastic v3.5
Apple’s going Back to School! We’ll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on cool software for K-8 classrooms.
Canvastic LLC has announced a new version of the Canvastic graphics, writing, and publishing tool. Canvastic is designed to be used in K-8 classrooms, and is fun and productive for students.
Canvastic 3.5 is designed for use on both PPC and Intel Macs (which is great, as many American schools still use older Macs). The student publishing tool includes drawing, text and presentation tools, plus an Audio Tool for voice recording, insertion of sounds and integration with iTunes. Audio tracks can be played in documents or presentations.
Other new features include:
- Transparency and color tones in graphics and text
- Teachers can enable or disable spell checking, and also keep students from “customizing” the dictionary
- New brush shapes
- The ability to import digital photographs
- Additional templates, backgrounds, and art
As before, Canvastic presents a customized user interface depending on the grade level of the student. Canvastic 3.5 is a free upgrade for all registered users, and those with free site licenses can upgrade for 50% of the posted educational prices. Pricing ranges from US$39 for one user to US$949 for an unlimited school building license. Schools can do an unlimited pilot of Canvastic for up to 60 days, and many school districts qualify for a free site license for half of their schools.
Click here to download the free trial.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Back to School: ProfCast half off today
Apple’s going Back to School! We’ll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on for help for professors and instructors.
Humble Daisy is offering 50 percent off its ProfCast software, which helps educators (or anyone else who presents via PowerPoint or Keynote) record slide-based lectures as podcasts, and share them via iTunes U and iWeb.
The promotion is only available today, August 14. Academic users will receive an additional 25% off over the 50% discount. Purchasing today also allows you to upgrade to the next version for free.
The software is $30 today only (normally $60). For Academic customers, ProfCast is $15 $22.50. Volume discounts are also available.
ProfCast is a universal binary, and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher. You can check out a 15-day demo, too.
Update: My mistake, folks: the $15 price was based on a faulty calculation I did — commenters are reporting that the Academic price is $22.50. A thousand apologies for that. [Profcast]
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Reminder: Free iPod education promo ends Sept. 15
College
Just a reminder: We told you in June about Apple’s education promotion where you can get a free 8GB iPod touch (worth $299) to college students who buy a MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, or Mac Pro. The promotion ends in just over a month, on September 15.
If you haven’t placed your order yet, it’s probably a good time to get your act in gear.
Note also that from the reports we’ve seen, iPod touch is not shipping with the 2.0 software update pre-loaded yet. So you’ll have to shell out ten bucks for the software update.
Qualified students can also opt for an 8GB iPod nano.
On Sunday’s talkcast, we figured it was all-but-certain that new iPod touch models and possibly laptops will drop right after this promotion ends. Keep that in mind, too. [Apple]
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Stanford to offer iPhone programming course
Precious little information is available just now, but Stanford appears to be offering a course in the Autumn entitled “iPhone Application Programming.”
Award-winning iPhone app developer Craig Hockenberry wonders aloud if Apple will even allow such a course to be taught, presumably thanks to the ongoing NDA mummalum that Erica wrote about earlier today.
If anyone has any more information about the course and its instructor, we’re all ears: please feel free to tip us.
Popularity: 7% [?]
