Rover

I just found out about an app called Rover.  You can read the review that introduced it to me here. The magic of Rover is that you can use it when you are using Flash-based web sites.  When you first open up Rover, you will see a number of sites already programmed into it, which you can play with.  I choose not to bother with them but to put in sites that I'll be using in school really soon.

You'll see at the top of the page, a navigation toolbar similar to what Safari offers you.  I typed in a couple of sites and explored.

My take on it... It does the job.  It will show you the pictures and text.  I got sound out of it once in a while.  It's just slow though. The pictures come in all pixelated then eventually form the effect the creator wished for.  When I look at the same site on my Windows PC, the picture comes up immediately.  (Try it.  The site is http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/bhistory/underground_railroad/.)

If you can live with the slower speed, then I say to go for it. I have four student PCs in my room and a cart of 20 iPads that spend most of the week in my room.  If I have my 12 social studies students all wanting to get online at one time, we can't use the PCs.  However, we can use the iPads.  Rover makes using Flash-based sites possible again.  I will definitely have Rover loaded on the student iPads really soon and train the kids one how to use it so we can have more possibilities in the future.  I'm sure that as time goes by, the quality will get better and we'll be glad we got in on the ground floor.

Have you been using Rover?