While the iPhone and iPod touch primarily are entertainment centered devices – especially for young people – there are a few things you can do to improve their usefulness at school.

Calendar integration

Integrating the school schedule into the calendar app on the device and have it update automatically might be possible, depending on how the schedule system works. If your school has the same schedule each week, you can of course just put it in manually and use the repeat function, but especially in higher education you’ll run into schedules that change all the time.

The prerequisit for doing this is that the schedule system offers a vCal download. The trick is to feed the URl of the iCal file to Google Calendar and then sync that to the device using NuevaSync. However, there are a few problems. First off, if the calendar doesnt show the entire year, then the calendar will only show up until then unless you have a dynamic iCal file link. If you don’t, you can make one with PHP. Another issue I ran into involves the robots.txt file which the school server might have in the root directory to prevent the calendar to show up in Google etc. Unfortunately this also stops Google Calendar from accepting the iCal file. Again. PHP is needed to make a script that when promted, saves the iCal file from the school server to your own server and then redirects the URL there.

Since my blog is new and not that popular and this is a “hack” that I doubt a lot of people will use, I won’t go into details on how to do it (the PHP part). HOWEVER, if anyone wants to get this working and have an iCal file from the school server that they either want to make dynamic or need to circumvent the robots.txt, leave a comment or contact me using the link in the top bar and I’ll whip up a tutorial.

Document viewer

Despite the fact that there’s no included office-style application on the iPhone and iPod touch, they do actually read pretty much any document type including .xls (Excel), .ppt (PowerPoint) and .doc (Word). If you use an application such as AirShare or Files, you can make the device into a wireless storage device over WiFi and use it to store notes, papers, lecture materials etc on it to view at school. I use this for both viewing the PowerPoint presentations used during the lectures and I use it to store self written notes to read before exams.

Evernote

I haven’t used this trick in a while but I used it before the marketing exam last year and it worked well. Basically Evernote lets you select pics, snippets of text etc and sync them over the air to for instance an iPhone or iPod touch. If you have access to a scanner, or a lot of digital material (like PowerPoint presentations) you can then select part of that material, send it to Evernote, and you have the most important notes with you on the device next time you sync.

Voice recorder

A lot of people like to record lectures, but integrated microphones often suck. On the iPod touch and iPhone you can get some nice cheap mics that will still be a lot better than the integrated mics in other devices, such as the ThumbTack.