This post, however, is not the same, but rather, talks about how the iPad can make education fun for kids. While my kids love school, the iPad (or any tablet for that matter), can supplement the education they are getting in school.

Here’s how:

At the very basic level, kids, as young as 2 or so, have an eagerness to learn their ABCs. The ABC Animals app helps you do that.

After kids start to learn their alphabet, they want to start spelling. It’s part of their curiosity scale. They are like sponges and want to continue to learn and after ABCs, spelling is next in line. The Word Magic app can help kids with their spelling curiosity.

Kids are also visual and audio learners. The interactivity of some iPad apps really help kids soak in the knowledge. The Spell and Listen Cards app is a cool way for kids to become the sponge.

Want to teach your kids about the history of the US. Check out the Manual for the United States of America. Believe me, you’ll learn a couple of things too because you were probably falling asleep in history class.

How about Astronomy? Pocket Universe: Virtual Sky Astronomy is pretty bad ass.

Another great way to learn, though the industry is dwindling, is newspapers. Keeping them up to date with world events is a great educational experience. Newspapers is good app to check out.

What about tunes? You gotta teach your kids about music. The Preschool Music app is fantastic. You’ll find yourself playing this one for sure.

There’s a slew of other apps I’d add to this list. What would you add?

So what. I am going to give you one more. This will be stripped down and free of any sort of big conclusions other than answering the question if your house needs one.

This EOT Dad was impressed with the iPad

First, let me say I bought our first iPad for my wife. A stay-at-home Mom, she primarily uses her Apple MacBook to surf the web, read email and do a little shopping. She’s not doing any word processing, number crunching or design work. Heck, she’s not even blogging. For her, it’s really a web device, or as my friend Vincent Ferrari over at the Shamable.com blog calls it: a “couch-browser.”

We eagerly anticipated the delivery of the iPad on Saturday and it came as soon as we left the house to run some errands. BTW, UPS tracking sucks.

Once the iPad arrived, I opened it for my wife (OK, I really wanted to get my hands on it even though it’s hers) and fired it up.

The first thing that struck me was, of course, the design and “WOW” factor of just holding it. It is a bit heavy at 1.5 pounds but you really don’t notice at first. And since we both use iPhones, to start poking around the devices was easy and intuitive. I can’t imagine even non-iPhone people having trouble figuring out how it works. The device was full charged from its trip from China and the first sync to our iMac went off without a hitch.

I’ll save you a longer and more in-depth review because you can get that elsewhere. Here at the EOT Blog, we just sort of bottom-line things. So here it is:

The iPad is a beautiful device worth its price if you’re a tech fan and like to have your tech on the go. It’s really the perfect “couch-browser” device to use around the house. Its ability to deliver entertainment content (games, streaming movies via Netflix, and television via ABC app), and easy access to web browsing and email make it a great piece to add to your home collection.

It’s actually the perfect device for my wife and myself around the house. You can browse the web for a recipe, check your email or Tweet your latest update in TweetDeck. It’s casual computing at its finest.

I don’t believe it’s a laptop killer as its purpose – at least in our house – is different. While its Apple Pages word processor is robust and easy to use with full on-screen keyboard, I wouldn’t use it as my main work tool. I suppose I could but I don’t look at the device in that way.

As a father of four kids, I see the potential for this to be a dynamite piece of equipment for your family both at home and on the road. Kids (and adults!) can use it on flights or in the car to watch movies or streaming content (if you have wi-fi in the air) that can help make a long trip seem much shorter. The limited games I tested were killer and the large 9″ display delivers unmatched quality in a portable device.

Don’t listen to Apple when they say iPhone apps run fine on it. The apps run as a small rectangle in the middle of the big display and it is a completely crappy experience. Also, how Apple didn’t ship it with its popular Remote application is interesting. I’d love to use the iPad to control my Airport Extreme which I use to listen to music from my iTunes library throughout the house. They should have updated that app prior to launch. Tisk, tisk.

At $499 for the wi-fi iPad, the price is a little steep for most folks. But if you’re like me and an early adopter who likes the latest gadget, this is one worth the price.

One note: I can see where this device could have some great business uses. Imagine your waiter having one or your doctor. This device could grow in adoption amongst businesses who need computing on the go. We’ll see if app developers go there.

Will the iPad change the world and how it uses computers? I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s very cool and we’ve enjoyed using it.

Now, how do I convince my wife we need a second one for Dad?

EveryOtherThursday.com iPad Review Takeaways:

Pluses:

• Beautiful design and functionality
• Amazing entertainment opportunities
• The perfect household/mobile device for utilizing the Web
• Great applications
• A social media addicts perfect tool
• Lean, mean

Minuses:

• Cost
• Doesn’t replace your laptop completely; at least for most folks
• No camera for video chat
• No multitasking

One fairly new service that I have embraced wholeheartedly, however, is Google’s new voice over IP (VoIP) offering, Google Voice.  There are a couple reasons for this.

First of all, I’ve come to despise my regular phone provider and doubt the necessity of land lines. We signed up for one when we moved to our current house in 2005. Back then the notion of Internet based phones seemed down right dicey, while the promise of always-on copper service was attractive. Since then, though, we’ve ditched the copper for a VoIP based offering delivered on Verizon’s FiOS. If the power goes out, we’ve got a few hours of service from our battery powered unit, but then that’ll go dead, too. So much for always on. In the meantime, Verizon stuck us with an easy to remember number that’s close cousin to both a local Top 40 radio station and the number elderly people call to hear the weather forecast. The result: our landline is a spam choked conduit for a dozen or more wrong numbers a day, including lots with befuddled seniors who hang up in your ear, and teenagers saying things like “It was Black Eyed Peas…did I win the tickets!!?!” This, on top of the usual barrage of solicitations from mortgage refinance vultures and “appliance warranty” scam calls. As I see it, we’re basically paying for people to bug us. At some point I’ll overcome my fear and inertia and just ditch the land line altogether, but I’m not there yet.

Then there’s Google Voice, which is still in beta and technically closed to the public. But — as with Gmail — invitations are becoming easier to come by. It’s a step in the direction of a portable, universal phone number, with some truly nifty features. After receiving an invite, you sign up for the service and get yourself a phone number. The one I chose has a Boston (617) area code, and the exchange common in my home town when I was growing up. Very cool. With that number in hand, you can then link all your other numbers to your Google Voice number and set up policies around when calls should go where. So, for example, you could just have folks who dial your Google Voice number  always get forwarded to your mobile. Or you could say “during work hours, ring my work phone, but on weekends, ring me at home,” or just have Google call every number you might answer and see which gets picked up.  Best of all: Google Voice captures your voicemail and stores it online for easy playback AND it does realtime, automated transcriptions of voice mail messages, which are stored or can be forwarded as SMS text messages to your mobile phone. As one of a growing number of people who can’t bear to actually listen to voice mail messages, this feature is Very Cool.

Alas, the auto transcription  feature has generated a bit of flack for Google for..well…not really working all that great. I’ll be honest: the transcription capabilities of this V1 service aren’t strong. As more than one reviewer has pointed out, Google Voice often has a darned hard time making heads or tails of what your callers are trying to say, especially when there’s a noisy connection, slang or fast spoken english or background noise to throw off the transcription.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve generally been able to catch the gist of what my callers are trying to tell me. In the meantime, I’ve been treated to a steady stream of amusing foul-ups and even some chin-scratching “found poetry,” courtesy of Google Voice’s auto transcription engine. In some cases, the mix-ups seem to hint at deeper truths.  Google Voice heard the name of our local car dealership, Cityside Subaru, as Cityside Switcheroo. Accidental? Maybe…and maybe not!

I've seen the best algorithms of my generation...

In other cases, Google Voice does an exemplary job transcribing, only to sprinkle little bits of absurdity along the way. A perfectly captured voice mail from a running buddy ends with a one word sentence that reads, simply: Cement. Another innocuous voice mail message ends with the three word alliteration Hi Heather Hooks. I don’t know what the caller was trying to say…but I like it!

With other messages, meaning is utterly lost, leaving only a kind of loose prose poem that makes you want to grab the bongo drums, a bottle of cheap Spanish wine and that dog-eared copy of Howl and start reciting aloud.

My favorite, so far, is this transcription of a voice mail message from my wife. (I’ve added some line breaks where I think they make sense.)

Yeah suck. Bye drinking. Her it. This is Paul. This is Martha.
I’m running a little bit and I’ve got the yes I don’t know. Yahoo.

But hey, I’m guessing you’re bringing it like a letter in the bye bye colossal of alright.

So I was cleaning up on my I think that yeah okay bye but I didn’t know if I don’t know.

Again – i know we’re talking about algorithmic guessing here, but you’ve gotta tip your hat to anything – man or machine – who cooks up something as evocative as  ”You’re bringing it like a letter in the bye bye colossal of alright.”

At some point, Google will iron out the deficiencies in its transcription, the found poetry will disappear and I’ll be left with the quotidian task of actually responding to the voice mail messages that Google Voice captures. For now, though, I’m enjoying the chaos and looking for more Google Voice poems. If you’ve got some good ones send them along to paul(at)everyotherthursday(dot)com, or Tweet them to me: paulfroberts!

One of the things I hate about our Internet-connected world, is the way that all these cool niche sites raise the bar for everyone who doesn’t share their weird obsession. Take pumpkin carving. Back when I was growing up in the 1970′s, pumpkin carving was a fairly straight forward: you cut a hole at the top, scoop the guts out, carve two triangle eyes, a triangle nose and a toothy grin and you’re done.  The biggest challenge was lining the eyes up and not making the mouth too big. (For those who need more instructions, fellow EOT blogger David Binkowski has a nice how-to here.)

It would never have occurred to me, or my parents, to depart from that design — say, using round expressive eyes instead of triangles or..ohh..dispensing with the face altogether and instead making our pumpkin look like the Death Star from Star Wars. Frankly, I just didn’t know that kind of thing was allowed. But now there’s the Internet, which brings to my doorstep all manner of variations on the toothy triangle face — there’s the Che faced pumpkin and the naughty pumpkin, the giant squid pumpkin, or bas relief pumpkins depicting Barack Obama or The Predator. There are all manner of puking pumpkins — an idea so obvious and funny that I’m ashamed that it never occurred to me. There are whole Web sites devoted to envelope-pushing pumpkin carving, like Extremepumpkins.com, which has whole subcategories on pumpkin pyrotechnics, tools and design strategy.

The puking pumpkin - why didn't I think of this?

No surprise, then, that these pumpkin carving Mozarts leave earth bound mortals like myself  feeling like Salieri by comparison. This season, I’m doing what I can: I’ve purchased the requisite pumpkin carving tool kit (again: these did not exist when I was growing up) but am passing on the use of power tools. My daughters, true to form, will decide on some ornate patterns: the flying witch or a princess or wolves howling in the clearing of some mind blowing, filigreed forest. They’ll obsess about their choice, “ewww!!” a lot when scooping out the guts, then conveniently disappear to turf the actual carving to yours truly. I’ll sit down at the kitchen table, shoo them away, knit my brow and try my best to pull off some cucurbitan masterpiece while not severing a digit in the process. Toothpicks will be used to patch together the design when I cut too deep or too far and, in the end, it will all look pretty cool. My advice to all the dads out there: start in the middle, not at the edge. Have a strong drink at your elbow and be prepared to sell whatever you end up with as EXACTLY what your kids wanted. As with so much in life, its all about the presentation. We do the best that we can, and our kids love us for it.

Although I can be serious as a father at times, I pretty much joke around with my kids all the time. And the fact I have them all to myself for that half hour gives me the opportunity to live out my inner child with corny jokes, impressions and crazy observations. For that 30 minutes I get to play comedian with my kids as a captive (literally) audience.

But, like one of my heroes Rodney Dangerfield used to say: “I get no respect at all.”

One of my all-time heroes: Rodney Dangerfield

I throw everything I have at them: jokes, faux Indian accents, goofy cartoon voices, singing really bad and loud to songs on the radio, and even whimsical conversations with myself like they aren’t there.

What do I get in return? Bubkes!

When I asked my daughter about why they don’t laugh or comment back at me, she simply said this:

“Dad!”

When I pressed my 12 year old daughter some more, she fired back with this:

“Dad, can I just relax before school?”

To which I responded in my best Apu Nahasapeemapetilon voice:

“To which Dad are you talking about? Who is this Dad you’re always talking about. I am simply your driver who can fill a Squishee faster than any human alive.”

I sort of feel like these guys bombing on stage:

Now, I know that’s not Comedy Central material. But I try my best to just be goofy and lighten the mood before a day of school.

Maybe its my threats of pulling up to the school and doing my rendition of “Sex Machine” by James Brown that gets them nervous.

Besides actually thinking I am very funny (at least to an 8 and 12 year old), I do think my kids will look back at these moments with a smile. After they’ve left the comfort of home and start living their pre-adult or adult lives, they’ll tell stories and remember fondly the jackass driving them to school each morning.

I also like to think they go into class with a bigger smile on their face than had I not done it.

The best thing for me, and perhaps most encouraging, is that I still have two younger kids who won’t start school for a few years. I’ll get to do this for at least another 16 years. That’s a lot of time to refine my act and get really good!

I AM the comedian in the front seat and my engagement never ends. Thank you. Thankyouverymuch.