There's no question it's the most comfy, intuitive way to surf the net. Yes, yes, I know, no flash. That is irritating, but it's surprising that after a tiny bite of disappointment when encountering a non-functioning flash object, well, you just surf somewhere else. The web is a big place with lots of shiny things to look at. I'm not a gamer, but I've read that the iPad and it's little sibling the iPod Touch are making big inroads as gaming applications. There's no question that the iPad has gotten more press than any other single product ever. It gets 786 million hits on Google versus 679 million hits for Windows 7.
So what can we do with this in education.
Well, personally, and I'm not an instructor, I'm using it mainly as a PDA (a '90's term, Personal Digital Assistant); staying in touch with email and calendar while on the go. (It's also nice to whip open and have something to read while waiting for Windows 7 to reboot while installing something in a classroom, which I inevitably have to do in the beginning to of the semester.) An objective of mine for the iPad is to not print anything that's been sent to me as an email attachment when going to meetings. (I do still carry a pad of paper to take notes.)
I have a personally purchased one of my own at home which my wife and I refer to as the source of all knowledge. We use to refer to our iPhone that way, but that's become mostly a road tool since we got the iPad, although it's not unusual to have one of us on the phone and one on the pad at the same time.
In order to find out what kind of teaching/learning affect it can have, we used some money available on the happy end of end-of-the-year accounting to purchase five iPads and some software and projector connectors to loan out to faculty for one month and have them report what they made of it. Since payment for apps is tied to an iTunes U account, it took a while to figure out how we could pay for apps, while not leaving a University purchasing card available for our borrowers, but that got worked out and it leaves it possible for borrowers to install free apps (and even pay for apps if they want–they would still be good for installation on another iPad if they acquire one themselves after our loan period, but they'll be wiped from ours before going to the next instructor.) We did include the pretty sweet iWorks suite–Numbers, a spread sheet, Keynote, presentation, and Pages, word processing and layout–and a connector to display it on a classroom projector.
If this sounds like an announcement to solicit participation in our little project, its too late. The announcement hit the Announcements email list, which I have to mention isn't closely monitored or even subscribed to by a significant portion of the population, at 4:00 on last Friday afternoon (Were you at your desk monitoring email at 4:00 on Friday afternoon?) The five available iPads were spoken for in under 5 minutes, and we now have them reserved well into the next semester.
I'm not sure if we can scarf up more money to add to the project and I'm going to wait for the reports of the first wave before I even try for that. I can't wait to see what they're going to come up with. I suppose they could just say they used it to watch YouTube in their office, but I'm hoping they'll come up with some interesting uses that affect teaching and learning.
But it has gotten my imagination going.
About ten years ago we bought a portable computer lab. Ten laptops on a cart with their own wireless access point. Instructors had been complaining that they couldn't get into one of the three teaching computer labs on campus when they needed to, and besides, what they wanted was for small groups to have a computer to work with, mainly to seek resources on the internet to inform discussions. That failed pretty miserably because we could get about an hour and a half use on a battery charge, and it took four hours to charge up, not to mention somebody had to carefully connect each computer to the power supply back at the classroom technology office. (Distribution was limited to two adjoining classroom buildings, but they account for about half of all classes.) This meant only one class could use it each day. Also, since for efficient battery charging, they had to be shut down, which meant they had to be started up in class, taking up a few extra minutes. It's not the first thing you think of, but they also had to be handed out and gathered back up, taking up a few more minutes. If the class didn't get them packed up, one of our staff had to do the cleanup, tricky to do in ten minutes between classes, especially if you have other deliveries scheduled. There was the obvious security issue. Did the instructor count to see if all the laptops were actually put back in the cart? This never actually happened, but there was no control to cover it other than the vigilance of the instructor.
OK, fast forward 10 years and change the laptops to iPads. An iPad can easily get 11 hours of use out of a charge that only takes about an hour, they weigh 30 percent what a laptop does, and they come on instantly, and don't require shut down, and wireless is available everywhere on campus. We could even set them up so they didn't require any log-in to the wireless network.
The security issue is kind of amplified though, thanks to the extreme portability and desirability of the iPad, and– it's not a computer. If you're trying to teach how to use Photoshop or Indesign, it's not going to work. A lot of internet applications don't work on them–for example, I can't edit this blog post on it and the text editor in D2L doesn't work.
However, many internet apps do work–I can post to Facebook and even older discussion boards–and as noted before, it's the greatest way ever to surf for information to inform discussions and fill out reports in small group situations. And there are lots of special purpose free apps that could have instructional value.
If we did this we'd have to find some creative way to solve the security issues, and someone would still have to take class time to hand them out and gather them at the end of class. I'm not going to pursue this idea unless I have a pretty good idea that instructors would like to use them in this manner.
If you substituted iPod touches for iPads, it would be even more portable. You could get 15 of those in a small briefcase. They also cost half as much. Again as noted above, before I bought the iPad, our iPhone was the source of all knowledge and the iPod Touch is pretty much the same device until you want to make a phone call. Would these meet the kind of objectives instructors have in class?
This leads me to the thought, that since small groups are the target users, is it possible that enough students in the average class have smartphones of some kind in their pocket to meet this kind of objective, eliminated our need to make the expenditure and manage their distribution?
I've never had much luck getting comments on this blog, but to quote one of my favorite bloggers: Wise and worldly readers, do you have any ideas how iPads could be applied to teaching and learning?
Posts
2 comments:
Post a Comment