I have watched my wife recharge and load software on piles of iPad in my living room. I know there are practical issues those enamored of the iPad as potential learning tool have not considered (e.g., how do put software on the device, but prevent others from doing the same).
Howard Chan has put more effort into identifying the multiple issues than I so here is the list from the Socratech blog.
I think the iPad is a great device for exploring my RSS feeds. However, quickly moving through the feeds is not the end of my personal process. What I want to do is to find the resources I think will be valuable in the future and then store links to these resources, potentially with annotations, in an organized way. Diigo is my service of preference for storing, organizing, annotating, tagging, etc. these resources.
The challenge I have been facing is that none of the RSS readers I have tried offer a way to submit a resource to Diigo.
So, Reeder, for example, is a great tool. It offers many ways to share content (see above), but the many options do not include Diigo. Maybe there is a technical reason for this. Perhaps certain companies do not cooperate. I don’t know.
Diigo has finally introduced an app for the iPad. An iPhone app was available before, but the newer app was developed specifically for the iPad. The app itself is not that important because I am more interested in getting content into Diigo than being able to use Diigo itself on the iPad. The Diigo app comes with a snippet of javascript that can be added as a bookmarklet into Safari. Tap the button and the Diigo options appear.
I am not claiming this has worked well for me. I cannot get the “highlight” function to work consistently. I can seem to save bookmarks consistently.
Now, I have a tedious, but I guess workable method for adding links to Diigo on the iPad. I can identify resources in a reader, send the link to Safari, and save the bookmark to Diigo. I hope this gets better, but at least for now it kind of works.
I recently wrote a post indicating that much online content was interesting but is not “deep” enough to encourage the understanding of a topic. This is not to say there are not exceptions and you may be lucky enough to find a thorough analysis in an area of interest.
The MIT OCW (open courseware project) offers such resources and has recently released an iPad app (actually they describe it as an iPhone app) that offers access to some of these resources and offers a “social” experience in addition to the video content (hackeducation review). I am not personally that interested in the social component, but the content is useful IF I locate something of interest – I tend to focus on certain things. I found a course on “Photography as inquiry” that I have been viewing. You may find something related to your interests.
Search the app store for MIT OpenCourseWare.
One of the comments Steve Dembo made in his FETC iPad presentation was that one of great benefits of the iPad was the battery life. Easy to overlook something like this.
I started thinking about the benefits of a device that you can charge once and use throughout the school day or in my case a day at the conference. The conference was probably the first time I had used my iPad under what I would call “real world conditions”; 6 hours or so of continuous use much of it with Internet access. I was not even close to exhausting the battery.
Now, if you are used to taking your laptop to a conference, you soon find yourself looking for a place to plug in. Perhaps you station yourself at the back of the room during a presentation or sit on the floor in a hallway having located a plugin.
We need a phrase to describe these people now that I am no longer one of their number. Plugin challenged. Temporarily attached. Mobile to a point.
We have been fans of using technology in the field for many years. Digital probes allow students to collect data to test hypotheses in much the same way scientists would. The iPad has always seemed a natural for this setting and the adapter allowing a camera to be connected seemed to indicate that other inputs would soon appear.
Pasco has an interface allowing the company’s probes to work with the iPad or iPad touch. Contrary to our expectations the interface connects via bluetooth.
Speak Up data were presented at today’s FETC research session. Parents responded to survey and 54% claimed they would be willing to purchase smart phone data plan for students. Representative seemed pleased. I think the data point is realistic, but would argue this is a long way from providing acceptable access. Not all parents will be capable. What would be tipping point allowing something like the e-rate to cover the rest?
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