Many of you know that I am not a Mac person. I find their computers to be over priced and I don't particularly enjoy their operating system. However, I will say that Apple has done an amazing job in the world of smart phone and tablet computing.
While I was in Ohio for my friend Kristin Stellabottes wedding I made a pretty big impulse buy at an Apple store while waiting for my friend Josh to get his mac looked at. While I was there I was looking at The New iPad and decided that I wanted one. As I talked it over with Josh I came to the conclusion that I could use the iPad to replace my school computer and use it in a myriad of ways both in and out of the classroom. Turns out I was right. In fact I was more right than I ever could have imagined. With the combination of apps, gmail, a few programs and some good ideas my iPad is my full on teaching computer and can do things in the classroom that, if used in a broad stroke across many schools could make some aspects of teaching easier.
When I bought the iPad i was given a $50.00 gift card for being an educator. I then used that gift card to buy some nice apps.
Here are the ones I use in the classroom and for general work stuff:
1. Pocket Information Pro (a calendar and schedule)
The beautiful thing about PI Pro is that it syncs all of your calendars, and I mean ALL of them. I was able to sync multiple google calendars (including my schools calendar, and the district fine arts calendar) with my personal day to day schedule.
2. Quickoffice (similar to Microsoft office)
They beautiful thing about Quickoffice is integration with dropbox and google drive. There is no doubt that the cloud has changed everything we know about computing. If you haven't figured this out yet you should look into it. Basically I can type a document anywhere on any computer in the world (as long as it has access to the internet) and I can then access it anywhere or share it with anyone. This works really well with the iPad because I can type a lesson or note at home and access it on my iPad and download it for later. Really Quickoffice isn't revolutionary but it does the job of being a word processor really well. The biggest down side to Quickoffice is that absence of a spell checker. If you know me at all you know I NEED spell check or writing isn't going to be a good time. That leads us to our next app.
3. Pages
Pages is Apples answer to Microsoft Office. Though it has some limitations because of it is an apple product. It actually is a very nice app on the iPad. It has spell check (which is big for me), but more vainly it looks great. It really looks very nice and has all the functionality that you would expect from a desktop word processor. The downside is that there is little to no integration with the cloud. I am a pretty heavy user of the cloud (google drive and dropbox) so it was a little disappointing that it doesn't have this function. However the app allows you to e-mail documents (I recommend e-mailing in .doc, because pages is very unfriendly to PC) In fact I wrote most of this blog in Pages. Finally if you are going to be doing a lot of word processing on your iPad I recommend getting an bluetooth keyboard. There are many out there and I am sure they all work well. I bought this one because it was cheap but not too cheap.
4. Print n Share:
Print n Share was the most difficult app to figure out, but once I understood it, it became one of my most precious apps. Print n Share allows me to print my documents from my iPad without jail-breaking it. It isn't perfect but it gets the job done. It took some serious trial and error, but in the end I got it to print to multiple copiers and printers in my school building.
5. Spotify:
If you don't have Spotify you need to look into it. For me it is a great app because I am a music teacher. What Spotify allows you to do is stream almost any song you can think of to your iPad. Here's where it gets cool. Obviously the speakers on the iPad are small and tethering it to external speakers defeats the purpose of the iPad being a tablet. But with a little thought and a program called XBMCbuntu we can fix that problem. XBMCbuntu is a media player/operating system. In fact it is really small and demands little of your computer. If you install it onto a thumb drive you can boot into it instead of Windows or Mac. Once it is on you can set it up to receive airplay from the iPad. This allows you to play music from your iPad on your computer wirelessly and instantly. Now where ever I am in the room I can turn music on and off turn the volume up and down as I please with out the confines of wires.
One of the biggest things that has changed most all of what I do in the class room comes from Google Apps. If you have a gmail account you have access to Google Apps. One of it greatest assets is Google Drive. A cloud service that works in tandem with their docs app so you can type anything save it and access it anywhere. However it makes more than documents you can also create forms. A form is like an online survey. So I made an online survey that only the teachers in our school can access to record students ill behavior. This will become a great asset to our administration when a student comes to the office. Now all they have to do is open up the spreadsheet associated with the form and there is a list of everything that child has done in all his classes etc. The integration of this onto the iPad has made this in class documentation process stupidly easy. Even our playground aids have it on their iPhones and smart phones so when there is an incident on the playground they can record it and send the child to the office and the administration will know what happened as soon as they enter it. This couldn't be easier.
Here is a template of the form. Feel free to play with it:
Here is the spreadsheet it goes to (you might have to refresh the page):
To make a long and detailed story short I have completely replace my desktop computer with an iPad for my class room and I love it. It does everything a normal computer does with the ease of being light and mobile around the class.
