Do students need iPads?

I've been giving this some thought of late. I've also asked for some opinion from students on the matter. If you ask if students want iPads the answer is a resounding yes. If you ask if they need iPads the answer (in part) depends on who is going to buy the devices. If  iPads are provided to students at no cost then of course they need them. But if students are required to purchase iPads themselves, the necessity for an iPad comes under question. Why is this?

I think it comes down to the fact that no matter how you spin it, the iPad is not a standalone device. You must have a computer with which to sync, and realistically that computer must be yours, not one you simply have access to. If we take the cost of an iPad at €500, and a decent netbook at €500, that's €1000 for computer/connectivity. You're in Mac Air territory now, so if you have €1000 why not buy one device that gives you the best of all world's and is part of the Apple ecosystem? If you need greater portability well, that's your phone or your iTouch and they are part of a separate budget from your 'University required' one.

There's logic to the above, very compelling actually now that I reread it. Maybe I should just shut this blog, and start one on HTML 5.0 in University education. Either that or I need to delve a little deeper into what an iPad might do that other options cannot. I don't actually know what the outcome of this delving will be, but whatever it is I'll post it here.

I'll finish with following observation. Sometimes watching people tells you a lot more than listening to what they say. At the recent Apple tech series I attended, all of the Apple people used Mac Books to present and those not presenting were 'working' on Mac Books (email, surfing, etc). Only once in 6 hours did I see an Apple person actually pick up and use an iPad for something other than demonstration purposes. What might that mean?

More on File sharing

Dropbox will help me get files onto my iPad when I am not in a position to sync, but what about going the opposite direction? Say I work on a file on the iPad on the way to work, then arrive and want to access or use the file on my office PC (assuming I don't sync my iPad with my work PC). Unfortunately I can't save my work to Dropbox from the iPad (except pictures). Fortunately there is a way to transfer iWork files off the iPad without syncing (at least for now).
iWork applications for the iPad (Keynote, Pages, Numbers) have the option to export files to iWork.com, a public beta of an Apple cloud service, presently free. To use the service, save a file to iWork and log in using your AppleID and password. You will be sent a confirmation email. Open it and click to verify your email address then resend your file to iWork (you only need to do this the first time you activate iWork.com beta). Now log on to iWork.com using your browser on your PC. You can download the file onto your PC either as a pdf or in Office format (if you're using a Mac you can download and edit in iWork format) or you can view the file and comment on it directly in the browser.

The legalese associated with the iWork beta indicates the service is free for now but may require a fee in the future.

This seems like a lot of work to move files around and indeed it is, even taking into account the fact that you are also switching between different OS. If all of your devices are Apple then you need only use iWork because you can open and edit files in iWork on your desktop/laptop Mac, and export back to iWork. For those of us still using multiple devices with differing OS, this is the best (free) way I have found to deal with the problem. I am certain that within 12 months cloud services will make this problem go away, but I don't know if the solution will be free.
Just remember that you can set your iPad up to sync with multiple computers, and as long as you control what is synced and when, and as long as you have the cables at each of the computers with which you sync (or carry the cable with your iPad), then you need not worry about the convoluted method outlined above.

Dropbox

One thing people find annoying about the iPad is the necessity to sync the device to transfer files onto it, because it doesn't have a USB port. Syncing with multiple computers is also a pain, so the tendency is to pick one computer with which to sync (work or home). So how do you transfer files onto or off the device if you are not at the computer with which you normally sync?

The simple workaround is to email the file to yourself, then open the email on the iPad or computer you wish to transfer the file to. This becomes difficult if the file you are trying to transfer is large. You could open a Mobile Me account, but you will have to pay a subscription fee. You could configure a server running WebDAV but that sounds like far too much work! Or you can open a Dropbox account.

A Dropbox account is storage space in the cloud and files stored in Dropbox are accessible anywhere via the web. You download a small program onto your desktop machine, and it configures your dropbox account as a virtual drive. Any files stored in that virtual drive are accessible anywhere. What's more there are iPad/iPhone apps for Dropbox too, so you can access the contents of your Dropbox account directly on the iPad. Dropbox is free for a 2GB allowance, and subscription thereafter. A really useful feature is that you can configure Dropbox folders as public so anyone can see the contents. So say you wanted to share files with your students on their desk/lap tops or iPads/phones. All that is necessary is to configure a public folder and from there they can download files directly onto their own device. This really does extend the utility of the iPad and I strongly recommend using Dropbox (or any of the methods listed). And no, I have no relationship with dropbox other than as a user!

Flipboard

Someone without an iPad asked me to post some pictures of what Flipboard looks like, and how it displays the RSS feed from the twitter account I am using to push content. Delighted to oblige!

To the left is a Flipboard Contents (or home) screen. You can have up to three of these, and each can contain up to 9 tiles as shown here. Each of the tiles represents a feed to which I subscribe, including as you can see here feeds from Nature and New Scientist. These tiles update each time you open Flipboard, reflecting changes in the underlying content (if changes have occurred), so that although the same tiles appear on each contents page, the image on each tile updates. Tapping a tile opens the feed or account to which you are subscribing. You can see one of my own feeds in the tile on the lower left.

Here's what my Histology_AN505 feed looks like when I tap on its tile on the contents page. It shows three 'articles' in a magazine or newspaper like layout. The 'articles' are actually blog posts and the images are drawn from these posts also.Each time I update the blog it sends an RSS feed to a twitter account indicating that a new article has been added. Flipboard examines the twitter feed and 'scrapes' the content the twitter feed points to, including any images included in the blog post. Then Flipboard magically decides how to lay the page out to look nice. I think it does so very well most of the time.
The entire blog post does not appear in this view in Flipboard, just the first couple of hundred words or wherever you have specified the jump break tobe. To see the full article you need to tap on the summary. The summary expands and above it you see a link to the original content (see image below). Below you see the content in a kind of Flipboard browser that allows you to read the full article within Flipboard (see image below). Links, video etc in the blog post work in this FlipBoard browser window.

I think it looks good and I'm certainly pleased with it. Hope you like it as much as I do!

Student iPads continued

I attended an Apple Tech Series thing today about deploying iPads in educational environments. Very interesting and very informative I must say. It dealt with content production, delivery and with device management and deployment. Some of it went way over my head (some management and deployment stuff), but other stuff was clear and easily understood. Apple have a series of strategies for getting round the whole 'no USB port' controversy about iPads and the attendant issues about getting content onto devices. In a nutshell, with the correct setup you can drag and drop an item on your desktop into a folder, and that item appears instantaneously on the users iPad. Now of course it won't be quite as simple as the demo today, and I'll probably have to buy a giant overspecced iMac (boo hoo!) but nonetheless it looked slick and easy to use once set up. They also demo'ed (kind of) a WebDAV way of doing this that enables content produced on the iPad to be shared using the inbuilt protocols in some iPad apps - also very slick if it works as well in the real world as it does in a closed network demo.
Overall I was impressed. Apple have gone to some lengths to make iPads actually usable in an education environment, although not quite as usable as you might expect. The fact remains that the iPad is still essentially a single user/single owner device primarily designed to enable the owner to consume content via iTunes. The device works out of the box....getting the content you want onto multiple devices in an efficient manner will require work on your part (and support staff too probably). But that extra work may well be worth it for the educational advantage you might achieve.
It's less than a year since the iPad appeared so I'm interested in whether anyone has any real experience of medium to large scale deployment. Apparently so and there's even a Webinar next week on the topic. See
here for details. I'll be viewing for sure.

More to follow..........

student iPads

We're having some conversations concerning whether or not we should trial iPads for students. Lots of interesting issues come up. If we do trial some sort of tablet will it be just the iPad or will we trial Android devices as well/instead? What are the advantages of a tablet over a netbook/laptop (if any)? Are there things a tablet can do that can't be done by other devices? Would an iTouch work just as well as an iPad for what we might possibly have in mind for students?

These are difficult questions to answer, not least because we're not students. In general if you approach students and ask them if they would like to trial an iPad the answer is a resoundingYES. iPads are cool. But do we really want students tweeting in lectures, or surfing the web or watching films on devices we have provided them with? Or are we being unfair to students, who by and large are interested in learning and attend lectures because they find them valuable rather than because they have to?

The really hard question to answer is what do we want students to use an iPad for? iPads are devices for consuming content, which is largely provided through iTunes. Can we serve educational content on the device in a way that enhances the experience of education?

I am doing a trial of serving educational content through FlipBoard, a very popular (and free) app that brings together facebook and twitter feeds with other RSS feeds and serves them in a magazine style layout. It's a very polished and sexy app and definitely takes advantage of many of the iPad's features. I am posting content for a distance education course to a another blog I have (histologyireland.blogspot.com), and serving an RSS feed from that blog to twitter. I then connect Flipboard to the twitter account, and flipboard presents the scraped content in a nice attractive format (screenshot below).

How the Twitter feed appears in FlipBoard

Tapping on an article opens the scraped content the complete article appears in a browser window below. Links, multimedia content etc in the blog post work in the browser window so everything on the original blog can be accessed from within FlipBoard.

The scraped article with original in browser window below

It works really well and looks really nice. FlipBoard partners with some newspapers and magazines to serve nicely laid out magazine style articles this way, and apparently they will be making the software to lay out content in magazine style available for free (skipping the need to post content to a blog). 

Does presenting content in a more engaging way improve it's educational value? Does serving content on a phased regular basis improve the sense of engagement compared to providing a single big pdf at the start of a course? Serving content this way will obviously pace learning but is it too slow and inefficient for the quick learner? I'd love to know the answers to these questions but for now only one student on the course has an iPad and I don't even know if they are using FlipBoard!