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..........