OK, I'm going to try again. Hopefully I will keep the blog a bit more up to date this academic year!

During the summer I had several developments of significance. The first is that I have just completed the transition to all Apple computing products. As I write (on a new iMac) my windows PC is having the hard drive scrubbed and it will be recycled for a postgrad student. The second is that we are buying another 20 or so iPads to add to the ones I already have. This will primarily (but not exclusively) be used in the dissection room. I am presently finalizing the apps we will load on these and thinking through how best we might use them in a meaningful and engaging way.

I am dreading the management issues. Because Apple has chosen not to operate a volume licensing programme in Ireland, I can't use Apple Configurator so each iPad will have to be manually managed. If anyone out there knows of a better way than individual device management please let me know.

The case for a case

As you might expect when it is intended to use iPads in an environment such as a dissection room, protecting them becomes a particular issue. Anticipating the worst we went ahead and purchased GumDrop cases. These are robust three-part cases. One part covers the back of the iPad, the second part, a translucent screen cover, snaps on top of the first, and the third part is a thick rubber bumper that surrounds the back and sides of the case. First the good - the cases are robust and work really well. The bumper is easy to grip even with slippery latex gloves, and the case gives excellent protection against casual drops and bumps. Now the bad - ugly, ugly, ugly. You no longer look like you are using a slick, well-designed modern tablet. Secondly, the fit between the back of the case and the screen protector is so good that opening the case can be difficult and might cost you a fingernail! And finally, (and the deal breaker for me) was the length of time it took to wash the cases and dry them, and especially to dry the screen protector so that it didn't have annoying streaks all over it.
We switched to a low-tech but effective method which I had been using with my own iPad. When the iPads are removed from their storage case, the students wrap the iPad they are using in good quality clingfilm/plastic wrap (we use stuff from Western Plastics). When done, the clingfilm is just discarded. Every couple of days (or as needed) the iPads are wiped with some alcohol free cleansing wipes. So far this has worked well for us and we haven't had any drops or damaging accidents. We also require students bringing their own tablets into the lab to use this method.
The quality of the film/wrap IS important, and the bargain stuff doesn't really work. The film/wrap must have an excellent degree of 'clingability' and 'stretch' (I bet there are official measurements for these parameters!) so that one or at most two layers can be tightly wound onto the iPad. We have found that cheap film doesn't cling and so just slides off.
Of course we wouldn't recommend this method for all uses/circumstances but it fits our needs perfectly for now. At some point in the near future we will buy and test the newly released Seal Shields iPad2 cases. Apparently these are so slim so as to be almost invisible and allow complete immersion of the iPad in water, as well as being impregnated with an anti-bacterial coating. If they work as advertised these could gain wide acceptance is some clinical settings where sterile practice is paramount (actually sterile practice should be paramount in ALL clinical settings when you think of it!), as well as in settings such as ours where there is a need to protect the devices from chemical splashes and spills etc.

OK, now it really is time to start updating regularly. The iPad trial is underway. We have four academic staff members and two students involved as principals in the trial. Two of the staff members and one of the students did not own an ipad at the trial commencement and were given an iPad in order to participate. We will be hearing from them shortly in regard to their initial experiences and impressions of the iPad2.

We have 12 iPads for student use during the trial. Between 8 and 12 of these are available to use in a structured way during lab sessions, tutorials, clinical skills sessions and lectures. Individual staff members have their own projects to evaluate whether the iPad is a useful and constructive tool, but in all cases we are looking at whether a set of medical school owned (as opposed to invidually owned) iPads are a useful tools and a worthwhile investment. We will report on each of these projects and the apps they use on an individual basis as the trial proceeds.

I am administering the trial and responsible for the initial setup of all the equipment, and working out the details of syncing, provisioning and the other logistical elements in running the trial. The iPad(2)s were purchased prior to the release of iOS 5.0 so we had to buy hardware to enable simultaneous syncing and charging. I have yet to get the syncing to work! So I have been manually syncing each of the 12 as needed.

Early student response and feedback from using the iPads in the dissection room has been good, but as yet it is too early to tell if this is a response to the novelty value or the educational value. A quick check on each of the iPads after their use shows that every app on the device had been started, even though only a couple were relevant to the work at hand. Whether this represented simple curiosity or whether it reflects the iPads being used as a distraction when students should be dissecting or working with specimens remains to be seen. More anon.

iPad 2

I am writing this post on a newly acquired iPad2, one of 16 I have acquired for a project I referred to previously. It's white, which I thought I would hate but actually I rather like it... dare I say even prefer it to the black! Interestingly while the white ones seem to be readily available from Apple in Ireland, the black are now on backorder for the last three weeks.
I ordered a mix of colours so I can compare how 'dirty' the white appears compared to the black in a multi-user environment. This might be important if they are going to be used in a clinical setting. Does one want to see 'dirt' on the casing of a white iPad, or have it concealed on a black casing? Under normal usage will the white iPad appear dirtier than the black?
In one of the principal settings they will be used on my project (the anatomy dissection room) the colour won't actually matter because I will be using iPads in protective cases. The cases are white so as to highlight dirt and encourage the students to clean the cases regularly. More on the cases in a later post.
The iPad I'm currently using has a grey 'smart' cover. Haven't had it long enough to comment on but I'll post on this shortly also.

Back again

That was some hiatus! But I'm back blogging on the topic again for reasons that will become clear later.

Since my last post we have seen the release of the iPad2 which seems to be selling particularly well. I expect it will do even better with the release of iOS 5 (whenever) and the untethering from having to sync to a PC. However I can't comment on a comparison between it and its older sister as I haven't really had a chance to try one.

That's going to change very soon however, as I have received funding to run an iPad pilot with some colleagues during the coming academic year( thank you School of Medicine at NUI, Galway!). The pilot will involve medical students and staff using iPads in a variety of basic sciences and clinical settings, with a view to evaluating if the devices have a place in medical education. Once the pilot is up and running (in a few weeks) I will begin regular posting as we evaluate the device, the apps we will use and the student and staff experience. The participating staff have varying experience of the iPad, from none to lots and their attitude will very much shape the success (or otherwise) of the pilot. I intend to grapple them into guest posting to this blog as part of the evaluation.

Outside of medical education, I'm also going to be collaborating with my wife, who has received funding to pilot iPads in teaching anatomy to Sports and Exercise Physiology students at AIT. We already have some interesting (well I think so!) ideas as to what we might do and I'll blog on these in the future.

So, commencing in a couple of weeks, check here regularly if you are interested in the iPad as an educational tool for use in third level environments, and if you have opinions, thoughts or experiences of your own on this issue please contribute.

Reading and Markup

Screenshot of a marked up pdf in iAnnotate

One thing I have found the iPad really useful for is as an eReader. I use it (and my iPhone) for reading books for both pleasure and work. The iPad is particularly useful for reading the many pdf copies of journal articles I scan/read in a week. I haven't actually printed a journal article since I got the iPad!
Now if  you are one of those people that highlights and marks up pdf's as you read them (either in wetware or software), the iOS eReader will disappoint you - you can't highlight or mark up pdf's within the app. Fortunately for you there are a few good apps that address just this issue. I use one of the the best ranked, called iAnnotate PDF. Using this app you can manage the pdf collections on your device, and within a pdf you can highlight, add notes and mark up the text in a whole variety of ways. Best of all, you can email/export the marked up pdf so that your mark up can be read in any pdf reader, or indeed send it in a format that allows you to edit your markup assuming you have a compatible reader (Acrobat Pro for example). If, like many academics you distribute lecture notes and Powerpoint presentations as pdf documents, your students will find iAnnotate pdf really useful. If any students out there are using iAnnotate to take lecture notes on top of pre-distributed pdf files, I would be very interested to hear of your experiences and would gladly give you space for a guest post.

Some pages from my notes, formatted as ePUB and displayed in the iBook Reader

Personally I don't mark up pdf's that much (at least not up until now), so I am happy with the eReader that comes on the iPad. Where I really like the eReader is for viewing books formatted using the ePUB open format. Interacting with the book (turning pages, placing a bookmark) is really simple and natural. You can highlight passages in the book, add text notes, search words and phrases etc. The tool set is not as rich as iAnnotate, but I prefer the really simple, clean, limited mark up tools. The tools only work with eBooks formatted as ePUB, not with pdf which is actually quite a pity. I was delighted to find that I can export files from Pages (Mac OS X version) as an ePUB file and then transfer to the iPad/iPhone. A couple of major advantages of the ePUB format are that the document resizes and repaginates to suit the device and orientation in which it is being viewed, and the reader can change the font size to suit and the document repaginates automatically. I took some lecture notes of mine that contained illustrations, opened them in Pages (OS X) then exported as ePUB and transferred to the iPad/iPhone. You can see from the screenshot above how they appear. Very professional, even though I say so myself (and with essentially no effort on my part). In the next couple of months I will be expanding this into a demo project and I will post progress reports here as appropriate.

iPad 2

Thinner, lighter, whiter. Do I need the iPad2?

The answer of course is yes! But not for the reasons listed above. Nor is it for the dual core processor, or even the new smart cover (even though I do want a smart cover). No, the reason to choose iPad 2 is for the camera(s) and Facetime.
The camera allows the iPad to be used as a data gathering device. This could be shots of a whiteboard, a page of a textbook, a photo of something from the lab, a short video clip etc. The fact that Apple are now making  iPad versions of iMovie and Garage Band suggests this is something they see the iPad as useful for too. And then there's Facetime. On a WiFi networked campus, Facetime will enable real collaboration among faculty/students at different physical locations - forget complicated video conferencing setups.
Of course this will bring problems too - bandwidth for one, if enough people are using Facetime simultaneously. And within a medical teaching environment there are all kinds of privacy issues around the use of cameras. If the iPads belong to the institution it's not so bad because the cameras can be locked down if necessary, but that isn't possible if the iPad is student owned.
Still I am looking forward to trying one and will post a review once I have had a chance to try one out.