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I’ve kind of put off this final post in the iPad series because, hey, Edcamp happens. More on that later.

It was in conversation at Edcamp that I did finally put all of the pieces together of my conclusions during a lunch conversation.

For those who keep asking, is the iPad a perfect device for an implementation in the classroom? Of course not. But no device is. As I said in the previous post, every device is going to have its own positives and negatives.

To get this out of the way, yes, the iPad has many negatives. Many websites and resources we use do still require flash. If you’re a master touch typist, the onscreen keyboard is not an ideal solution. While there are substitutions for common pieces of software like Microsoft Office, substitutions aren’t the same as having the actual product everybody else is using. If you’ve moved onto Google Docs, it doesn’t work that well on the iPad yet.

This is a formidable list of negatives to have to throw down against.

That being said, while the iPad is not the nonexistent perfect device for use in the classroom, it is in fact a very good device for use in the classroom. Here are my top reasons why:

• Battery life – During the trial, and iPad could go through two days of classroom use before needing to be recharged. Not having to constantly worry about the state of battery life on a device for your classroom frees you up to worry about other things.
• Device management – I can install and update software on devices without having to go through the IT department. If I find a good, free app in the app store, I can have it loaded onto devices pretty easily. The school can load devices with content and then still allow students to sign in with their own iTunes account to load their own stuff on it as well. My district is also investing in some pretty hardcore remote management capabilities for the iPads.
• Instant On – When every minute in a classroom counts, not having to waste several minutes getting computers booted up and logged in at the beginning and turned off at the end can pay off in large dividends over the course of a year. The smart cover on the iPad 2 has improved this even further.
• Increasingly powerful creation tools – Camera + iMovie = all in one device for making HD movies. Students can easily make their own cartoons, create pieces of artwork that look better than what they’d do on a computer, record audio, make and record music, design comic strips, add pictures and audio to stories they’ve written, and more. I’m pretty tired of the only consuming not creating strawman that people keep trying to bring up.
• Ease of use – this is the big one, and I partly addressed this in the last post. In comparison to a typical computer, it takes about two minutes to show people the basic things they need to know in order to use the device. The finger is a natural device for people to use, and removes a layer of abstraction that you get with the mouse.

I’ve seen the youngest students in the school use the device purposefully and powerfully within minutes of being handed an iPad, and I’ve had some of my least tech-savvy teachers take an iPad home for one evening and come back with a bunch of great ideas for use in their classrooms. This is a device that both teachers and students understand quickly and want to use.

My job as a technology specialist is partly about teaching the kids how to use a variety of technology tools, which I can do with almost any device given the opportunity. The other piece of my job is a constant guerilla campaign to get teachers to think about ways they can use technology in their classrooms and make it meaningful for the students in order to meet their learning goals. We have some netbooks and flip cameras and digital cameras and a few other things, but those get limited use, really. The iPad is the first thing I’ve told people about this year that I had more people want to use than I had time to get it to them. Teachers that seem hesitant about using technology are willing to try it!  At the same time, the teachers who are already gung-ho about trying out new technology love the iPad more than any other thing I’ve shown them this year. In my quest to get more teachers using technology in the classroom, the iPad right now is the best ally that I have.

Is it perfect? No. But the perfect is all too often the enemy of the good. For me and my school, the iPad is very good indeed.

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I asked the teachers who did a full day with the iPads to fill out a survey. The results are pretty encouraging.

On the personal side, they all rated my technology instruction throughout the day to be excellent, which, I’ll admit, feels awesome. I can’t completely trust the results since they know that I know who’s taking it, but I figure if I keep telling people to let me know when I screw up, sooner or later somebody will.

The more useful data for me really comes from questions about engagement, activities, and overall feelings about the iPad, and potential future use. So here’s a bunch of graphs! In all graphs, 1 is poor, and 5 is excellent

Quality of engagement:

I’ll freely admit there’s some shiny-new bias in here. But the kids were overall super-engaged throughout the day, including students who otherwise frequently struggle in our pretty traditional classrooms.

Quality of activities:

I sat with each teacher for 20-30 minutes to plan the major bones of the iPad day, with each of us taking our individual pieces and coming up with additional materials or instructional plans. Whenever possible, my goal was to make plans that fit in with their general routine or current curriculum whenever possible. I’m glad to see they were overall highly pleased with the results.

Feelings about the iPad:

I’ll be frank that this surprised me. Some of the teachers did bring up the limitations of the iPad (lack of flash, google docs not working flawlessly), but even with that in mind, they see a lot of potential for iPads in the classroom. A big part of the reason why I did this pilot in the first place was to see if it could actually work as an elementary 1:1 device or not.

Future use:

We’re really in a bit of budget flux right now, so it’s honestly possible we won’t end up with many iPads next year. There’s not a lot of money, and if there is enough to get some devices, knowing whether teachers would actually use them is pretty high on the list for spending priorities. By the beginning of next year, every classroom is supposed to be equipped with a teacher laptop, Interactive White Board, and a computer that runs 4 stations. We have a set of 10 netbooks, but they were often sitting unused, which means they probably weren’t the best use of funds.

iPads on the other hand, look like they would be used a lot more frequently.

In a comment on a previous post, Jim Gates, a man I greatly admire, expressed a lot of doubt about the use of iPads for schools. I’ve seen him more than once on Twitter and now in my comments talk about how people are buying an interface.

I agree with him, but disagree with his conclusion that this is a negative thing. When it comes to using computers, interface isn’t just the only thing, it’s everything. I had the chance a couple of months ago to play with a competitor tablet that a company was trying to sell our district on, and the interface was terrible. Easy tasks felt complex, whereas on the iPad or iPhone, it’s frequently the opposite.

There are legitimate questions to be asked in regards to whether the iPad is a robust enough platform for everyday use in a classroom. Any device is going to have its positive aspects and negative aspects. The iPad is still so new that we’re trying to get a real feel for those tradeoffs, and different people are going to come to different conclusions about whether or not those tradeoffs are worth it.

I take my role of Technology Integration Specialist as a unique opportunity to expose teachers and students to more progressive ways of operating their classrooms. For many teachers, the very concept of students having constant access to a device that provides them full access to the world’s knowledge is a daunting idea. If the teachers and students are more comfortable with this new interface, then I’m willing to work around the rough edges of using this new device to help them see the potential of networked learning.

For the most part, 1:1 computing isn’t really on the radar of teachers in my building. Which is why this last graph is honestly so gratifying:

In just one day of teaching in a 1:1 environment, three out of the five teachers want a device for every student in the school. While I know for sure that one of them would have said that before the trial, I’m pleasantly surprised to gain some additional people who think that 1:1 computing is a god idea, no matter the device.

In my next and last post in this series, I’ll do my best to sum up my own feelings on the iPad and wrestle with how it does and does not fit into where my school is and where I think it’s going.

Part 1.

Warning in advance: This is the kind of boring, technical post. If you’re looking for apps and activities, come back in another post.

Back in November or so, my awesome district IT guys dropped off a couple of iPads for my school. Gifts from the district.

It was pretty awesome.

I know that in some buildings, it seemed like those devices went to administrators or other tech people. Fortunately, I’d already had the chance to borrow one for a few months earlier in the year, so I knew that I could certainly survive without one for the time being.

So my librarian and I got them into the system and started checking them out to teachers. I loaded them up with a bunch of mostly free apps and a couple of paid ones with a little bit of leftover gift card money from our PTO.

When I handed one over, I took about two minutes to show them the basics: turning it on, flipping through pages of apps, and using the home button. The base directive, implied if not explicitly stated, was to explore, discover, and think about how to use it in the classroom. The more common way I probably stated that was, “Play with it, and tell me what you think.”

They told me, and it was pretty much all positive. I encouraged them to not just play with it themselves, but to have the kids try it out, too. One of the teachers in my school has fourth graders, so she twisted their arms to play with it. Their feedback was encouraging and valuable.

The inevitable conclusion of teachers using these and bringing them into their classrooms was clear: we needed to try out a class set. Fortunately, I knew somebody who had one.

The Media Specialist at the Middle School in my district, Dennis Villano, is not only a great guy with a wealth of knowledge, he also bought 20 iPads or so with some of his budget. After asking, he was kind enough to let me pick a couple of weeks to borrow them.

I chose the end of March for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was immediately following the end of the marking period, so teachers wouldn’t be freaking out about grades. Secondly, while some classes would be dealing with standardized tests, I knew I could work around it, and that it might disrupt the normal schedule in beneficial ways.

Once I had the date, I needed a plan for how to get these out into the classrooms.

Some math: 22 classrooms divided by 9* days = just under 2 and a half classrooms per day. In my mind, while spreading the wealth equally, this system would do a disservice to actually trying to put the iPads through their paces. Every class would be more or less the same: “Hey kids, here are some iPads! Here’s how to use them! Let’s check out some apps quickly! Gotta go, kthxbai!”

In my mind, that would have been a waste of two weeks. So I came up with an alternate plan. For six of the days, I would spend a full day in one classroom, one at each grade level K-5. For the remaining three days, I’d try to get around to as many classrooms as possible. A few weeks before they arrived, I threw it out to everybody in an e-mail, asking for people who’d like to try them out for the day.

In every grade, I had one teacher step up almost immediately for the full day. Once those were full, I had a harder time immediately filling the remaining three days, although they did end up all booked in the end. In every grade, I got to at least two out of the three or four classes. In the end I was fortunate enough to not have to turn anybody away who requested to have them for at least a little while.

In my next and post in the series, I’ll do a breakdown of the activities we tried and the apps we used.

*As a warning, it takes a really long time to set up a bunch of iPads when you want them all to look and feel the same from positioning of apps. I created a base template iPad from oe of my own and backed it up. I then had to restore each iPad from that backup. When loading ~4Gb of apps, this takes about 25 minutes per iPad. It made for a really long first day with the iPads, and not having them get into the classroom. Luckily, I planned for this from the start.

Part 3.

On the positive side, I already wrote most of this post two years ago. All I need to do is edit it a bit for a new decade and state. Edits in italics.

Word’s breaking out on Twitter that Attorney General Martha Coakley has recently been saying some ignorant things.

Needless to say, I have a problem with this.  First, I will let it be known that my school district has a very progressive view on the use of cell phones in school. At the high school, students are allowed to openly carry cell phones and teachers are encouraged to use them in class. I was just talking to a high school teacher who referred to PollEverywhere as “the best thing ever.” That rule is a decision made on the local level, based on the needs and wishes of the building administrators and the school board.  I have no doubt that the rules could change over time or have some added flexibility for other new tools.  We already provide some of that, as students are now at least free to have their phones and use them after school as needed.  Martha Coakley’s proposed changes to the law would take that flexibility away from us.  According to this proposal, with few notable emergency exceptions, students would not be allowed to ever bring a phone to school for any reason whatsoever.

Five years ago, I wouldn’t have thought this a big deal, but to take away the option of teachers allowing cell phone use in their classrooms to me now seems especially ludicrous.  Right now we are experiencing a major shift in computing resources available to students in their pockets, with phones as powerful as a computer from only a few years ago.  People who want to ban these tools really need to check out Cell Phones in Learning.  Honestly, if you think we really want you to take away more teaching options from us, you’re sorely mistaken.

As a starting point to work to stop this proposal, I recommend contacting your state legislator and the Attorney General’s office.

Here’s something to make you happy: