iPad Review
After taking the iPad to work and using it for just a bit, here are my thoughts.
1. It is early on in the development of the iPad. There will be a lot more applications soon that will make the iPad even more useful.
2. I love the iPad. It is very useful for what I wanted. Just for information, I wanted a “newspaper” replacement and something for the kids to post to Facebook. It does these things well.
3. Taking notes is surprising better than expected. Even without an external keyboard, notes are good.
4. For students to create, it’s not quite there yet. We are not a “cloud” based school at all yet. There doesn’t seem to be a way to let students save documents to their “I” drive. We also use Moodle. Moodle uses a non standard text editor. That renders some things unusable. This should be fixed with Moodle 2.0 in July.
5. The iPad is incredibly fast.
6. Management is another issue. I’m not clear yet how easy these would be to manage for the classroom. Generally, the iPad is associated with one iTunes account. I don’t know how this works with a classroom set.
All in all, I’m hopeful. I won’t be buying a bunch for my school yet, but the future looks bright.