You gotta love the title, especially when your 7th grade teenage daughter and her friend write it. Today I asked the girls three questions about using iPads in school. They shared what they thought was the upside and the downside of using iPads along with some advice for new students in an iPad program based on their experience over the past year. It's nice they felt comfortable sharing how they felt about this program. Enjoy the following audio.
A quick summary of the audio clips from one student's perspective:
Upside
- Internet Access
- Notability lets you draw pictures
- Typing quickly with a Bluetooth enabled attached keyboard
Downside
-Distraction for others caused distractions
-Got us behind when it malfunctioned
-We had to print out our work
Advice
-Charge it
-Name your files
A quick summary of the audio clips from the other student's perspective:
1. Name three things you liked about using the iPad.
- I preferred the ease of CBB (Creative Book Builder app) as opposed to hard copy projects, because it was much easier to change things.
- Communication in group projects was also much easier, as sending a presentation, like Powerpoint, could be changed by your group members and sent back to the regional owner with their changes.
- The Internet was more readily accessible to me, even if our home computer was occupied.
- The environment; we used less paper.
2. Name three negatives.
- Most of the things on the iPad can or could have easily been done on paper. When given the choice, I always took notes by hand. Writing it helped me remember, and typing truly did nothing for me. Even when studying, I used the iPad as a reference, but I still have a notebook.
- Also, in foreign languages like mandarin, it is very difficult to hand write the characters on the iPad.
- Online textbooks were also unhelpful and didn't enrich the learning
Advice
- Always update your apps to avoid teachers becoming mad
- Constantly upload things to iCloud or eBackpack to avoid taking up too much space on the iPad.
Upside
- Internet Access
- Notability lets you draw pictures
- Typing quickly with a Bluetooth enabled attached keyboard
Downside
-Distraction for others caused distractions
-Got us behind when it malfunctioned
-We had to print out our work
Advice
-Charge it
-Name your files
A quick summary of the audio clips from the other student's perspective:
1. Name three things you liked about using the iPad.
- I preferred the ease of CBB (Creative Book Builder app) as opposed to hard copy projects, because it was much easier to change things.
- Communication in group projects was also much easier, as sending a presentation, like Powerpoint, could be changed by your group members and sent back to the regional owner with their changes.
- The Internet was more readily accessible to me, even if our home computer was occupied.
- The environment; we used less paper.
2. Name three negatives.
- Most of the things on the iPad can or could have easily been done on paper. When given the choice, I always took notes by hand. Writing it helped me remember, and typing truly did nothing for me. Even when studying, I used the iPad as a reference, but I still have a notebook.
- Also, in foreign languages like mandarin, it is very difficult to hand write the characters on the iPad.
- Online textbooks were also unhelpful and didn't enrich the learning
Advice
- Always update your apps to avoid teachers becoming mad
- Constantly upload things to iCloud or eBackpack to avoid taking up too much space on the iPad.
Maybe a future blog post will be about iPads in the classroom from my perspective as a parent of a child in a 1-1 iPad program where I paid for the iPad. And another blog post, or part two, could be from my perspective, as a teacher in a school where our 5th graders had 1-1 iPads that the PTA paid for. All great information to share, it's just hard finding the time. Plus I'm pretty slow at this. It's hard for me. Hopefully, the joy of writing will come after I get more comfortable. I've read that after 100 blog posts you really find your comfort zone and it doesn't feel so awkward to write a blog post. We'll see.
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