Collaborative Classrooms with 1:1 iPads

Dina Kravets The Lawrenceville School October 2012

Abstract
Millions of iPads have been deployed in educational institutions, yet very little analysis has been published on the effect of these deployments on education. How are these devices used? Do they fundamentally transform learning? In this paper we present the results from a two-term pilot in which five high school classes were taught in collaborative classrooms that used 1:1 iPads, projectors and Apple TVs.

Introduction
Over the winter and spring terms of the 2011-2012 school year, the Lawrenceville School ran a pilot program in five classes testing collaborative a classroom system that included classroom projectors, Apple TVs and one-on-one iPad 2 tablets. The classes ranged from 5 to 14 students: Art History (5 seniors), Environmental Science (14 juniors and seniors), Foundations of Music (9 freshmen), and 2 English classes (11 freshman and 10 seniors). Overall, more than 50 students participated in the pilot over the two terms1. The teachers were selected from a larger number that wanted to pilot new technology, the students did not have a choice. Each student was given a Wi-Fi iPad 2, a stylus, a protective case, and in the latter two classes, a keyboard. Some students in Environmental Science also requested, and were given, keyboards. The students kept the equipment with them throughout the terms and were encouraged to use it both in and out of the classroom. The school has excellent wireless connectivity throughout the academic and residential buildings, as well as in the sports facilities. Each of the five classrooms, equipped with a projector and an AppleTV, allowed anyone in class, teacher or student, to wirelessly mirror their iPad to the projector. Mirroring duplicates the iPads screen and audio on to the projector. Any changes on the iPad appear instantly on the projector. Mirroring using Apple TV and iPads is quick and easy -- a few seconds with a few swipes on the iPad screen. This speed and ease of instantaneously sharing ones work with the entire class was the decisive factor in our choice of equipment for the collaborative classroom pilot. This sharing capability became available with Apples release of iOS version 5 in October 2011, and as of August 2012, we are not aware of any nonApple device that enables the same functionality. The teaching styles and technical comfort levels of the teachers varied widely. The only common training initially provided was to ensure that all the teachers knew how to use the collaborative tools, e.g., projector mirroring. Advice and help with hardware, app evaluation, purchase and usage was available throughout the pilot, but it was up to the teachers to seek it or not. The teachers with the least technical interest were also the ones least likely to seek help, and their classes used only the preinstalled apps,
1

In the science class, the roster of students changed from one term to the next.

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specifically Safari browser, Notes, and Photos (the photo albums app). The music class had three musicspecific apps that were a great match for all the class needs. Two classes tried and used a wide variety of both free and paid apps, including note taking, clicker, screencasting, PDF annotation, movie making, conversation threading, social browsing, GPS-based gaming (for which the teacher created a treasureseeking game), an interactive textbook (Our Choice), subject-specific apps (e.g. water conservation), etc. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The Pilot Rationale section explains the reasoning behind various pilot decisions. The Classroom Setup section describes the difficulties encountered in setting the classrooms up to enable the pilot. The Pilot Outcome section provides our analysis and conclusions regarding the pilots results. These are based on a survey taken by the pilot participants (see link), teachers written summaries of their experience, and our interviews with the teachers. Lessons Learned section presents the knowledge we gained with iPad-based collaborative classroom deployment in a high school environment. The detailed data from the survey, including charts and quotes, appear in the Post-pilot Survey Results section. Our focus in this paper is strictly on the systems performance as an educational tool, not on the issues related to their economics, administration, support, etc.

Pilot Rationale
The first question for this section is why create a collaborative classroom with a tablet and not another platform? All the classrooms already had wirelessly-accessible projectors and the campus has had a 1:1 laptop policy for many years. Many classrooms also have Smart Boards. Why not simply require the students to bring their laptops to class and use wireless projection from their laptops? Why introduce a new system that requires another device? We return to these questions later in this section. First, let us examine the relative merits and shortcomings of the two classes of devices being discussed: laptops and tablets. There are a number of reasons why tablets may potentially be more ideal devices than laptops in schools. These include A tablets battery life lasts an entire day. A tablets touchpad interface expands what is possible to do with a device, e.g. handwrite notes, draw, compose music. A tablet with both a front camera and a high-res back camera supports both video-conferencing and taking pictures or movies. Laptops typically have only a front camera, which makes it an unwieldy tool for taking pictures or movies. A tablet is an always-on device; there is no lag time for waking the device. A tablet has a more convenient form factor, making it easy to always have the device with you. It also encourages sharing -- a tablet is much easier to pass around the table than a laptop. A tablets low profile is less intrusive in a participatory classroom and provides easier monitoring of students activities by the teacher. Tablets do not have fans and produce no noise in class. There is an increasing number of interactive educational resources, including textbooks, that are created specifically for tablets and not for laptops. Conversely, there are a number of reasons why tablets may potentially be less ideal devices than laptops in schools. These include 2
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 The most ubiquitous interactive Web technologies, Flash and Java, do not function on the Apple tablets. Androids support Flash, but not Java. This makes much of the multimedia Web content inaccessible within the tablets browsers. Tablets are closed systems and thus at the mercy of developers who may or may not develop apps for them. This is particularly acute because of the previous point -- just to get their web content onto a tablet, organizations/developers need to create device-specific apps. The same criticism used to be leveled against the desktop/laptop systems, but the advent of the Internet changed this equation. With interactive Web technologies and widely-available broadband access, the browser has replaced the operating system as the principal platform. Full-featured browsers are available on all desktops/laptops and this decade-old trend of browser-based computing has exploded, creating amazing in-cloud applications. Now, tablets (and smartphones) have forced a regression -- browsers on these devices do not support the requisite technologies and developers once again must write software specific to a device. In practice, the developers pick whichever platform shows success early in the game. The second (or later) comer to the platform market is automatically at a disadvantage, as is the current state of the marketplace with Apple iOS devices and non-Apple devices -- Android and Windows. A tablets on-screen keyboard is more difficult to use than the physical keyboard on the laptop. It also eats into the already smallish screen real estate. A physical keyboard is needed if the tablet is used for text-heavy content creation. Such a keyboard accessory negates some of the tablets merits, such as the form factor and low-profile positioning. A tablets screen has had much lower resolution than screens of many laptops and could not display as much. This disadvantage is disappearing as new tablet screen technologies provide resolution and clarity that is equal to, if not better than, that of the laptops. However, screen size remains an issue. Tablets lack ports for interfacing with other electronic devices. This disadvantage may in the future disappear as more devices go wireless, but this will take years. The following applies only to Apple tablets. iPads, as all other Apple devices, are controlled in a monopolistic fashion. Apple can charge what it pleases, both for the devices themselves and for their accessories. Apples device announcement of October 2012 provides a good example: Apple is adding a chip to the cable that fits these devices one and only port, thereby disabling all third party connectors, such as power, camera, projector and other adapters. Typically, such third party equipment costs as little as a fifth of Apples price. Overall, the premium paid on Apple products is often 50-100% over the prices for similar capabilities. The above tradeoffs do not address a number of important issues, including administration, management and support. There is one other aspect left out of the list, the most important criteria by which we should judge: the relative capabilities of various devices to truly transform the schools learning environment. Transformative is hard to quantify and is fraught with subjectiveness. Nevertheless, we needed to establish some criteria by which different setups can be evaluated. In our view, the most promising reachable goal is a system that enables and promotes individual and group interactions, exploration, synthesis and sharing of ideas, within and outside of classroom. We now return to the questions posed at the beginning of this section: why introduce tablets when laptops are already available? The key factor was Apples October 2011 release of iOS version 5. This iOS added a feature, called AirPlay, which made it possible to mirror the iOS device (screen and audio) onto a projector and to do so wirelessly and quickly. Wireless display on a projector is not a new 3
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capability. Desktops/laptops, both PC and Mac, have had this feature for many years. The uniqueness of AirPlay offering is the ease, speed and independence with which this mirroring can be accomplished: a student can make his/her device mirror onto the projector within a few seconds with a few finger slides. This feature is huge in a school setting, and surprisingly, has not received the attention it deserves. For the first time, the student is given the autonomy and direct control over how their work is shared with the class. Although this power for a student to put anything up in front of the entire class is frightening to some educators, and such power may not be appropriate in lower grades, responsibility for ones public digital behavior is a critical and necessary skill a 21st century student must learn and this setup provides an excellent teaching opportunity. Sharing ability is not new either -- students have many ways to share their work with the class, for instance, by putting it on a webpage. But, prior to AirPlay, the control has remained with the teacher. A classroom discussion where students can share their work via directions to the teacher on what to display -- this is not a system that promotes sharing. With AirPlay, student and teacher are true collaborators in the classroom learning. Imagine a classroom of students researching some topics, alone or in groups, and then having an interactive multimedia-supported (i.e. mirror their devices) discussion on this topic. When sharing your work with the entire class takes a few seconds, the pace of the discussion is not interrupted. A few-seconds delay is practicable; a 20-second delay is not - the rhythm of the discussion is broken too much and it feels like a good chunk of class time is spent waiting for the projector. This type of sharing is only available with Apple hardware as of August 2012. We sincerely hope that other systems add a similar functionality and do so soon. In the end of 2011 when our pilot was being considered, a number of Apple devices had AirPlay, including iPhone, iPad 2 and a number of Apple laptops. Out of these choices, we picked iPad 2. In addition to the collaboration enabled by AirPlay, we wanted to see how a tablet form factor would perform in a school environment. The first-time availability of such a unique collaborative setup strongly guided our decision to pilot Apple TVs and iPad 2s, as opposed to any other alternatives. It also dictated the decision to have one iPad per student.

Classroom Setup
While using the AirPlay projector mirroring feature is supremely simple, setting up the necessary equipment and configuration to support this feature with the existing classroom technologies proved more challenging. We start with the hardware. The iPads do not communicate with the projector directly. Instead, they communicate wirelessly with another Apple device, Apple TV, which is itself connected to the projector via a cable. The first difficulty is that while Apple TV outputs a digital signal, while most older projectors accept only analog. This necessitates a digital-to-analog converter. Since a classroom projector is typically already connected to a classroom desktop or a laptop docking station, in order to add another input signal to the mix, we need a signal switch. All told, the setup took some time to iron out. Here is the final picture of a few possible hardware setups involved:

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The much larger issue, and one that has not been resolved, is security. In order for the iPad to connect to Apple TV wirelessly, they need to be on the same network. Unfortunately, Apple TV does not support enterprise-level security, which is the standard in most organizations. Thus, a deployment requires the setup of a separate, non-industrial-strength wireless network, which is a highly undesirable solution.

Pilot Outcome
The analysis of the pilot outcome is based on a survey taken by the pilot participants (see link), teachers written summaries of their experience, interviews with the teachers, our observations of the pilots and a year worth of online chatter and reports about tablets, other pilots, etc.

Overall impressions
The pilot participants, both teachers and students, were very excited at the start of the pilot. During the pilot, iPads enabled many interesting and innovative experiences. At the same time, there were a number of snags and difficulties that caused frustration and disappointments. By the end of the pilot, the teachers were interested in repeating the experience, but the students were more ambivalent. The majority felt that the iPads made a positive contribution to their learning, but it was not a large majority. In the remainder of this section, we present our analysis. 5
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Content consumption vs content creation

Pilot participants universally agreed that iPads are excellent tools for consuming content. The iPads form factor, the instant-on and the automatic appearance of an on-screen keyboard when accessing search made finding information easy and painless. The screen is large enough and clear enough to support extended reading. Although lack of Flash and Java makes interactive multimedia Web sites inaccessible, much multimedia content is accessible since much of it is on YouTube, and therefore on the iPad via the YouTube app. The ease and speed of pinch-zoom function is especially useful in enabling superb access to visual details, a feature that awed the Art History class participants. Universal agreement ends when the tasks involve content creation. Participant satisfaction with iPads performance depended heavily on the type of content they were asked to create. Music composition on the iPads got rave reviews. Creating videos illustrating lab experiments was a positive experience, as was taking pictures and entering lab data. Writing was the task that received less than a positive response. There were at least two issues with writing. The first was the keyboard. The onscreen keyboard takes up too much of the screen space. Within two weeks of the pilot startup, the classes doing text input were asking for physical keyboards. The participants tested a number of different types and brands of the external keyboards, with mixed results. Even with a good external keyboard, creating text content is awkward because the controls are on the touchscreen (i.e. there is no mouse or similar exoscreen control interface), necessitating frequent movement between keyboard and touchscreen. This is especially awkward if a stylus is used, since the transition requires a hand to leave the keyboard, pick up a stylus, touch appropriate controls, put down the stylus and return hand to the keyboard. This mixedinput process is intrinsically inefficient. Another issue with writing is a lack of good and inexpensive apps that support the two most-used on campus word-processing formats: Microsoft Word and Google Document. There are a number of excellent apps for note-taking, but they store data in their own format that is not easily convertible to Word or GDoc. Apples Pages app could be used to generate documents, but editing the same document on iPad and non-Apple computers is cumbersome. This issue has been somewhat ameliorated with the latest (September 2012) release of Google Drive, which allows limited editing of Google Documents.

Subject differences
iPad, when loaded with appropriate apps, shines in Music classes. It offers a rich hands-on learning and creating experience that is not available via any other reasonably-priced method. The touchscreen input for quick art or lab sketches is great. iPad is less satisfactory as a general tool for writing. During class, it may be less important since even in writing-heavy subjects such as English or History, much class time is spent on non-writing activities, such as discussions and research, which are well-suited to iPads. In our survey, students clearly preferred non-iPad resources for taking notes and writing papers.

Quality of Apps

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Apples App Store sports an almost unfathomable number of apps -- half a million and counting. Unfortunately, quantity of apps in the App Store is a misleading measure for two reasons. Because of iPads popularity and its relatively poor support for common Web technologies, many organizations have been forced to create apps that are simply presenting the content from their website. For example, New York Times is an app. What does it do? It provides articles from the New York Times website, but adapted to display properly on the iPad. The same is true for innumerable other apps -- with iPad, instead of Web-based access, you have app-based access. With half a trillion websites, even if a very tiny fraction creates iPad apps, they would constitute a substantial segment of the App Store numbers. So, access to your financial institution on the iPad -- it is via an app, your news sources -- they each have an app, medical information -- an app, social network - an app. The iPads primary market is as a personal entertainment device, so perhaps it is not so surprising that the quality of apps that are truly useful in the context of high school education is underwhelming. For example, creating a movie on the iPad is great -- iMovie and a number of other apps handle the task well. On the other hand, creating a screencast -- recording whatever is being done on the iPad screen together with a voice over -- is not possible. There are a number of apps that generate a movie from what the user does on that apps own canvas (e.g. Explain Everything, ShowMe, Educreations), but there is no app in Apples US store2, as of September 2012, that will record whatever is being done on the iPad screen, including whatever is displayed by another app. This makes it difficult for a teacher to provide tutorials on how to accomplish tasks on the iPad. Screencasting is a very useful functionality that has existed on computers for a long time. Another stumbling block is the general bugginess and instability of the apps. Developers skills notwithstanding, one clear culprit is Apple. The company releases iOS updates without giving developers lead time to update their apps. So, following every major release, typically a few times each year, the apps may become unusable. When the iOS release happens in the middle of the term, an app that worked fine yesterday may not work today. This situation arose on more than one occasion during the pilot and caused much aggravation and wasted time.

Are iPads game changers for education?

The short answer is -- iPads alone are not. However, a collaborative system that supports iPads and mirroring may be. With the current state of the market (October 2012), iPad enables certain amazing learning opportunities that cannot be duplicated in a reasonable way by any other device. If more developers and teachers take fuller advantage of iPads capabilities, such uses will multiply. However, potential does not always translate into reality. In high school, the ability to type is still important, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Speech recognition has improved but is still years away from replacing writing or typing as the widely-available and widely-preferred method of entering large amounts of text. The iPads limitations are enough of a roadblock that almost no one in our survey chose iPad as the one and only computing device for educational needs -- a student still needs access to a laptop/ desktop, for serious writing among other tasks. If iPad is not replacing the laptop, is it the third device, in addition to a smartphone and a laptop? Does it offer such a compelling learning opportunity, such a revolutionary capability, that it is worth having a third device in every high school students hands?
2

Interestingly, there is one app that supports true screencasting on the iPad, Display Rec. by Bugun Software Co., Ltd., but it is only available in Germany.
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Certainly the millions of iPads that have been bought by K-12 and higher education institutions would seem to support a positive answer to this question. Unfortunately, glorifying news stories aside, there is a big gap between having devices in hand and having the devices used well. There is a great paucity of examples of iPad uses at the high school and higher levels that are revolutionary. While it is unquestionably the device that is easiest to sell to parents, school boards, grant agencies, and other funding sources, it is iPads uses by the teachers and students that determine iPads worthiness in education, and we have seen very little documentation that deployments are truly transforming learning. One interesting result from our students survey -- while the majority felt the iPads were helpful to them, fewer than half wanted iPads as one of the devices for their educational needs.

Lessons Learned
Training: The pilot teachers received no special training on the devices capabilities, nor did they have the time to rethink their pedagogy. As a result, some of the pilot classes used the iPads in fairly simple ways and did not take advantage of iPads unique capabilities. You don't know what you don't know. The one feature that all the classes used was the mirroring of the iPad screen on the projector, and this feature was well liked. They used this feature because that was the one task that required extra hardware and they were trained how to do it. Prior to a deployment in a classroom, the teacher must be exposed to the available apps, all device capabilities and if possible, examples of usage within the same discipline. Communication: People differ greatly in their level of self-reliance, their comfort with technology and with asking for help. When coupled with you dont know what you dont know, some teachers do not seek ways around an encountered problem, and use very suboptimal solutions or give up on the task altogether. Half-baked: Whenever there is a system update, the teacher and students cannot depend on the apps working as before. After an update, there needs to be a process for someone to test the effect of the update on all the non-native apps (i.e. for iPad, all apps not made by Apple) used by the class. The teacher needs a Plan B for any segments that depend heavily on a specific nonnative app. Even without system updates, the class needs to be prepared to face buggy apps. Business as usual: The teachers need time and training to rethink their class materials and student work. Even for very pedestrian classroom use, iPads have their limitations and the teachers need to know them and adjust. For example, a teacher who is used to emailing a Word worksheet for students to fill in class can make the process work more smoothly on the iPad by using a shared GDoc instead. Typing: Any non-trivial amount of typing on the iPad requires an external keyboard. Even with the external keyboard, extensive typing on the iPad is less than ideal. Limitations: While the iPads responsiveness to bluetooth peripherals is good, it is not instantaneous and tasks that require exact synchronicity, such as music jams, do not work out. Textbooks: The quality of textbooks available for the iPad varies tremendously, from gorgeous interactive multimedia apps to simply scanned pages that do not allow any kind of markup. With enough lead time, a teacher has the option of creating their own textbook using iBook Author. The big downside is that the resulting work will not play on any non-Apple device.

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 Myth of the digital native, part 1: While the students often have better general familiarity and comfort with technology, they can be easily thwarted by an unfamiliar interface. Teachers need to ensure all the students know how to use any new apps. Myth of the digital native, part 2: Students may be more adept at thinking up interesting ways of using the device. As much as possible, they should be encouraged to explore the device, its capabilities and available apps. The teacher should be prepared to be the learner when it comes to novel uses of the device. This last point is key -- it requires a significant shift in pedagogical thinking. Teacher training, and time, and time, and training

A collaborative environment with a 1:1 tablet deployment requires an enormous investment, and the purchase of the devices is the least costly part. While iPads (and other tablets on the immediate horizon) have much potential, their current state as an educational revolutionary is half-baked. If an institution wants to use them in a truly transformative way, the participating teachers need the desire and significant amount of time and training to rethink their pedagogy to take full advantage of the devices potential. The amount of effort involved would vary widely by the subject area -- some areas already have welldeveloped apps that plug-in naturally into classes, other areas need the teachers to reimagine their methods and create material with little existing scaffolding. In some areas, particularly math and science, interactive systems based on Java dominate the fields and it is not clear if or when comparable riches of examples, simulations, etc become available on tablets.

Post-pilot Survey Results

At the end of the pilot, the pilot participants took a survey (see link). This section presents detailed results of the survey.

Quantitative results
The answers to the quantitative questions are charted below. Percentages have been rounded to the nearest 5. The charts speak for themselves; we point out a few items we found interesting or surprising.

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Only a third of the students felt that iPads on-screen keyboard was good. A quarter of the students thought the iPad is well-suited for content creation. This question did not distinguish between text content and multimedia content. The pilots used iPads both for content consumption and for content creation. Despite the low rating for content creation, over half the students found iPads helpful in their pilot class, probably because more of the work on the iPads involved content consumption.

One of the selling points in education is that the iPads make student collaboration easier. This is not reflected in students answers, with fewer than half finding iPads helpful for collaboration. We do not know how much the lack of collaboration is attributable to the nature of the assignments given to the students and how much to iPads limitations. Moreover, students may not have considered iPads ability to project their work in class as collaboration.

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Unsurprisingly, the students prefer laptops for most tasks. The exception is that iPads beat laptops as a device for consuming a textbook (the students were told to assume that the textbook is available in appropriate format for each tool). Since only a dozen students in the pilot actually used textbooks on their iPads, the answers to this questions are based more on the students expectations than on their experience. It is also interesting to note that 40% still prefer physical textbooks. Another unsurprising point is that students prefer taking notes not on the iPad.

By far the most important feature in a device is battery life. The next question is perhaps the most telling of the survey. When all is said and done, the students liked iPads. The central issue is where the iPad does or does not fit in the students device arsenal. It is not multipurpose enough to replace the laptop. Is iPad then a third device, in addition to laptop and cell phone, and if so, does it provide enough benefits for the students educational needs that the students would want to deal with an extra device? Plurality (38%) feels that just a laptop is needed. Very few feel that only an iPad or only a smartphone is sufficient. A fifth want all the devices they can get. Looking at 11
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the survey answers, out of all the students that were handed an iPad in this pilot, by the end, there is roughly an even split between those that would like a tablet and those that do not want a tablet.

3Finally,

when asked their opinion about the future of iPads in the Lawrenceville School, the answers were mixed. While more than half did endorse it, a sizeable fraction had a negative opinion.

Written comments Positive

Kudoos Complaints

Negative

Although the chart specifies tablet, all but one person listed iPad as the tablet of choice.

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 long battery portable, light-weight fast browsing; easy to research topic of interest to class sharing using the projector easy way to communicate wide array of apps, both for learning and for fun

typing (even with external keyboard) inability to view certain sites (flash/java) and edit/view all files (Word, Google Docs) small screen istracts d from class discussions; distracting outside of class glitches with apps imprecision of finger or stylus on a touchscreen

A selection of positive quotes [ on iPads key strengths / best use ] The iPad is sleek, fast, and mobile. It basically can do anything a computer can do (maybe a little bit slower when it comes to actual typing and formatting) but is the size and shape of a small notebook. "Fast browsing. Easy to share things with peers. Easy way to communicate. Small and easy to carry around. Its strengths are the interactivity of the apps Accessibility and convenience. Most of the iPad apps are not up to par with the apps on the computer, but the portability of the iPad makes it a better option at times. I feel that the iPad strength is that to me it is like a electronic page. Any document I need I can get easily and readily on my iPad. I can look up the homework on blackboard, view class notes and even write an email easily and efficiently. I usually don't take my laptop to class so it was like having the internet in the palm of my hand during class. Projecting on to the board and sharing ideas with the class.

A selection of negative quotes [ on iPads key weaknesses / worst use ] The iPad does not lend itself to creating material. Even taking notes is a huge hassle compared with paper and pencil or even a laptop keyboard, not to mention the horrors of trying to create a powerpoint-style presentation or analyze data from lab. The iPad (and tablets in general, actually) find their stregnth [sic] in portability, simplicity, and display capability, not processing power and versatility. Thus, applying them to situations where processing power and versatility are required (like the situations above) makes no sense and is frustrating for everyone involved. Trying to do anything productive (as opposed to revelatory--not trying to be sarcastic here) on the iPad is a nightmare. We constantly ran into limitations of the ipad, especially when trying to produce content and work collaboratively. the biggest limitation simply seemed to be typing on the i pad, it slowed everything down, and even with a key board it was not very efficient. It cannot do EVERYTHING a computer can do. When you actually need to type out an email, the ipad's keyboard is an 13

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"I think its strength is the creativity factor. With the iPad, creating things (whether it is music or art etc.) is much easier.

annoyance, and even if you have an attachable keyboard, why wouldn't you just use a laptop?

Seeing other people's work and iPads on [ complaints about specific apps ] the projector was, to me, an interesting For me personally it was I annotate [sic aspect of the iPad. iAnnotate]. It constantly crashed for me, and when it did work, it felt sluggish, and That's the particularly cool thing that unintuitive. It seemed like I would be better ipads let you do, interact with text and taking notes on a computer with paper or all that. its an extremely effective way to pencil. transmit information and then the reader can choose how deep they want to delve Using the pagesend app, we had issues into something. changing the notes for class and we had to use another app instead. There was I am going to just go ahead and conflate very little progress made for it became interesting with positive/good and say a distraction in our class, while it should that the best use of the iPad in this class have been a tool to help. was for interactive texts. I think that the integration of video,interactive graphic/ Apps like Explain everything and text elements seemlessly into one place Pagesend constantly failed and shut down is a great use of the iPad's simplicity and on our class making them difficult to use. display capacity (since it is basically just a giant touchscreen). The voicethread app was interesting, but also most peoples' least favorite part: In my opinion I thought that the iPad was it was time consuming and sometimes the most useful when we were looking annoying, plus it was hard to get used to it at documents that were on our google and make the voicethreads sound like real site. The iPad allowed me to easily switch harkness discussions. Otherwise, we didn't through the many numbers of documents really use the Ipad for anything we couldn't on the site without me having to clutter my already do on our computers. notebook with documents we would only have to look at once. Just by having this Aris, it often shut down easily. unique feature the iPad was extremely useful to me in all of my classes. A lot of the programs you use on your laptop isn't supported by the iPad, which is frustrating when you need to bring up [ on lack of Flash/Java ] a particular file. It's more annoying than anything. The flash/java issue wasn't really a problem, because we didn't need that They were very slow(most of them) for much. Also, there weren't any other limitations. Garageband deleted songs after you had 14
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[ praise for specific apps ]

too many.

I loved the garageband on the Ipad. It was [ on lack of Flash/Java or other iPad limitations ] the greatest thing we did with the Ipad this It was a problem because I would always term. have to bring around my computer in case the iPad could not do something. Also, the I think our most interesting experience iPad is nowhere near as convenient as a was with the Jam Session exercise. laptop because it is very difficult to type, is Even though it took us some time to slower, and is harder to view things on. get used to it, it was interesting to play chord progressions over a melody that This iPad limitation is part of a greater somebody else was playing. However, I set of limitations that the iPad faces. It is think I the Jam session could use some not a processing center and should not fixing in that it was difficult to figure out be treated as such. This is only a problem how to record all of the musicians' songs if you are trying to apply the iPad to a into one person's iPad. situation where it doen't [sic] belong. Definitely our choice. The interactive A lot of the programs you use on your textbook in my opinion is by far the best laptop isn't supported by the iPad, which use of our ipad all term. Our choice is so is frustrating when you need to bring up intuitive, and flawlessly integrates video a particular file. It's more annoying than pictures and text, that it made reading it anything. enjoyable, and interesting. [the app is Al Gores Our Choice]

Other comments
I thought that the textbooks were pretty cool, especially life by e. o wilson. The ARIS app. When we had to adventure around campus to find things, it was the most interactive and complex thing we did this term with the ipad. It was cool to have to follow the hints, and collect cows. I wish we did more with this. It is the voicethread, although in the beginning I did not really enjoy our use of the voicethread, through several recordings and projects that we had to do I have grown to like it a lot and I believe that it is an extremely valuable teaching tool. This really helped with my speaking and analyzing skills, I wish that Mr. Burns would continue to use voicethread so that future students could have this amazing The first two weeks with the iPad was were unproductive. I downloaded numerous games and often was distracted from my studies. Once I deleted all my games and kept only the academic apps, however, did my iPad become a great asset in my academic assignments. I felt like many of my other classmates were distracted during class ( surfing the web, going on facebook, and playing other game) while the teacher thought that the were working on a project or taking notes. I think the most negative aspect of the iPads is the distraction. By allowing us to have the freedom to download whatever apps we wished, some of us were distracted occasionally. 15
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experience as well. We talked about how we were going to use the iPad so much and we never really did. We downloaded so many apps, and only used 2 or 3, and for a very short time only. We rarely used one use of them for more than a week. It became a bit of a nuisance.

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