Assignment+1

= Bruce McMurry, Oakfield School District, February 24, 2011 = Marian University EDT 704

Article A. “How will the iPad Change Education?” [] Using the iPad as an instructional tool for students has great potential. The ability to download textbooks and other instructional materials would be very convenient. The chance to have all textbooks and homework contained in a tablet would greatly simplify life for a student. My concern is that we’re not there yet. I have had discussions with the other two administrators with whom I work, and they think we can eliminate textbooks right now. I think we’re a few years away from that. I don’t know that all major textbooks are available in an electronic format. Even if they are, we need some advances in the iPad and other tablets. We need USB ports; we need more memory; we need the ability to attach or connect through Bluetooth to printers and keyboards. Right now iPads are too expensive to practically provide to every student.

Article B. “Measuring the iPad’s Potential for Education” [] Portability and ease of use are two features of the iPad that are especially attractive in the classroom for students. I can easily see the day coming when an iPad or other computer “tablet” device is with each student, just like a notebook or textbook is now. Another possibility might be a Smartphone that has the capability to project a larger image to a tablet sized screen which is touch enabled—like a miniature Smartboard. Students really like the size of Smartphones. I’m not sure they’ll want to go to a larger tablet device.

Article 1. “The iPad isn’t a Third Device, but a Third Revolution” [] I was around when the PC was born. I bought the first Apple in my school the first year I was a principal, 1981, squeezing my budget to buy the “CPU and keyboard” and hooking it into a television set, paying a cool $1000 for a 64K machine. I bought my first personal computer around 1982, paying $1000 for a used Radio Shack TRS 80 computer with 48K of memory. It was a slick unit with the keyboard, CPU, monitor and two built in floppy drives all in one unit. I bought a tractor driven dot matrix printer and learned to word process, so I could use it to write my Ph.D. dissertation and easily handle the endless edits and revisions that went with the dissertation process. Not many people, even my professors at UW Madison, understood what I was doing and why. When I moved to Oakfield for the 1991-92 school year I bought a Macintosh computer for our family, just like the five Macs I bought at school for our computer lab. Over the next few years we outfitted our school with a Mac lab of 30 machines. We offered classes at school through Marian University (taught by Denise Leong) for our staff so they could become more “computer literate.” Little by little, we got computers on the desks of our teachers and tied them into the Internet through a network. Our district made a major decision around 1992—we decided to use the Mac platform instead of the PC for our instructional computers. Little did we know that the icon driven, mouse operated Mac operating system would be more like the PC world our students were growing up into than the keyboard driven PCs of that generation would be. Now, all these years later, we are offering a Marian University class at school on the iPad. I remember the first Mac I saw, around 1984. It belonged to the Director of Instruction in the district where I worked. It had a 9 inch black and white screen, and was a small tower with an independent keyboard and a mouse. Some high school kids broke into the district office and stole the Mac, burying it behind the district office with the hope of retrieving it later. They were caught and the precious Mac was saved. The iPad, like the iPhone when it was first introduced, had that kind of mythical status. This article does some reminiscing similar to what I’ve just done. The technology for interfacing with the iPad can properly be called the third revolution (the first being the personal computer; the second being the introduction of a mouse operating system). Having lived through those devices, the iPad is a next big step. By allowing the user to touch the screen directly to access the device, Apple has taken a radical step beyond the mouse. I fear, however, that Apple may be making the same mistake with the iPad that it did with the original Apple computers, by trying to freeze out the competition through restricting access to its operating system. First Apple did it to the iPhone; now it is doing the same thing with the iPad. The reason that 95% of the world uses PCs and not Apple Macintosh computers is because software developers and computer manufacturers were able to develop products far more freely in the PC environment. Now tablets powered by the Droid operating system with Google behind it are invading the marketplace. Users are starting to get used to the Droid system in their phones, and are liking it. The Tablet Wars are next. God cornered the Tablet market with the Ten Commandments. I’m not sure Apple will be able to do it again!

Article 2. “App Store Sees 60 Apps Downloaded for Every IOS Device Sold” [] Amazingly, the average number of apps downloaded per IOS device has increased in a straight progression every 6 months since July of 2008, roughly doubling every year since. The apps store was projected to reach 10 billion downloads in January 2011—that’s in 31 months! Clearly, the apps available at the iTunes App Store are a huge draw for the iPad market. The other tablets have a long way to go to catch up. I had read somewhere that there are now 160,000 apps available!

Article 3. “5 More Sources of Free Online Tutorials” [] Photoshop—basics of Photoshop explained in a single convenient list, including getting started, touching up digital photos, and using the “draw” tools. iPad—the complete list of iPad tips, trick and tutorials Facebook—Facebook 101 is a free video tutorial series, which includes how to sign up, find friends, share information, and interact with groups. Twitter A collection of Twitter tutorials, including tips on how to get started and expanding the use of Twitter using hash tags, desktop clients, and other Twitter apps. Livescribe smartpens—teaches how to download apps to the pen, create “pencasts” of recordings, and printing your own notepads.

Article 4. “Try iPad Apps for Better Business Collaboration” [] There are now iPad apps designed for business collaboration available at the Apple App store. They allow distance communication and sharing of data and documents with colleagues, clients, alumni, stakeholders and customers in the “cloud” environment. In the Apple environment, sharing can take place between Mac computers and iPhones as well (not to mention iPods). Some of this can allow switching over to PCs as well, though it may take some extra work. If applications like Skype are used, it is clear why people are hoping that the next iPad generation will include a built in camera.

Article 5. “iPad E-Book Development—Read E-Books on iPad” [] Reading books is amazingly natural on the iPad. I read a review of a book that the reader had read on the iPad. He said that he wouldn’t ever own a book again, if he could help it—he saw the iPad as that much more desirable as a medium for reading books! By touching and holding a word on the iPad, the reader can look into the dictionary, Wikipedia, use search engines, or even search for the word throughout the book on the web. Our school district has been discussing downloading textbooks to iPads or notebook computers. The iPad allows personalization of text through highlighting. The student can use a bookmarking feature and make notes. In addition, iBooks can save places in a book across other devices such as the iPhone or iPod touch!