iPad Report, Part 2
iPad Report, Part 2
As promised last week, I am posting the second of my reflections on where things stand in the third year of our 1:1 iPad initiative. In this case, I will the address the areas where I think the iPad has been less than expected.
- Textbooks and educationally-oriented apps have been slow in coming. When the iPad first hit the market several years, we were promised a revolution. So far, in terms of electronic textbooks, the revolution has not happened. Only a handful of our courses have been able to adopt what I would call robust, enhanced electronic books, in which the features are clearly beyond what a normal paper textbook could deliver. Otherwise, the e-textbooks are essentially just glorified PDF’s. Our teachers have searched regularly for the sort of textbook that would really transform the way textbooks have generally been used, but so far the publishers have not kept pace, nor have they delivered as many subject-specific apps as we might have assumed. While there are certainly some exceptions (biology has used a wonderful e-textbook and some of the world languages have enhanced e-books as well), the revolution must wait a little longer.
- The extent to which iPads need the support of other technology has been somewhat surprising to me. In other words, the iPad cannot fully replace the need for other devices, nor the need to have other essential tools to get the most out of it. The Reflector app is wonderful, for example, allowing a teacher to move about the room with his/her iPad and “reflect” what is on that iPad to the whole class on a screen at the front of the room. But the feature requires a laptop as home base, as well as a projector, a high quality screen and connectors. In other situations, the iPad feature might lack the capabilities of what can be done on an laptop, or may even have a subpar interface with such essentials as the website. Thus, like so many technological devices, the iPad does many things briliiantly but not everything well. Meanwhile, the battle for iPad connectors, otherwise known as “dongles,” has been fierce. These little charging or connecting cords are much needed and easily lost, such that there has been frequent need to replenish these gadgets for teachers and students, at a significant cost. (I am convinced Apple makes more money on these device supports than they do the devices themselves.) Furthermore, with just about every new iteration of the iPad, new connectors are needed, as Apple changes the plug style. And, of course, anyone who does even a moderate amount of document writing needs to have a decent keyboard, and those can be expensive and less than durable. In the end, these kind of additional issues can make for that needless frustration with technology all of us have grown accustomed to.
- The iPad will never replace the necessity of human interaction. Wait, that’s not a disadvantage! In the end, regardless of the fact that we have adopted a sophisticated piece of technology as a mainstay of our academic program, we are still a people-centered enterprise. Students value the relationships with their teachers far more than those with their devices. And that’s just as it should be.
So while the positives far outweigh the negatives, the iPad is not perfect fix for all our pedagogical or even technological needs. Like so many things these days, the right solution is a combination of things, with the iPad serving as another valuable tool in our toolkit.
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