One Week In

The iPads were in the kids' hands this past week! Before that happened, though, I showed them a video I created using VideoScribe that distinguishes between one's social presence and one's professional presence online. The kids were pretty impressed by the video--I just wish the subscription fee to VideoScribe wasn't so hefty. I was working off a seven-day free trial, but I did get their iPad app, which was $4.99. I'll have to try that and see how robust it is.

Stressing to my students that the school iPads are for developing their professional presence online, we then discussed the rules for iPad use: 1. Respect the device 2. Schoolwork only 3. Images require permission. Then we got them on their assigned iPads--I keep rosters of who gets which number next to the iPads in case anyone forgets in these first few days, and our tech director also has a copy of the lists--and their first task was to set up a Gmail account specifically for school use. I'm requiring that they use our school initials + their first initial + their last name (e.g., bdhsjschmoe@gmail.com) so that I can email them or share documents with them via Google Drive without having to look up individual email addresses. I also gave them printed instructions on how to set up email forwarding if they want their school Gmail account to forward to another email address that they already use. I have a feeling, though, that once we start using Google Drive regularly that they won't feel the need to forward their school email.

After having several classes use the iPads, I discovered a fourth iPad rule that I'll be including: 4. Log out of accounts. I lost count of how many kids went to use their iPads only to find that the previous student hadn't logged out of their Gmail account.

Toward the end of the week I had the chance to teach one class another skill on the iPads using Google Drive. They had to take a photo of a diagram I had created on the whiteboard, upload it to Google Drive, and then rename the image to something easily identifiable for future study. I demonstrated first with my own iPad (projected via my document camera), and most of them got it pretty easily. Side note: I have AppleTV set up in my classroom, but I have yet to use it with my iPad. I find that using the document camera creates a much larger image on the screen than the AppleTV does, but the opposite would probably be true if my document camera and AppleTV were connected to a flat-screen monitor.

So everything pretty much went smoothly until the last couple days of the week. At that point, there were many adjustments being made to our student wireless network, which resulted in no Internet access whatsoever for the kids. Some got to access Moodle to read a PDF of a story I had posted there, but the remaining classes basically couldn't use the iPads at all. With our heavy use of Moodle and Google Drive, an Internet connection is going to be critical. Here's hoping that gets straightened out this week!