iPad in Education

From the Illinois Online Network Faculty Summer Institute (May 2011)

This session, presented by Mike Miley from Apple, Inc. discussed various apps that are popular in education, in addition to various tips and tricks for using the iPad.

Some of the apps that were highlighted include:

• The Elements app ($15)...wonderful for chemistry instruction
• Wolfram Alpha ($1.99)...an application that provides real time database information in an understandable format (examples: population of U.S., calories in food, GDP France v. Norway, atomic radius of gold)
• Pages app ($9.99)...a word process for the Mac, redesigned for iPad
• Papers app ($14.99)...research literature, mainly science based
• Penultimate app (1.99)...handwriting app (can use finger or stylus)
• Sketchbook app($4.99)...drawing app for digital artists
• Modality Inc. app (free)...interactive anatomy and medical imaging
• Inkling app (free)...a platform for interactive textbooks (includes live data)
• CourseSmart (free)...more eTextbooks for the iPad
• GPS apps...good for science classes, can share location data with some applications (example: study of bird migration)
• FaceTime...for video chat. You can use FaceTime to upload video reminders to your LMS (pre-lecture)
• iAnnotate PDF($9.99)...add your own notes to PDF files. There are also some free ones such as neu.Annotate PDF and pdf-notes (note: PDFs can be saved to iBooks for future viewing)
  

General use in education

• School are going more and more toward developing web sites and functionality that can be viewed by students using mobile devices. See example of MIT (http://m.mit.edu/about/) ...this allows you to get essential info about campus from your mobile device (bus schedules, etc.). University of Iowa has something similar (M.uiowa.edu )...students can even see the dorm laundry room schedule when machines are available!

• Norma Scagnoli is the director of eLearning at UIUC...good resource for using apps with College of Business.
• ePubs...great for use with iPad. Amazon is starting to use ePubs. You can create your own ePubs with Adobe inDesign. Why they are cool: in books, you can hold your finger over a word, and it will show the dictionary definition. You can also highlight words as you read (in different colors) and it will keep track of your notes.
  
• Keynote presentations (Apple's version of PowerPoint) can be saved in iTunes
• WebDAV...a new file sharing protocol (similar to Dropbox) that lets you share information from apps (Dropbox doesn't)

General information about iPad

• Use can plug it into your computer to be projected on a screen (need a VGA adaptor and digital adaptor...$20-$30), however, you can't see your hand touching the apps. Better would be to use a document camera. You can get a small document camera for $70
• Zag.com is a good site for buying accessories (bluetooth keyboard, skins for iPad to make them less slippery)
• As you are typing on an iOS device, if you hit the space bar twice, it will automatically put a period at the end of a sentence. (and auto capitalize the next word)
• On iPad2, there is no longer a rotation lock on the side. Instead, it's a mute switch. To go back and forth between these, you can press the home key twice (which shows recently used apps) and swipe right. You can also use this area to dim the brightness setting (ideal if using a document camera for display)