Category Archives: Discussion

May 17 2013

Dynamic School Documents

I started thinking about the amount of time I was spending on dealing with files, their types and their availability online. I was being sent Microsoft Word Docs, converting them to Pages, exporting a PDFs and uploading them to websites and the school Learning Management System (LMS).

Problem 1: Managing the availability of your documents and worksheets online can be time consuming and difficult when allowing for  iPad access.

Problem 2: Teachers emailing files to each other for checking and updating and then collating the result is also time consuming.

Problem 3: Re-printing or uploading revisions to worksheets and docs and deleting old copies is annoying too.

Solution? Using a central department or school Google account, I can operate and organise permanent, online dynamic Docs as the standard for the school / department files. From my Google ‘Drive’, Students can download PDF versions for working on in any of the iPad PDF apps. Multiple Teachers can access and update the single copy of any file knowing the existing links to these will access the latest version. No more work is required in updating and uploading new files as the links point to the same live document in Google Drive.

My staff have seen many benefits in the first month and started working much more collaboratively. Here’s a diagram to explain the features and setup.

Dynamic School Doc links

May 11 2013

‘The task’ vs. ‘My task’

“Teacher, I’ve finished your work” 

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It can be easier for a teacher managing a class of iPadding students to design projects where students own their own learning and thus care about the quality of their outcomes. For me, ensuring students care is my primary goal when designing tasks and programs. If they are doing ‘the teacher’s work’ then any motivation to produce the best result will probably have to come from external sources, like material rewards from the teacher or even as simple as making the teacher happy (Teacher’s pet). The teacher’s work is always seen as ‘work’ and genuine engagement is difficult.

Intrinsic Motivation

Here is a list of ideas for adding incentives to tasks to help the kids intrinsically care about the outcomes.

  1. Screen Shot 2013-05-11 at 2.09.33 PMThe success criteria should be devised by the students themselves before commencing any task. These should be discussed and agreed upon by the class or group. Design a success criteria template that’s always filled in by the group.
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  2. Screen Shot 2013-05-11 at 2.11.44 PMThe teacher  only asks questions. Give no answers. Students should find their own answers and be taught to confirm them with more than one source including each other’s research.
    e.g. Try to always prompt for output with ‘Why’ questions and never start a lesson with “today class we will…” because who knows what the kids will do in todays lesson!
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  3. head-37523_640Choose a creative & fun task for all and / or allow freedom of expression (choice of app) but remind students of the success criteria.
    e.g. You must record a TV news story containing an interview but it must explain how X affected Y. This will be shown on the class TV channel.
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  4. 6181049228_4dbbf2c9aeFocus on the students producing ‘products’ that could actually be used to benefit others, be they classmates or the community. Even if it’s not used in the end, work should seem purposeful and be seen as usable in the real world.
    e.g. If you are writing stories then ensure they look into how one self-publishes online. This opens the possibly of a real audience with real feedback. student blogs are an obvious starting point but why shouldn’t a child consider starting their writing career now, earning real cash? (There are examples online of this happening)
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  5. 1272px-Internet1I think the world is getting to a point where evidence of all student work should be stored / published online. My students always react with amazement when they first realise the videos / animations are going onto Youtube on my dept. channel. This creates an environment where students can easily peer review and encourage but also parents too, which I find has the biggest impact on motivation.

I have started to have a go at this with my year 7s and 8s and am now considering how future senior classes who have iPads will also own their learning whilst still working towards the national qualifications. I am lucky as the New Zealand assessment system if very flexible and I look forward to the challenge!

Apr 26 2013

ENSURING SCHOOL IPAD SUCCESS

PRIORITY NO.1 : LEADERSHIP FROM THE TOP.

LeadershipDucks

The initial goal is to ready a school for the quick iPadding of all daily school tasks carried out by Teachers, Admin and students. The first emphasis must be to get staff and students to move their daily routines onto the iPad and not look back. This realignment will only be quick & successful if staff and particularly members of the leadership team understand iPad best practice.

BIG DECIDER: ONE COMPETENT SENIOR LEADER (AT LEAST)

In the beginning, at least one senior leader must become fully fluent in how the iPad deals with the daily school tasks. My experience to date tells me that this will be the key decider on iPad success. I find that most school technicians charged with readying school systems for iPads only ‘fully respond’ to senior leaders. Here’s a check list of good iPad practice the senior leaders must understand:

5 EVERYDAY iPAD ESSENTIALS THAT LEADERS MUST UNDERSTAND AND PROMOTE:

PDFexpertA) DOCUMENTS: How to convert and ensure all documents (forms/worksheets) are shared in PDF format. This includes on the Website, LMS and in shared folders on the servers. We all use apps like Word to create documents but once finished, Word/Pages/Powerpoint should not be the file formats that are shared publicly or internally. Don’t continue to think that because a form or worksheet must be filled in, it needs to be shared in Microsoft Word format. Most PDF apps (both Free and Bought) will allow the staff and students to view, complete, sign or annotate the forms & worksheets and will really start to make the school paperless (a serious ‘Green’ issue). One problem area will be uploading PDFs to the existing school websites / LMS directly from iPad. Some of the LMSs are creating iPad apps and this can help but without clever design, the website might need to continue with desktop updates.

iMessageAppB) COMMUNICATION: Email is dead! Students certainly don’t regularly check emails. New communication tools must be considered. Internally, it’s best using messaging tools like iMessage, your LMS’s messaging service, if its iPad app runs such a service or even Twitter. I find adults like ‘texting’ messages as much as the kids do, you only have to look at Facebook to know that. Externally, the school should also run a Facebook Page for people to follow for community announcements and this too can be run by the senior leader directly from the iPad. It might be with the best intentions that every school aims to run a good website, but for communication, parents rarely check school websites and it’s not the way 21st Century communication takes place. This is one reason iPads have never needed the facility to update website HTML.

PhotosAppC) IMAGES: The leadership must decide on how staff iPads will upload, store and organise photos. This is good for teachers as they can share pictures with students directly from the iPad and good for all staff to share images of student work and activity. Using online services like Flickr or Google’s Picasa, there are ways to ensure images can be uploaded and organised by staff iPads to appear embedded on the school websites etc, without the need for separate login. (See my previous posts)

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YoutubeD) VIDEO: This is quickly becoming the new ‘paper’. Young people are experiencing online video as a first step to understanding anything. They also create multiple videos using devices like phones on a weekly basis. If harnessed, this can make any school a lively exciting place where students really show-off their understanding and even start to learn and leach each other through video. The school must have an official system for staff to organise the videos for the courses and where the school can showcase student video work. The one system that the iPad and all the available apps work seamlessly with is a Youtube account. The school should setup a Google account from which it can organise its Youtube channel with playlists for different courses, classes or general school activities. Students and staff can now login or be logged-in to upload video content to the channel. This channel can be embedded in school websites etc, and will automatically update as the content arrives.

wordpressE) LEADERSHIP BLOG & ADVICE: This is a great idea to ensure genuine engagement from all staff and students. A senior leader blogs the schools experiences and advice on using iPads from day 1. This blog is linked to on the school website and can be used by the whole community to find out the latest news in how the school is operating with iPads, including any problems that have arisen. A school “How-to” page is also setup to cover all the basics.

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If you can get your school performing the daily basics on iPads, the creative stuff will follow naturally. The more they stick to their old ways, the harder the transition will be. Success and collaboration between members of the iPadding community rely on full understanding and engagement from all parties. And this starts with the basics and from the top!

[Update] Other Considerations:

1. Don’t waste time looking through the App Store. Focus on tasks. Start with only considering all the daily tasks within the school for students, teachers and admin and focus on collaborative systems like Google Accounts and Twitter to bring the new iPadders together.

2. Ensure that all the departments have the basics mentioned above working before you worry about adding extras. The first issue is about building confidence and when staff & students see they can at least do all that they did before but better, the project will really take-off.

3. Get the whole senior leadership team fully immersed by the end of the first year. This will build respect for both the individuals and the project. The school will really come alive if the community see the leaders themselves start moving forward.

4. Build an open approach to web filtering. Like all major businesses, 1000s of schools are now using Social Media and Youtube in the classroom. Other than blocking the ‘obvious’ negative material, it is important that schools are able to teach digital citizenship within school and this requires positive role-modeling in how the internet can be used.

Nov 17 2012

Gaming as School Assessment?

What can schools learn from why millions of people of all ages are turning to online gaming and online virtual environments? I’ve been reading this book by Jane Mcgonigal on the effect of and reasons why millions of people of all ages are turning to online gaming and online virtual environments. Here’s Jane at TED summarizing the book in 15 minutes. The basic premise is that the continuous feedback and desire for self-improvement becomes the drive to continue.

It goes as far as to say that games that have a definitive end and can be won are less appealing. A classic example is “Tetris” which became one of the most popular games in history regardless of not being able to win it! It never ends, you just continue to challenge yourself to last longer each time, whilst receiving continuous visual and sound feedback.

Gamers just want work and learn! The more work the better. World of Warcraft has clocked-up 6 million gamer hours in about a decade! (That’s as long as humans have been upright!) It takes 500 hours of play to reach the highest levels in the game and this is now seen by gamers as a small amount of work time!

The constant desire to get more work done within the world, whilst continuously “levelling-up,” and the fact that one’s levels are shared across the system is what drives the engagement. The other thing going on in these games is learning. the students only really score points if they show they have learnt something new. I’m wondering if we can bring that level of drive & dedication to work and learn into the school environment.

So I thought I’d have a go!

Here’s an idea for a mobile app system used by teachers and students that could work in many schools to drive student engagement but also provide individual student performance analytics to the school.

Allowing for my previous blog posts, I must add that this would only work in a student-centred environment where students were self-directed on large enough projects that the teacher is free to only offer 1-to-1 guidance and have time to truly assess how each student is developing.

Step 1 (Objectives)

The school decides on about 8 core requirements for life in the 21st century. Skills that it feels students must be assessed on across all their school-life and students can then “Level-Up” on each day/week.

These might be things like:

  1. Creative Thinking

  2. Independence

  3. Leadership

  4. Physical skills

  5. Collaboration

  6. Sharing

  7. Language depth

The school could outline a matrix of examples of how students might behave and think to Level-up in each requirement.

Step 2 (Technical)

Classes are set up on a database system accessible through mobile devices by everyone in the school. An app is created with both a student and teacher version. A website also collates the data for the school leadership team.

Step 3 (Levelling-Up)

A Mobile app is used by all the teachers to simply issue points on-the-fly to each student. Any evidence at any moment, either in the classroom or when marking work in the evening can gain points in any of the identified core requirements.

The app design is key and is simple to use. The class list is shown and clicking on a name brings up 8 large buttons that allocate a point on each click to the student for any of the core requirements identified by the school.

TEACHER APP (MOCK-UP)

Step 4 (Feedback and Socialising)

Students download the student app and can login to view a live self-profile and see the levels increasing day-to-day. For fun they can design an avatar (maybe to illustrate a future career) and possibly even share their thoughts on their scores with other students in the school. Socialising about your levels using the app would also be key to the engagement. Students who have Levelled-Up in Creativity, for example, might share what they did to show creativity. Their peers might then attempt to model the same behaviour.

Step 5 (Student drive)

Students start to question at all times in the day how they might show evidence of creativity or leadership etc,  knowing they’ll receive the feedback on the mobile app almost immediately. They also understand the core skills are cross-curricular and essential to life in general. It also pushes the idea that any moment of the day is an opportunity for self-improvement.

…anyway, it’s just an idea and please feel free to make the system and become a millionaire! However, I might spend some time next year developing it.

STUDENT APP (MOCK-UP)

Nov 5 2012

Learning with iPad? Use the News!

Can any day’s world events or featured articles be tied to all learning objectives and make learning more meaningful?

One good use of student iPads is to appreciate that all creative output that comes from the device can feed directly from real-world stories, delivered by the various news apps. There should be one of any day’s events, stories or features that connects to a learning objective in any subject area.

The iPad can be used to produce media products or documents that cover how the story connects with the learning objectives in question. Appropriate news apps for your country or even local area can be used by the students to make learning more real and tangible.

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Connect the learning to the story. It’s just a matter of asking the right question. 

How does the story:

  1. relate to current immigration issues?
  2. prove or disprove the wave equation?
  3. parallel the mindset of Macbeth in act I Scene V?
  4. show that humans need to change their approach to politics?
  5. indicate that health problems are linked to religion in more than one country?

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These are just some examples (from the top of my head) but given that the news apps divide stories and features into categories, teachers should always be able to find something appropriate and design decent projects from it. It doesn’t have to be that exact day. Anything from the last week will still feature in the apps and offer a range of opportunities.  Connecting topics to real-world stories often humanises the context and engages students through an emotive connection. Studying weather patterns is one thing but connecting it to the effects of 8 million people loosing power after hurricane Sandy is quite a lot more powerful, especially if you demand solutions to their problems!

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Fixed content - irrelevant?This approach to learning does go hand-in-hand with project-based learning and does not fit well with the more common approach of one-size-fits-all topic by topic approach (fixed curriculum factory schooling – see right). This is precisely why I encourage it. 21st Century learning, if it is to be engaging and successful (long-term) must appear relevant in today’s world. Separate from what school offers, information is delivered to students too easily and quickly for schools not to connect it to bigger learning objectives and discuss it’s meaning and impact.

Getting Started

Technical issue 1: The news apps don’t often allow for the saving of images or the highlighting of text.

Solution: Use the 2-button (Home+off) screenshot to grab content from the screen and crop using the photos app. These can then be entered into any iMovie project / keynote or in fact any app.

Solution 2: Many allow sharing through email. This will give you the website link and you can grab content using Safari with the normal copy-paste.

Remember copyright and kids should attribute their sources when using the material.

Technical issue 2: Which apps?

To save me a lot of time, here’s a good list but I would add 4 things:

  1. The Guardian Eyewitness app
  2. The Boston Globe Big Picture app (now US only?)
  3. Summly app (quick story summarizing – great for kids)
  4. Look for your local TV news channel, it might have an app that covers more local stories.

Technical / teaching benefit: Safe surfing
Using the News Apps gives you a simple internet filter and is safer for younger students over general internet surfing

Conclusion

Make want to teach relevant to today’s world because it is and always will be. Humans will always be human and so everything you want to teach still has relevance even if it’s to discuss the stark difference between ‘then’ and now. Make the students think and make connections, hopefully while tackling problems that have a real purpose.

Nov 1 2012

Where should School leaders stick their iPhones?

One of the reasons I’m always keen on the idea of leading a school is that it’s never been easier and more fun to document the amazing life of a school and publish it to the world. I have seen a number of examples, both online and in person, of leaders running what seem to be live feeds of the day’s activities. This becomes one of the most powerful forms of feedback for the students, marketing for the school and parents absolutely love it!

It’s school life that leaders should be sticking their iPhones & iPads in to!

Many, if not all Principals these days have a smart phone and many have and iPad too. Unfortunately, due either to a reluctance to ask for help from the staff or worse, a lack of interest in classroom activity, many of these multi-talented devices simply get used for email and calls.

So, here is a list of ideas regarding how leaders can use their devices more effectively to lead and promote the good work of both staff and students.

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  1. In-School Photo feed
    “Document the Day.”
    One school I visited in California had TV screens scattered throughout the school to display information and daily routines etc. But I saw something else appearing. The Principal made it his duty to take at least 10 photos a day of student activity and post them as a running slideshow on the screens. Students were spurred on by the recognition “from the top” and it looked impressive from my point of view as a visitor. It took up 30 minutes of the Principal’s day, which for the payback was cheap indeed. If you are careful you can also publicly broadcast daily activities online, giving parents immediate access and the school a great marketing opportunity.
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  2. Twitter
    “Principals chat principles”
    If you’re lucky, your school leaders are already on Twitter, but most are not. The best professional development is often provided by peers and on Twitter there are 100s of school leaders discussing amazing projects and developments. This keeps school fresh and challenges principals to push their organisation forward. Twitter provides 100s of case studies to help in decision making and is free and on call at any time. Leaders like to network and this is simply the best example of networking ever conceived.
    Here’s 6 world-class tweeting educational leaders to get you started:
    @NMHS_Principal
    @21stPrincipal
    @bjnichols
    @TomWhitby
    @PrincipalDiff
    @PatrickmLarkin
    Check out who they follow and also use the account @ConPrin (Connected Principals)
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  3. Video performances
    “The Principal’s view”
    Quite often for student cultural performances, the leaders have the best seat in the house. Why not record the performance and post it on the schools LMS for everyone to watch. The students will appreciate it greatly and it indicates genuine interest in the creative talents of the students.
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  4. Dictation
    “Who needs a typist when you’ve got an iPhone”
    The latest iPhone update to iOS6 improved the iPhone and iPad’s ability to receive dictation. It is only available in some countries but will save much time and reduce the need for 2 people to compose a letter. Maybe a leader can dictate to the device and hand to a typist just to clean up?
    Here’s an introductory video:

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  5. Be Humble in your leadership
    Please ask the teachers and students for advice
    Around the world, teachers and students are being immensely inventive with their use of their smart, mobile devices and many leaders are missing out on opportunities for fear of looking weak. Asking for help connects leaders to staff and students, immediately improves working relationships and in fact, can increase the level of respect people have for a leader. Everyone in an organisation benefits from a leader who can learn and develop new skills and understandings on a weekly basis, regardless of where they come from.
Oct 25 2012

True learning is creative! … iPad, please!

The iPad empowers students to create products within any subject context, physical space and even on the move. This is why the iPad is so important in transforming education into a genuine learning experience, not a knowledge absorption space. This well known Ken Robinson video has, for a while, indicated the importance of creative process in learning. Creating is important because during the process of creating something new, a student is:

  1. the owner of that process
  2. fully immersed in the experience
  3. genuinely engaged
  4. driven by and personally connected to the learning objectives

Under these four circumstances, you create truly life-long learners, who are intrinsically motivated by their own demands and ideas.

 (picture via @gcouros)

Common misconception 1:
“My subject’s not creative”

Many teachers do not see creative process as part of their subject. The factory based education system used throughout the 20th century, isolated subjects as disconnected silos of information and creativity was removed from most of these study areas and confined specifically to the arts subjects only. This is not how the real world operates and creative thoughts and processes are demanded in most, if not all industries. All subject areas within schools (while those areas still exist), must harness both the students’ genuine will to create and the iPads power to enable this in so many forms and under so many circumstances.

Common misconception 2:
“I can’t grade & compare different creative output styles”

What exactly does grading do for a student? It gives them a record of how they compare with their classmates or even national year-group. What does this positioning mean? … nothing! The minute you leave school you will be working and competing with different groups of people of various ages and your grade comparison becomes meaningless immediately. Yes, you looked amazing in your school when up against your fellow students  performing standardised tests, but now you’re suddenly struggling against people from different backgrounds and may even look quiet incompetent.

Students also become distracted from their learning when focusing purely on their grade comparison with their friends. This removes any interest in learning for the sake of bettering oneself and even engagement with the objective of the tasks. Students take shortcuts and do anything that would increase the grade regardless of the impact it might have on truly understanding concepts or not. Students also find it very difficult, if they can do it at all, to articulate what an A or a B means. The grades themselves are arbitrary and mean nothing in terms of personal achievement and only make the lower grade achievers give up on learning anything.

This UK BBC documentary, The Classroom Experiment, covered many common traditional teaching habits that actually do harm rather than good in education, including grades:

A shifting agenda

An increasing number of educators are agreeing that:

  1. Personal creative processes should replace fixed content delivery and
  2. meaningful comments from both peers and teachers should replace meaningless grades

The iPad is both a personal creative device and a great tool for collaboration and documenting discussion. This is the basis on why and roughly how schools should push forward with 1-to-1 iPad integration.

Oct 23 2012

USA Education vs. iPad

It is common for outsiders (like me) to picture America as:

  1. conservative (traditional and proud of their American way);
  2. security conscious (all ‘foes’ must be known and controlled);
  3. having a poor standardized public education system (Something the US is currently debating publicly – “Waiting for Superman”

If true, all 3 ‘generalizations’ would have an extremely detrimental effect on introducing iPads in schools. Below is a personal view of how these 3 factors will impact on the success of iPads in transforming American education.

  1. The new mobile world needs new thinking (not conservative)
    I found a blog post, glowingly discussing the iPads potential to transform education and you might think I’d agree with it. But for me, most the writing and attached picture sum up all the obstacles facing iPad integration in the US. The article does mention collaboration and iMovie (specifically only in regards to FIlm courses), but essentially describes the iPad as a great note-taker, textbook and consumption device. That consumption is of the teacher’s education. In particular, the image advocates standardized education where one-size-fits-all and a teacher is the only source of learning. Here’s an indication of what I’m getting at in two images:

    As a simple starting point, american schools must dismantle the traditional classroom layout which isolates the students as mere educational factory products and places the teacher at the centre of all learning. This is simply not the way the world operates anymore.

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  2. The world no longer recognizes the carrot & stick external control.
    One of the driving theories behind 20th century education was the idea that given a choice, students would not want to be at school. This thinking led to the traditional carrot and stick approach, where rewards were offered for conforming to the teacher’s demands and punishments issued for breaking from the “norm.” The article mentioned above, also positively refers to how “schools can be in control of what applications are on the device as well as what students do with it.” This desire for control is only needed within the out-dated education model that expects students to conform to an education put upon them rather than expecting them to enjoy exploring and understanding the world they live in. If it’s the school’s education, a student might not feel a connection and avoid it. This is where external control is required. If the education is student-centred and demands the student prove themselves within an open-ended model, then the student can genuinely connect as best suits them and the control measures will be detrimental to the freedom and thus are not required. The iPad is a personal device and pushes a personal education agenda. The iPad is not a school device, ready to deliver an externally controlled experience of the world. Read this book for more info.
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  3. Poor education?
    Until the US reduces its devotion to 1 & 2, and stops trying to press a pre-written education into every american, then iPads will never be allowed to transform learning. As I’ve mentioned before, The professional and personal worlds we now live in are both personally curated and social. Young people now have these factors as normal life expectations and school systems that isolate individuals physically & academically will not seem relevant and will cause disconnect and continue to fail.
Oct 19 2012

iPad vs. BYOD

Yes, we are at the beginning of a revolution in Education. Yes, we have witnessed the world going mobile and yes, there is a variety of tools available to help us make learning mobile and personal.

But…

Most of the teachers around the world getting excited about this and offering advice (like me) are tech-savvy people. We have already had a play with many devices, we blog and Tweet all day, researching the best practice around the world. We are comfortable with the differences and know how those differences in features and software might affect a lesson. We also know that BYOD stands for “Bring Your Own Device!”
But “we” account for 5% of teaching staff in the world! (That’s based on at least 10 schools I know in NZ and the UK)

So…

Until the vast majority of the teaching profession are aware of what opportunities students would have with one device over another (at least 5 years), the decision a school makes must guarantee simplicity for the non-technical majority. The decision a school makes must also ensure there’s a strong, easily accessible support system and that getting what you need is straight-forward. This keeps everything simple for a non-tech-savvy teacher and offers comfort in knowing what is and isn’t possible when assessing the students output. The idea of one student saying “I can do this” and another saying “I can’t” is simply not equitable and makes things difficult for “normal” teachers. This leads us to another question:

Why should it be iPad and not one of the others?

The devices are all the same! They all:

  1. have a camera;
  2. have a screen;
  3. can ‘Skype’
  4. access the Internet
  5. do office-style documents

So why iPad?

I think I can answer that in pictures rather than words.

Here is a major section of Apple’s App Store available through the iPad directly focused on the key learning areas, not available on any other system.

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Here’s a separate area of the App Store dedicated to various subjects and special educational areas including a full section for Special Needs education.

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Here’s the Apple website section on education, with iTunesU offering 1000s of courses from every major University. Again, there’s a focus on the benefits of considering special Accessibility options and how they can actually benefit all teachers and students. Through iBooks, you receive both fiction and textbooks, how-to guides and the ability to produce your own multimedia iBooks using iBooks Author on a Mac. This Mac software is free but the absolute leader in ebook authoring software. (iBook is just Apple’s name for eBooks)

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The rival support systems just don’t compare, especially in the eyes of a non-geek teacher.

Android.com offers no education section but does specialise in games.
What is Open Source? Some of the geeky teachers might use ‘Open source’ as some sort of argument when choosing a device. This is where Google offer the code for how a device works to the world of geeky programmers and they can do whatever the like with it. This sounds good, but for schools, it means little. It makes the Android system more buggy and prone to viruses and crashing. These issues destroy both lessons and confidence amongst a generation of teachers trying to grapple with new learning pedagogies.

Google Play’s site (The main Android site) does not place it’s education section on the home page and when you find it in ‘Categories’ it only divided into Free and Paid with no focus on the various needs within education. Most apps in this section are early-childhood based and you have to scroll though page after page to discover what’s available. Not good for a teacher who’s new to this game.

Conclusion

You see, it’s not about the device it’s about the support system you can connect to and how much that system is designed for education. In this regard, Apple is the only company doing anything specifically for schools. Google and Microsoft continue to focus their efforts on business needs and hope that schools find a use for their business tools. A school near me had a technician who was adamant that it be BYOD rather than just iPad. 4 months into the programme, he was preparing advice documents for the following year to say iPads only!

Future
There’s also the matter of statistics and future developments. iPads have been bought by schools and universities in their millions! There are at least 50 iPads in education for every competing tablet of any make , and given the conferences I’ve been to, that’s probably generous to the “others”. The competition is eating into the iPad market but not in education. What does this mean to schools? We can support each other through this tricky transitional period in education’s history, if we are all on the same platform. The developers, who make the apps with an educational focus and offer the support for schools are nearly all iPad based. Over the next 5 years, the gap between what can be done in schools with iPads and their alternatives will increase exponentially and this makes iPads the only truly sensible choice for any school of ‘normal’ staff and students.

P.S.

Oh and the Flash thing. Yes, iPads don’t play all those Flash based educational websites but Adobe, who make Flash have stopped making it! and so the next 2 years will have every website moving away from flash (they’ve already started.) So Flash is no longer an argument and the new Windows 8 Tablets will not play it either. The reason it all came to a crashing end was because Flash running in the background on the mobile device swallows up battery life. Something Apple were the first to recognise and never went near it. The other companies are now realising. Adobe’s given up.