iPad - First Impressions
After some subtle hints, Santa was good to me this year and bought me an iPad. :)
Below are my reflections on using it after a week....
STARTING POINTS & SUCCESSES:
Mel Cashion recommended me The Age app which has been great for school holidays. Love that I can download the newspaper and read it from wherever I am. The 30 day trial has been great and will more than likely continue with an education subscription (at only $22.50 for the whole year why not ?)
Jenny Ashby and her iPad trial blog have given me some good ideas and apps to download. I'm keen to take a look at more of these and see how they could be used for teaching and learning. After talk about the shutdown of Delicious, I'm moved my bookmarks across to Diigo. After a bit of reading, I've now installed the web app for bookmarking. This allows me to move between my comp, iPad and iPhone. :)
I've also downloaded the Kindle app and had a play with iBooks. Looking forward to being able to purchase books now online to read.
Tweet Deck is another app that works great on the iPad and allows me to keep up with the happenings on Twitter.
FRUSTRATIONS:
Having issues setting my home e-mail account up. Haven't really tried to hard with this, but need to look into it. I also need to work out a way to manage my email better. All my email accounts are set to download to my computer and remove themselves from the mail server once I've downloaded them.
Apps that I have started to enjoy using on my iPhone arn't that great on the iPad.
An example of this is my to-do list, Remember the Milk. It's great on the web, and great on my iPhone, but just doesn't work as well on the iPad. In the meantime I'm using loading up the webpage on my iPad until I find something better or they make an iPad app. I'm still trying to get my head around what is the best way to work across my computer, iPad and sometimes my iPhone. I was playing around with creating spreadsheet using the Numbers App on my iPad, but then wanted to make it available for me to access anywhere. I had also been playing with Dropbox and was hoping I could "send" it there somehow, but didn't have much success with that. I'm thinking that Google Docs could be an option, but I find working in Google Docs rather slow at times.
Keen to find an app that would be good for taking notes, but also allows for you to draw pictures, highlight etc.. At the moment I use Evernote for taking notes and having them available across my PC and iPhone. I've heard that my new school has purcahsed some iPads to use and during our induction week, someone is coming up in to give as a few tutorials on using them. I'm hoping to use this as an opportunity to seek some answers to questions and a chance to find out some more. In the meantime, my great PLN on Twitter has been a great support.