The Center has one iPad that the Technical Interns in Education have been busy exploring in the past few weeks for the best free Apps and even some paid Apps for education. This project will continue throughout the summer with the goal of having a Brown Bag presentation before fall semester or early into fall semester. While we’d love to have more iPads for College of Education faculty to check out and begin their own exploration, the iPad is in high demand across globe and they are currently on back-order along with the various accessories for the iPad. Hopefully by the time fall semester starts, we’ll have a couple more floating around for checkout.
In the meantime, we’ve put together some resource links for the iPad including app reviews, app recommendations, and reviews of the iPad. Also, TIES Andrea and Molly have created a video review of how to use the iPad and some of the apps, including the iBook reader. Lastly, Mashable.com has an article on Steve Job’s address at the D8 conference in Los Angeles this week addressing the phenomenal growth in the sales of iPad and if tablets (like the iPad) will someday replace the PC. In it, Jobs is quoted saying, “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.”
FYI – In one week of travel between the Games, Learning and Society conference in Madison, WI and an S3T3 workshop in Southfield, MI I was able to blow through the 250MB plan on the 3G iPad. That is without watching too many videos -my daughter did watch a couple 10 minute Word World episodes on youtube
– mostly Web surfing & Google Maps.