“I’ve been using iPads in education for as long as there have been iPads available to use in education,” Fraser Speirs writes for Macworld. “I implemented the world’s first whole-school, one-to-one iPad program, in which all students in my school use iPads full time.”
“The iPad has served us very well over the last four years but, recently I had grown concerned that iPad was always going to remain the little brother to the Mac,” Speirs writes. “Before WWDC last year, I wrote a blog post in which I outlined the limitations of iOS that we’d discovered when using the platform full-time for serious productivity work.”
Speirs writes, “Last year, I didn’t get much that was on my iOS 7 wish-list. (We did get AirDrop and it has been transformational in how easy it is to move large data files around the classroom.) But at WWDC 2014, Apple delivered on a huge chunk of my wish-list, and I couldn’t be happier.”
Find out why Apple’s iOS 8 will be a big deal for educators in the full article here.
So iOS makes you smarter? I wonder what Android does to the brain then.
iOS 8 does look great! Really great.
I also share the reservations about iCloud drive. While its nice for novices to find each file with the related app, the pairing of apps and files becomes is a very limited form of work organization.
My solution would be to allow the creation project folders that any kind of file can go in. Novices would continue with the simple file-in-app model until they needed to organize some files themselves.
Then on the Mac side the “Documents” folder could become the unified container of file-by-app and file-by-project and suddenly all files would be in the same place on all devices. Apple could hide the rest of the file system in Finder from novices.
I am sure Apple is working out their own solution.
iPads have been a big success story at my wife’s primary school, where 4 and 5 year-olds have made great progress in their early years education – thanks to the iPad.
Likewise, teachers there effectively use ‘2Simple EYFS’ to chart their pupils’ progress.