Monthly Archives: August 2010

is investing in #ipad’s for schools ultimately doomed to failure? #etextbooks #ebooks

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I’ve been writing (for a while now) a post on how to bring the ipad into my school as a justified and relevant tool for use in the classroom.  It’s an appealing device with a lot of impressive functionality and certainly some schools may have got some good use out of it already.  However in reading an article I picked up on twitter the other day (link posted by @ict_works) on the 10 worst practices in ICT I came across the following point:

6. Make a big bet on an unproven technology (especially one based on a closed/proprietary standard) or single vendor, don’t plan for how to avoid ‘lock-in

Let’s acknowledge that the speed of technological changes almost always outpaces the ability of educational planners to keep up. In response, some policymakers seek to get ‘ahead of the curve’ by placing large bets on new, largely unproven technologies in an effort to ‘leapfrog’ what is happening in other education systems. In other cases, education systems effectively outsource most of the capacity to manage activities in this area to a vendor or other third party. There are potentially valid reasons to pursue such courses of action in some cases, but they are inherently very risky, especially if clear plans are not made on how to ‘exit’ such decisions and relationships.

I also read through an article by Tony Vincent on Apple’s app volume purchasing agreement (which is a necessary step for supporting large amounts of ipads in a school).  The ultimate conclusion he made wasnt very positive about the process saying it was ‘confusing and frustrating’.

I have never been a fan of the rush to flood a school with Interactive White Boards and applying that same cynicism to ipads I still think they could be potentially good devices, but in light of the point above on making big bets on unproven technologies from single vendors and difficulties with Apple’s volume purchasing agreement I think not rushing for ipad’s is a good idea!  Other schools may trumpet their flashy new tablets but I think a school which waits a bit is a wise school.

So what should they wait for?

1. Other tablet competitors

This one worries me – taking the ipod and iphone as an example other competitors still have not been able to come up with something to compete.  Android and the HTC platforms are a possible competitor to the iphone but they are too fragmented still.

2.  Apple to improve their app volume purchasing system

Again this worries me – Apple’s intransigence when it comes to certain developer rules and regulations indicates to me that their app volume purchasing system probably wont be improved in response to school input.

3. Publishers to come on board in a big way with etextbooks

This will be good and I think it will happen.  It will also open up the possibility for schools to source tablets from other competitors or even allow students to use different tablets in the same class.

I think I will still complete my other iPad post – however I think it was good to write this blog as it means I will continue to appraise ipad’s with a healthy dose of cynicism and a good dose of realism.

Using Google Realtime search in lessons

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Been a while since I blogged – decided to pick an easy topic to get back into the groove with.  I saw a post in my Google Reader about Google’s updated realtime search and decided to give it a try (find it at
http://www.google.co.uk/realtime
).  My first choice of search term was an obvious one – Chile (related to the miners who are trapped).  The resulting stream was pretty interesting containing some personal insights on the miners predicaments but mixed in with links to content I had already seen a number of times.

I see two possible uses for this in a classroom

1: Tracking an ongoing and relevant event such as Gulf Oil disaster or the Chile Miners.  Perhaps even an event like the Papal visit to the UK could be an interesting one to follow.
2: Definitely as a basic backchannel for presentations.  I especially liked that you could click on a hashtag in a result and it filtered it to just twitter.com results.

Issues?
  1. It takes a short while to update – so its certainly not ‘realtime’
  2. looking back it doesn’t seem to have much of an archive – I tried using the time slider to go back to the previous night when #ukedchat takes place and it didn’t have any results
  3. If the search term is too popular you will have to sort through a lot of guff in order to get to the right amount – this could be an issue as some of the guff could be links to malicious sites (a common practice on twitter)
overall though i am very impressed with the site – its a good implementation of a modern expectation of search