by John J. Doherty and Kevin Ketchner
Perhaps the hardest part of owning an iPad is trying to avoid the addictive world of Angry Birds, the favorite game app of the new British Prime Minister. For just $5 you, too, can attack pigs with hard-headed flying birds.
That kind of distraction is exactly what many faculty worry about when we ponder the place of tools such as the iPad in the classroom. We fear that our students will be more engaged with their games or Twitter feeds than with our lectures. But the iPad, the iPhone, the Droid, and the flood of other new tablets and smart phones finding their way into our classrooms are not the cause of student inattention. These gadgets are just tools, and student engagement depends on good teaching whether or not a cool gadget is present. In Technological and Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge (.pdf), Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler note that we need to understand not only various technologies but also how the technologies affect our pedagogy.
The iPad is a good case in point. Since the iPad’s launch in April 2010 some educators have begun to examine its place in education. Our experience in using the iPad for teaching is that it is useful in two distinct ways, consumption and production, although it currently is more useful for the former than the latter.
Consumption
The iPad is very obviously a tool for consuming information and media. Reading publications such as the New York Times or watching movies through the Netflix app seems to be a natural fit for the device. In the classroom, we have been using iPads as a way to deliver information to our students.
For example, in a course on Reinventing King Arthur, John used the Kindle app on his iPad to give his students access to some of the course readings. In fact, he chose the course readings based on their availability in ebook format, and in one instance, John was able to bring back into his course a text that had been out of print for almost 20 years! In another case, students who chose to download the Kindle version of a new book were able to do so several days before others were able to order the printed version (although this might have been an error on Amazon’s part). The students used their own devices, mobile or otherwise, to read the ebooks, which was possible because the Kindle app is no longer limited to the Kindle device. The app can be used on PCs or Macs, desktops or laptops, iPads, iPhones, Droids, and iPod Touches. One of its best features is that you can read the same book on various devices, and the app will remember where you left off. You can start reading a book on your laptop and then later switch to reading on your phone without losing your place.
Kevin has been using the iPad for an Honors course on the cultural impact of comic books. Marvel, DC, and other publishers have iPad apps (iTunes link) that present comics in sharp, HD-like quality. When you can zoom in on details of comics in high definition, the panels take on an immersive quality.
The following panel is a screen capture of the Iron Man (2004) #1 book, available in the Marvel app.
Students in the course can download the movies Iron Man (2008) and V for Vendetta (2006) via the iTunes Store or other media sources. By examining both the comic serial and the movie versions of these stories, students see how the superhero movie genre has reinvented the comic.
Students can also use reference apps such as Wikipanion (Wikipedia) to find out details about characters in these stories (such as Guy Fawkes, the original fundamentalist terrorist who is burned in effigy in the UK every November 5th).
The ebooks John uses in his course include built-in dictionaries that make it convenient for students to look up unusual words, which is invaluable for texts based on older versions of the English language. The iPad apps can also read the texts aloud.
Here are some other apps that we’ve experimented with and have found useful for teaching.
| App | Description |
|---|---|
 iAnnotate PDF ($9.99) |
Syncs PDF documents between your desktop and your iPad. It also lets you highlight and underline and add commentary, which is great for our e-reserve readings. |
 CineXPlayer ($3.99) |
Delivers Xvid movies to the iPad through iTunes. Includes subtitles and TV/VGA output. The advantage to this app is that it supports more than just iTunes native formats. |
 Netflix (Free) |
The app is free, but you need a Netflix subscription to use it. You get access to the Netflix streaming library. John has had his students view the BBC TV series Merlin (2008) and the movies Camelot (1967) and Excalibur (1981). |
Accessibility
The iPad is opening doors for some differently abled users. Its built-in text reader can give voice to anything downloaded to iBooks. Dragon Dictation is a free iPad app that uses voice recognition to create text email messages and even Facebook and Twitter updates. The iPad’s magnification and closed-captioning features also make content available for a wide range of people. The New York Times recently reported on how an iPad elicited reactions from a 7-year-old boy who has a severe motor neuron disease. The same article noted that autistic children are also engaging more with this tool than a regular computer.
Production
As a production tool—that is, for generating rather than just consuming content—the iPad has plenty of potential, but it still has lots of room for improvement. Much of this post was written in the Pages app on the iPad, using the on-screen keyboard. Or at least it was until we started getting annoyed when we typed too many extra n‘s and m‘s because those keys are uncomfortably close to the space bar for our not-so-nimble digits. So we just synced the iPads to our desktops and continued typing from there, using real keyboards.
The on-screen keyboard works well enough for some things: browsing the web, searching the App Store, typing things into Wikipedia. In our opinion, though, an external keyboard is an essential add-on if you want to use the iPad for serious writing.
In addition to Pages, the other two iWork apps—Numbers and Keynote— for the iPad are useful production tools . Each costs $9.99 from the iTunes Store. iWork will soon be available to the NAU campus through a site license, and it is a decent alternative to the MS Office applications. John developed some of his course documentation in Pages and Numbers.
Drawbacks
Some of the drawbacks to using these apps include lack of easy cloud syncing and inability to print directly from the iPad. That said, the MobileMe iDisk app does provide some access to the MobileMe cloud (which requires a subscription) or the beta of iWork.com. There are rumors of an about-to-be-released Google Apps app for the iPad and Android that will allow for editing of Google docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Apple is undoubtedly working on updates to their products to fix these and other shortcomings, and they are also exploring cloud-based computing, but if you want to take the iPad plunge now, you should be aware of these limitations. Syncing the iPad to your computer also leaves a lot to be desired, because you need to go through iTunes to make it work at all. The advantages of using the iPad over a netbook as a mobile production tool are currently few.
Recently, we discovered two note-taking apps for the iPad that let you use your finger or a stylus. We tested Penultimate and WhiteNote in meetings and in the classroom. The former is pretty slick but simple. The latter needs some work, especially in how it uses the screen and the writing space. But it offers the bonus of letting you browse and import from the web, PDFs, and other formats, and it also uses cloud-based resources for saving and sharing PDFs via Google Docs.
The iPad and some smart phones are beginning to offer access to learning management systems (LMS), such as Blackboard Learn and Moodle. Mobile apps are available for both of these LMS, but their functionality is quite limited, although the Blackboard Mobile Learn app syndicates content from that LMS quite well. For the moment, though, both Blackboard Learn and Moodle are best accessed on the iPad through a browser.
Lessons Learned and In Progress
The iPad holds much promise for education, but it is still in its infancy. Missing but available soon with the impending release of iOS 4.2 release are the ability to multitask (that is, to run more than one app at a time), print from the iPad, and even output information to other devices through AirPlay. The ability to easily display the content of your iPad on an overhead projector is essential for educators, and we hope Apple addresses that shortcoming quickly. Apple’s prohibition of Adobe’s Flash on the iPad means that some of our preferred media sources, such as streaming films available through our university library, are not viewable on the device. 
However, the Skyfire browser, which converts Flash video to a format that works on Apple’s mobile devices, might soon solve that problem.
The most obvious lesson we learned is that students like using the iPads for classes. It wasn’t at all hard to get the students to use the iPads. It was hard to get the students to give them back.
John J. Doherty is an instructional designer at Northern Arizona University’s e-Learning Center and an instructor in NAU’s First Year Seminar and Honors programs. He has been studying the Arthurian Legend formally since 1989, but has been reading and writing about it much longer. Kevin Ketchner is a librarian with NAU’s Cline Library and also teaches in Honors. His love of comic books has generated a strong interest in visual literacy and narrative.
