Auditioning the iPad

Our school district is currently in the process of vetting the iPad for a potential 1:1 program at our middle school. Part of that process has been to get first generation iPads in the hands of the teachers on the 5th-8th grade leadership team, the administrative team, and the IT department (my husband). My husband Matt brought the iPad home so we could see how our children - Megan, 10 and John, 5 - interact with it. This has been fascinating to watch.Our children have experience with touch screens as they are allowed to use our iPhones so they were instantly very comfortable with the iPad interface.

A week into the experiment we have found that our 10-year old has gravitated from the iPad back to the desktop and netbook, while our 5-year old continues to be drawn to the iPad. He uses it exclusively for games, and he also seems to prefer to use a stylus with it.

Megan uses the computer primarily for chatting in Gaggle, surfing the internet, using Skype to talk to relatives and watching videos. I think part of the reason she prefers the computer over the iPad is her comfort with typing. She has pretty good typing skills and complains that she makes more mistakes on the iPad. She also is very disappointed that that there is no video for Skype. The Skype issue may get cleared up in iPad 2.0.

Something interesting that we have noticed about Megan that we think probably is transferable to other members of her generation, is the expectation that an application or device will be capable of everything they can imagine. For example, she expects the video camera to be capable of sending e-mail and to play any video. The lack of a camera on the first generation iPad is a big negative for her.

Last week I decided to force myself to use nothing but the iPad for a day. On that particular day I needed to create a poster for an upcoming orchestra event. I would normally use the Adobe Suite on my desktop, so in order to complete the task on the iPad I had to first find an app. I chose Phoster and downloaded it for $1.99. Although the templates were very limiting I was able to find one that I liked and complete the task with great results. Although the Adobe Suite would allow unlimited options for my creativity, for this task I was able to take a screenshot, upload the photo, change the text and complete the entire project in about half an hour. With all of the options in Adobe I could have easily spent much more time than that and not necessarily had a better final product.

While we are interested in whether or not the iPad is the ideal tool, my husband the IT guy is also very concerned with more practical concerns such as battery life, cost, durability, portability, management and support. Netbooks have more moving parts: spinning hard drives and the dreaded hinge There is not yet an app management solution for Android tablets. At this point, with the information we have, iPad seems the best solution for 1:1 in our district.

I am eager to hear your comments on the matter.