Tuesday, November 22, 2011

iPads day one

This first day was a bit of a blur. I couldn't wait for them to show up so that I could get started right away. I am in the middle of a research paper with my seniors, so I wanted them to have access to the internet for their research as soon as possible. In our school, computer time can be hard to come by.

The first step was for me to image all 30 in my cart. This took me about 4 hours. It might have been faster if my 2 1/2 year old daughter wasn't running around my classroom at the same time. This process went pretty smoothly since I worked on it immediately after my training on Monday with Dan McCormack from Apple. In the training, we set up the image so all that I had to do was sync them when I got back to my classroom. My concern is that I want to create a new backup image but can't seem to find that option again. I haven't looked to hard yet since it's not a major priority.

The following day was such fun. The kids were SOOOOO excited to finally get to play with them. I had students peering from windows into my classroom and several claim to be new students. I am likely to become a very popular teacher.

I began class with some basic procedures and rules then basically gave them 30 minutes to play. Their only direction was to play with ALL of the apps so that they could become comfortable with the functionality. They often got stuck playing with photo booth for quite some time, but I think that they got a chance to get a lot of stuff out of their system.

The last 15 minutes of class, I gave them a simple assignment to do some work on the wiki page that they have been using for the last month. It was really nice for them to have something to work on that was familiar. I didn't want to add too many new pieces to the class at once.

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