I’ve been bed-ridden the past two days, and suddenly a major limitation of a class set of iPads became glaringly clear: if I’m not there, the iPads can’t be used. Not that this is a bad thing at all–in fact, it’s made me think that even if I did teach in a 1-to-1 situation, would I allow iPads to be used with a substitute? Just one of those questions that come to me when I have 48 hours of sleeping, TV watching, and Internet reading to do in between purging a virus from my being…
Which, by the way, I’m blaming said virus for the decision I made today. See, my 4th hour class has done such a great job with the iPads and made me feel like I can really do this, adapt my classroom to an iPad medium, that next week I’m going to try to use them with a couple of other classes as well.
Just like with my 4th hour, I am starting small–one app next week, perhaps another app the week following–because not making copies or collecting papers has been really quite nice in my 4th hour. (They can still re-read the articles we read on the iPad, since they’re linked on my syllabus.) And another curiousity of mine: will reading a little more on the iPad unwittingly prep my students for the State Reading Test, since that test is completely online? Teaching them how to highlight text, just like they can on that test, and how to read on a screen, might actually be helpful, in addition to the more complex texts we’ll be reading in the next few months.
It might be a colossal failure. I might be cannonballing into the deep end with no life preserver in sight (I can’t swim, so this metaphor is especially apt). But as the cliche goes, I’ll never know until I try.
So here goes…
