Just this week I went to a Get to know your iPad workshop at the Apple Store in Sydney. If I apply KWL (what I Know, what I Want to know, and what I Learned) this is what happened:
K- I already know what the home screen is and the home button since I own an iPhone. I already know what the iPod app is for. There was no differentiation there between people who have just turned the iPad on for the first time and those who have been playing for a while and have come to get the most out of it.
W- I wanted to know how to get rid of the ‘permanent’ apps on screen such as contacts and lock the apps in place so students cannot delete any apps. The Apple store’s ‘facilitator’ said you can’t but all the demo models on the tables had apps locked so you can’t move or delete them. I need to do more research on this.
I also wanted to learn how to add books to the iBooks app. Apparently the school iPad needs a software upgrade so that pdf ebooks can be directly downloaded from the internet
L- I have learned that you can download an app called ‘pages’ part of the iWork collection. It behaves just like Word- that would be a good app for students. I also learned that you can group apps in folders by dragging one app on top of another. You can even rename the folders eg Maths games.
I spent my travel time on the train reading a very interesting ebook ‘From the Creative Minds of 21st Century Librarians’ problem was that I could not download it directly to the iBooks app so I could not bookmark it. The book contains wonderful library lesson plans linked to the Information Literacy standards in America but those standards are very close to our own Australian Information Literacy standards.
Point is that I have been reading this ebook on the iPad. I found it very easy to read and I could change the text size from small to very big by ‘pinching’ or ‘pushing out’ the screen
Miss H
The features and the recommendations of the iPad,are really great and also useful to know,it is good that you want to learn about the adding the books to the iBooks app,so this is a good topic to learn,in fact i also want to know some of the features about it,so the things you tell,are seems to be useful for me.