Like a lot of other gadget loving and tech hungry people I went out and purchased an Apple iPad last weekend when it went on sale. I purchased the iPad 16GB version as I was more interested in finding out about the functionality of the iPad from a student use perspective than storing a bunch of video and music files for entertainment.
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The Apple iPad has been reviewed to death by many expert reviewers so I won’t go into the details of what the iPad does and whether I think it’s good or not, you can read full reviews on sites like Engadget, WSJ and NYTimes. I instead would like to offer the top five reasons to get an iPad if you’re a student.
1. It’s all about the screen quality and orientation flexibility
First of all. it’s important to note how beautiful the screen on the iPad is for viewing and how easy it is to view from various angles. Given that students can spend hours and hours researching and reading on the web a nice screen can make for a much more tolerable experience when doing online research. It is also easy to view web pages in landscape or portrait mode, whichever suits that website best, you just rotate the iPad to be either vertical or horizontal. For instance, if the web page is long and narrow then rotate the iPad vertically to see more in portrait mode. If the web page is wide and geared towards typical wide screen displays, then rotate the iPad horizontally into landscape mode. Below you can see how the New York Times newspaper appears differently in landscape versus portrait mode, personally I prefer portrait mode on such a site as you can see more of the headlines and layout.
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2. Using the Blackboard iPad App
So many schools use the online application Blackboard to organize courses and distribute class content that an app for the iPad was begging to be made, and of course it was. Blackboard introduced their Mobile Learn iPad app that allows you to access your classes Blackboard content from the iPad in an easy and intuitive manner. Now you can see class announcements, discussion, syllabus and more using the iPad Blackboard Mobile application. The app is free to download and any school that has Blackboard can simply enable the iPad content delivery feature for free.
3. Learning the periodic table of elements and making science learning interactive and fun
Every student at some point in their education has to take chemistry, and that in turn means you have to memorize and know about a bunch of elements in the periodic table. It’s not exactly fun stuff as looking at the periodic table is a little bit of a slog, but an app for the iPad called simply “The Elements” makes learning the 118 elements a lot more interesting. You can use the app to view the molecular structures of elements, rotate them, read the story behind the element and discover why it is important. This is all done in a very graphical and interactive nature, not like staring at a stale textbook, so learning becomes a lot more fun.
I’m sure many other apps will pop up that make learning science on the iPad very interactive and fun. Imagine rotating and zooming around the internals of humans for an Anatomy app, we’ll see an app for such a thing soon!
4. Apple iTunes University
Apple iTunes U is a collection of over 250,000 free lectures, video, films and other resources available directly from the iTunes store. Schools such as Stanford, Harvard and Cambridge have posted lecture videos online. You can take complete courses or just view a lecture around a single topic. Either way, for students and lifelong learners the free content and learning available through iTunes U is amazing. The iPad is really quite perfect as a medium for viewing the video based content. The screen is larger and much more pleasing for viewing than the iPod Touch, but it is easier to carry around than a MacBook. Using the iPad you can learn anywhere, anytime and for free.
5. iWork for iPad and Google docs
The iPad is not a fully fledged computer so you won’t be able to do everything you can typically do on say a MacBook or PC. However, one thing that’s important for getting school work done is a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application so you’d at least want these kinds of apps available for the iPad. While the popular and ubiquitous Microsoft Office is not available for the iPad you can use the iWork suite of apps from Apple to at least do some basic work that involves creating documents. The iWorks suite includes Keynote, Pages and Numbers so your presentation, word processing and spreadsheet needs may be met to a degree with these apps. Granted, it won’t be easy to use the on screen keyboard to type a long term paper, but it would be conducive to editing existing docs a bit. If you get an external keyboard for the iPad then typing would become a whole lot faster and writing a long paper on the iPad a feasible task.
iPad for Student Usage Conclusion
While I don’t view the iPad as a must have device for students, and I don’t see it replacing a laptop for many things a student has to do, I can see how the iPad might be very useful for a lot of learning tasks. Since the iPad weighs only 1.5lbs and has battery life surpassing 10 hours it could be a great companion device to take around on campus or those times you don’t need a fully fledged laptop. While there may not be a ton of education apps geared towards the iPad right now, the list will surely grow and therefore make the iPad more and more appealing as an educational device down the road.
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The Blackboard app is definitely one that I should check out. I find that quite useful in organizing stuff. But of course a student will want to check out games too when using a shiny new iPad. Anyway, I was in search for a new game app and now I have certainly chosen my puzzle game – the best puzzle game for iPad – StarFaces! Number one in my games list.
Blackboard app will definately be a great help to me as a student. I also would like to add that if anyone from Course Compass’ My Math Lab is out there, please make an app or use an alternative to Flash so i can pull my work with the ipad.
I would like course compass one an ipad/ ipod touch as well. Please
I would Also like course compass for the ipad. I hope developers see this!
Course Compass is something iPAd would have to have onboard in order for me to purchase an iPAd. Actually, i would purchase an ipad today if Course Compass and Evolve had apps for ipAd. These are big parts Health occupation students needs (nursing rn lvn lpn cna medical asst, EMT, paramedic, resp care practitioner, radiology, dental asst etc……………………….
Get on it App developers
Course Compass on iPad, please.
The problem is that Course Compass uses Flash and the iPad/iPad 2 and iPod Touch do not allow Flash to be run. If Apple were to change their mind on that, you could simply use the browser to view Course Compass as you would on a computer instead of needing a native app. Either way, hopefully Pearson who makes Course Compass come up with a solution.
Not being able to use Course Compass is the one thing preventing me from buying an iPad.
We need course compass. Goofy college students wanting to get a silly education and use apples product. Why dont you just slap your customers steve?
I would love to use course compass math lab on iPad 2.