Ipads 3-15-11

We finalized the email AUP and handed it out to the students today. The hope is that now we can more easily turn in assignments and communicate with the students. Up until now we have not really had much of an alternative to using the website to download the lessons, hand in homework or communicate with the students. In fact today, for some reason (we have yet to figure out why) one of the students could not download the lesson from the website and he really had no alternative. Certainly something on my mind is creating the “plan b and c” for technical issues with the equipment. In the end he left the computer with me, I placed the Dropbox app on the iPad and he now can access the lesson. More on dropbox in a minute.
The class moved ahead and with the lesson downloaded we move to check on their homework assignments on the iPad. As we have yet to create a format for turning in the assignments, I manually went around the class and looked at their homework slides. Next step is to correct the homework problems and review any questions. For this they do not use the downloaded lesson from earlier. It is a little different than the order for the paper class and I am working on the sequence. I think that this is the best.
1.    Arrive in class and download lesson
2.    As the lesson is downloading – place the homework assignment in the Dropbox app
3.    Open their homework assignment and correct
4.    Open up the lesson for the day and take notes.

Outside of the download issue we all worked on practice problems and the class went fairly smoothly.

DropBox app – one of the issues here is that they all log on under the same account and can all access the folders and files and therefore copy/change them. Therefore the best thing to do is to turn in homework immediately upon entering the class, then I can place it in my folder because it is shared.
One of the inherent dangers of this electronic distribution is the ability to share. If one student completes their assignment in the afternoon then he/she can immediately send it to friends to be copied. I am unclear on the solution and perhaps it’s as easy as that now anyway. I will certainly need to be careful about putting tests on the computer as it could be distributed while they are taking the exam.