Wednesday 3-11-11

I spent the last few days attending the CUE conference in Palm Springs. I attended several seminars on the iPad and a few that spoke to using the smartboard in the classroom. I have so much information that I am trying to sort it so that I can begin to use it. Once I have completed that task I will post anything that we are thinking about using in the classroom.
    On par with the seminars learning value were conversations with those in the lines waiting for the classes. I made it a point to ask whether they were using iPads, what role they played etc. One thing that is certain is that the interest in the iPad is huge. Any seminar that had the word iPad attached was packed with many standing for the typically 1 hour session.

Back to the classroom.

It was time to set up the emails for the students – steps
1.    Write email AUP addendum
2.    Define email format – gradyearfirstnamelastinitial@harborday.org - ex 11jamesg@harborday.org (this one is not active)
3.    Have students create password
4.    IT looks over password to make sure it follows rules
5.    Have IT dept. create the addresses and passwords
6.    Create and test the emails in class
Items 1-5 worked well and took about 2 days (except the creation of the AUP which took about 1 week but can be used from this point on). Everything was great until #6. The first mistake was entirely mine in that the iPad seems to automatically define the email as IMAP. So we entered them all this way and none of them worked. Later that day I was working with IT and we discovered that we needed to change the accounts to POP. This required us to delete the old version and create a new email on the iPad.
    I allotted 10 minutes in class to have this happen, too much I thought, but of course for the ONLY 7 students it turned out to be not enough. Some went quickly through the screens, others slowly, some listed to details, some didn’t. Lastly and as it turns out most importantly is some remembered the capital letters in their password, some didn’t (really no one remembered the capital letters its just that those whose emails worked didn’t have any cap letters).
    Next time I will take screen shots (Hold down power button and home button at the same time until your see/hear a flash – then it goes into the photos folder) and display them on the smartboard.
    Outside of that we have been working through the class rather effectively with the students focused on math and not on the tech (until of course I think of some idea which takes us off track again).
    Again the method used to turn in the homework assignments has yet to be decided on. The dropbox app had begun to work well but sometimes the students have trouble accessing and remembering to save the file with their name on it. With the emailing of homework it would be attached to the email and name included. I anticipate that the email version might be harder to keep and access the files. We will see.