Guest post by Brian Kotts: How I Became a Pad Teacher

I asked Teacher at Linnaeus University Mr. Brian Kotts to be a make a guest post to my blog and i am really glad he did, so thanks for your effort Brian. We have 6 High school iPad project going on, so i enjoyed this information a lot. This is great collaboration which Twitter community makes possible. 

A recent study showed that the use of iPad in schools is expected to surpass computers in five years. This may seem inevitable considering that children have become more skilled in using computers than activities like riding bikes or swimming.

Noticing that most students owned iPads, it dawned on me that we put them to more productive use. The disruptive nature of the iPad has facilitated in the flipping my classrooms, which has transformed how the students approach their learning.

Here are the apps that we’ve been actively using in the past two months:

1. Penultimate

Turned my iPad into a smartboard allowing mirroring of the notes and sketches in multiple colors. These are then separated into topics or projects later emailed to students or posted to a blog in PDF format.

2. Apple’s iWork suite

Pages for word processing, Keynote for presentation and Numbers for spreadsheet. With the integration of iCloud, it’s now easier to move docs in and out of the apps. Apple’s Open In… feature works too if one uses DropBox or SugarSync.

3. Dropbox

Has been excellent for backup as it automatically syncs files across multiple devices, and offers remote file access and sharing. It has also doubled as a PDF- and document-reader,

4. Instapaper

Great for reseach and archiving. “Read Later” list, whilst has allowed for better scanning of titles, easy management with Archive and Delete buttons, and faster refresh times.

5. TED

TED talk has 900+ videos from some of the world’s most fascinating people: education radicals, tech geniuses, medical mavericks, business gurus and music legends. Students have been able to bookmark or download their favorite TEDTalk for playback later.

6. Evernote

After each student registered for an account, we created individual and collective notebooks for sharing and collaboration especially for research and group assignments.

7. Skype

This has mostly been used for podcasts, lectures with guest lecturers, video conferencing with other classrooms and virtual tours with experts in various fields.

8. Osfoora

The Perfect iPad Twitter App.

9. Goodreader

GoodReader has hundreds of functionalities and support for different file types. Not only has it been able to re-format files for easy reading on the iPad, but also access to documents stored online on services like MobileMe, Google Docs, Dropbox and more and downloading of files straight from URLs.

10. GarageBand

Using this tutorial made creating podcasts quite seamless. The coolest function is to uploading the podcasts to iTunes for students to subscribe.

11. Wikipanion

Wikipedia is the number one site that students go to when they begin researching a topic. It’s features are far better than the native wikipedia app. These include smart autocompletion, much like Google search, keeping track of the last one hundred pages, uses geolocation to detect where you are and suggests relevant articles based on that location.

12. Dictionary & Thesaurus

Some one million words and definitions based upon the Random House Unabridged Dictionary are included, while the Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus boasts more than 90,000 synonyms.