Since I don’t actually have an iPad yet (emphasis on yet), I’m free to devote what I time I do have for it to pure speculation about the joys and trials it might bring to my life. For personal use, I see only joys. Maybe there would only be joys for school use too, but I admit to many questions about how we might convert our entire campus over to iPad junkies, as our fearless leader evidently envisions.
First, well…does Blackboard even work on the thing? We’re locked into Blackboard for course management, and Blackboard has lots of building blocks, like Wimba and so forth, that use flash. Apple isn’t even on speaking terms with flash, so how can this work?
I don’t know, but here’s a video demo of Blackboard for iPad.
Cool looking application. Does it solve the problems of incompatible Blackboard plug-ins? Who knows?
I have the Blackboard application on my iPhone, and I find it extremely frustrating. It shows me when new content has been created in my courses, but I can’t respond to it from my phone. I can see if a student has left a message on the discussion board, for example, but I can’t reply to it. The video above appears to indicate that this is not the case on the iPad. The app is meant to be much more functional than the previous app released for iPhone.
Yes, that’s nice, but do you mean only for native Blackboard content or for third party extras as well?
That will be one of the first questions I answer for myself when I finally get my very own iPad. I’m going to have to buy one, you see, before I can find out whether I need one or can even use one for what I think I want to do with it.
Meanwhile, I have played with the Evernote application on an iPad, and I think it is about the coolest learning tool ever invented. I oooh and aaah over it while I stood around in the Apple store in Madison hogging a demo model for an unseemly amount of time.
This, not the book reader, is why the iPad is a better device for the classroom than the Kindle.
