Photo #259: iPad Sad

I see lots of articles and blog posts about how wonderful the iPad is, and my students would definitely agree. Our school acquired ten of them at the end of May, and I had the use of one for the entire summer. So far this school year, I have had almost exclusive use of all ten of them. We have used several of the apps. Today we used the Glow Doodle to practice spelling words, and practiced math facts with Pop Math.

Last week I had the kids use the Pages app to write sentences. We had two goals: first to practice sentence structure and spelling words, and second, to get experience using a word processing program. Each student will have their own blog soon, and they are building skills toward being able to do that. Unfortunately I have yet to discover how I can print the work they did on the iPad, or even e-mail it myself, so that I can have their work in one location.

I learned quickly that any website that uses flash does not work on the iPads, so this rules out some of my favorite websites, like SpellingCity.com and Storybird. I wrote about this a few months ago on my Prospecting for Treasure blog, in a post titled Getting to Know the iPad.

The limitations of the iPad are compounded by my school district's filters. Almost everything I tried to do today, was blocked. I tried to access Delicious, it wouldn't let me put in my password to see my own account. I tried to visit our class wiki, ReadtheWeb, it wouldn't let me. I tried to put Dropbox on it, and it wouldn't do that either.

There are some things I really like about the iPad. I like how portable it is. I love reading my Google Reader on it. I like the fact that you can easily enlarge things. Photographs look fantastic on it, though I can't figure out how to put any on for my class to use.

To tell you the truth, I am still not loving the iPad. My frustration led me to take this photo.