Adobe Ideas, the drawing app for the iPad is becoming one of my go-to tools. I use it to sketch out big ideas,

create slides for Keynote

and capture content from mother people’s presentations.

I’m especially like the way It let’s me annotate images by adding a layer on top of a screenshot or photo:

I’ll go to my grave with a real book in my hands, but I’ve become a huge fan of ereaders. I have Stanza on my iPhone and Kindle and iBook apps on my iPad. They let me take stacks of material on planes, trains and automobiles.

Can someone stitch these two–an ereader and annotating tool–together for me? I can’t read an important book without a pen in hand for scribbling margin notes and I’d like to be able to do the same electronically. It’d be really nice, too, if I could save and share these annotations the way I can save and share highlights and sticky notes on web pages in Diigo. And, if it’s not too much to ask, I’d like to be able to hot link any cross references between pages…and even books!

This ability to make margin notes is the missing part of the reading experience offered by ereaders.

I was in Toronto last weekend giving a presentation on the Myth of the Digital Native at the SEAL (formerly Canadian Association of Independent Schools Best Practices Conference. on the flight home I happened to sit beside a group of students The York School and their head of senior school, David Hamilton, on their way to an outdoor camp near Squamish, in my backyard.

I gave the kids my iPad and asked them to pass it around for the duration of the flight to Vancouver on the condition that they leave a comment ont eh Notepad app  or add a drawing in the Adobe Ideas app. You can see what they said and drew below.

I chatted with a few, too, and after we got past the novelty factor they very soberly said that the iPad felt like a much better classroom tool than either a laptop or iPhone. It gave them a bigger, and therefore easier to use interface than the phone and wasn’t as clumsy as the laptop, said one student. Another felt a drawing program such as the Adobe Ideas app they were playing with would be a great tool in math and science, as well as art classes.

THINK Global School gave me an iPad to play with two weeks ago, which was “real sweet” as one of my students said, because it made us one of the first on our block with the newest cool tool.

It didn’t take long to see that the iPad is not about the apps. They are great, gorgeous even. Developers are taking full advantage of the iPad’s big glass touch screen. Elements is a stunning example of what can be done on the new, Evernote for the iPad beats all other versions of that app, even the desktop. iCal and Mail are gorgeous–in fact, the iPad is now my preferred mail reader. But the iPad is not about the apps. After all, we’ve had apps for a long time–my first was an early version of Wordperfect that spit running on my old 8088 back in the late 80s.

To be sure, the iPad has a few shortcomings. It outputs video to either a projector or monitor but, frustratingly for a teacher, I cannot share the iPad screen itself; that is, I can show inline video (HTML5 or QuickTime) but not, say, a Safari search.

Projecting a YouTube video from my iPad

Also, the iPad does not connect to the cloud quite as well as you might expect for such a new device. Out of the box, I cannot create or edit Google Docs, although a third party app, Office2 HD ($7.99) does the job for now.

You don’t have to look very hard on the web to find a host more pros and cons. But these all miss the point. There is the iPad-the-thing, and as I and many others have said, it doesn’t seem quite ready yet.

Then there is the iPad-the-idea and that, I firmly believe, is a game changer.

The iPad is bigger than its little brothers the iPhone and iTouch, but this quantitative difference makes for qualitative gains. The iPad is a social tool, whereas smart phones and laptops are personal tools.

Can't do this on a laptop

Just look at the body language of the user. Phones and laptops cut the user off from whoever else is in the room, either because the user has to direct all his or her attention to a tiny screen, or because the user has to look over the laptop screen which sits like a wall between the use and anyone else in the room. I took the iPad to our parent conferences this week and connected it to our online student database. The device sat unobtrusively as a piece of paper between the students, parents and me and I felt that made a significant change in the timbre of the meetings. They seemed more open. Not that I’ve ever had anything to hide, but I’ve always felt that the big screen of my 15″ Macbook Pro created a mixed message: I was saying trust me while effectively keeping my notes hidden.

The iPad is also terrific classroom research tool, not because it has a web browser but because when a student find something it’s so easy to share. I regularly ask students to be official researchers responsible for looking up answers to questions on the fly during class. Searching is no problem on an iPhone or laptop but the former is too small and the latter is too unwieldy to hold up. The iPad screen, however, can easily be seen across a room.

I also often ask students to work collaboratively to build notes. We use Google Docs for this, with each contributor writing in a different colour. I could monitor the students work from my laptop, but that keeps me at my desk. Portability is a relative term and although it’s easy to pack my 15″ MacBook Pro from home to school in my briefcase, it’s undeniably awkward to cart it opened up from desk to desk, especially in a classroom as crowded with stuff as mine. I could close the laptop, but every time I do that I temporarily lose my wireless connection. As we do all our work in the cloud, this is annoying. Much more importantly, however, it increases the visibility of the technology whereas the goal is to make it as invisible as a pencil. With the iPad, I can keep tabs on what any of the students are writing and still move about my classroom to mingle and coach.

Monitoring collaborative docs on an iPad

That might look like a small difference, but it’s a substantial change in classroom practice. Indeed, I think it might alter the basic structure of the classroom. The presence of a teacher’s desk and the computer monitor it holds up stratifies the space, no matter how contemporary the design. That’s why I don’t have my desk in my classroom.

More observations of the iPad in use coming soon

Since I posted my reasons for thinking an iPad makes the ideal classroom tool (that’s classroom tool; ideally, all students ought to have a smartphone, the ideal out-of-classroom tool, too) back in February, developers have been working at a good clip to come up ways to exploit the tablet’s features. This app, called CourseNotesApp, is a good early indication of what can be done on an iPad. It will make note-taking as writing on a laptop and, because it has built-in sharing over e-mail and Bluetooth/WiFi, it will let students do those important 6 collaborative classroom jobs out of the box.

Now, this little app might not be the perfect tool–the developers are still working on adding image and voice support–but I think it is proof of concept.

What I’d love to see is a mix of CourseNotesApp and something like this new magazine experience from WIRED magazine and Adobe:

I really like the dual axis navigation of this WIRED e-magazine. I’d love to see a developer put together a content creation tool that I, as a teacher, could seed with essential course material along the horizontal axis. Students could then and notes, rich media and connections to other subjects at any point along the vertical axis.

Interestingly, this is starting to look like a fantasy app I described a year ago almost to the day. That app would let me capture content, like delicious I said, and more importantly, let me show visually how those are related (unlike tagging). Maybe my fantasy will come true this year?

I saw in MacDailyNews today that Keybookshop has over 18,000 edcuational e-books waiting for the iPad. That good news, I suppose, as far as it goes, which isn’t all that far. It even takes us a little backward. When I buy a book, I buy rights to the book itself, which means I am free to pass it on to someone else. I don’t actually buy an e-book; I rent it, and so cannot legally pass it on from my iPad to your Kindle. Books are also platform agnostic. E-books are cheaper than paper books to produce and distribute, but that changes publishing, not education. (Let’s put aside the discussion about how the high price of texts restricts access to information.) Even an interactive e-book is still a Web 1.0, or read-web, artifact. I am waiting for the day when I can get my hands on a UI like this Adobe-WIRED collabortion with dual axis navigation, shown below, combined with Dynamic Books, Macmillan publishing’s idea for editable e-books.

Unlike Macmillan, which wants to let instructors to edit their textbooks, I want my students to be able to add and edit content. I see myself seeding a custom e-textbook with content that the students add to and edit through the year as they individually need–not custom courseware, but custom student-ware. The dual axis navigation would let them build subject area content along one axis and interdisciplinary connections along the second. This sort of Web 2.0, or read-write web artifact would be change a game changer.

Travis Allison at the OurKids blog asked me for my first impressions of the iPad. Here’s the interview.

But in short, I think it’s the ideal tool for the classroom working in the cloud (and everyone should be.) At Island Pacific School, where I work, I’ve divided web tools into five categories: research, production, publication, discussion and time and task management. I also try to use Alan November’s six jobs for students as much as possible, although as we’re not yet 1:1, this is a comes off more haphazardly than I’d like. The iPad would let me and my students handle most of these better than an iPhone/Touch (which, though a fabulous tool, is too small to share in a classroom) and at half the cost of a laptop.

I introduced my senior students (Grade 8s & 9s) to blogging in October. They weren’t exactly warm to the idea–Why can’t we just write a paper? they asked. I was caught off guard by that question. It suggested that the students saw the only reason to write in school was to generate an essay, presumably for evaluation, a sentiment that belies the notion that young people are digital natives.

As it turned out, it took a great deal of work to change that view of writing; so much that I changed my entire term’s plans and objectives to develop the practice of thinking first, writing later.

My students and I have come to see a blog as a place to think out loud. It’s a discussion tool. I rarely specify length for a blog post, preferring to let the students write until they feel they’ve expressed themselves clearly. Their first post were short, to be sure, but I suspect they were checking each other’s commitment to blogging. I know of at least one student who had tossed off a blog post went back and then went back and revised her thoughts once she saw what the rest of the class had written. “Wow, my classmates really think philosophically,” she said. I don’t get the sense she had been embarrassed. Rather, it was the fact that everyone else was publicly working hard  that allowed her to work hard as well. But since those early days, I’ve sen the average post length steadily increase.

Here’s an excerpt from one of my Grade 9s, comment on our study of Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, Sophie’s World, and Surrealist art. She’s responding to a comment by Flannery O’Connor:

The American writer, Flannery O’Connor” said that distortion is often a way of leading people to see the truth. What do you think she means by that? What truths do the Surrealists want us to see? What truths does Carrol want us to see?

I think that this is all connected to what we define and see as “reality”. Surrealists, Lewis Caroll, philosophers too, have the goal of showing us “many realities”. Or more so, showing us that reality is relative, subjective, and that it’s only a reality for us because it’s so deeply rooted in our everyday life, in what we do and see every day, leading us to being “nestled comfortably in the rabbit’s fur”; it’s comfortable, yes, but reality will never change, never differ for you, unless you climb to the tips of the rabbit’s fine hairs, or as Flannery O’Connor puts it, distort your reality. Surrealism, to me, basically means opening up to – not exactly a “new reality” – but to the fact that there is no such thing as “reality”; just many different ones. The distortion of reality, in the same way that many surrealist paintings make people uncomfortable, and sometimes even scared, is, I feel, another way of pushing past your “reality”. Here’s an example that I feel greatly reflects on what Flannery O’Connor said. Maybe you’ve been living underground for all of your life. It’s comfortable, you’ve created a “nice little home” for yourself, but you’ve never seen or experienced the reality of the outside world. And so one day you climb out of your small home in the ground, the one you’ve so conveniently and safely created for yourself, and enter the outside world. It’s chaotic, hectic, nothing like the warm, comfortable home you’ve always lived in. It makes you scared, uncomfortable; and this is when you either decide to return back to your home or explore this new outside world. And what I think Flannery O’Connor is saying is that the truth, or reality, can be uncomfortable, can scare you at first, but once you push past that discomfort, that feeling that “this is nothing like the real world”, or “my reality”, it can be amazing, it can be a completely different reality than you’ve experienced. Because distortion, or discomfort, or fear, is what motivates you to push past all of those things, and see what Flannery O’Connor says is “the truth”. Whatever that may be. This is why I feel that when in, say, a museum, when someone asks what your favourite painting is, you’ll most always point to a pretty watercolour painting of some nice scenery, or a peaceful sunset, etc. It’s pretty, it’s safe, it’s in your comfort zone. But it’s those other paintings, those strange, bizarre ones, that really make you think, make you wonder. I don’t think surrealists want us to see a truth, but more the fact that there can be many. Many truths, many realities, however “surreal” they may be. It’s just always getting past that initial discomfort, that early uneasiness, that’s difficult. And I think that this is what all these people – Caroll, Surrealists, philosophers – want us to try to see, to try to understand.

After a couple months of playing around with moodle I’ve finally decided to throw it out. This is actually my second look at the platform. The first time I passed it over because I felt it fostered the building of walled gardens, which might be good arrangements during a school’s transition from brick-and-mortar to the web, but aren’t things we want in the long run.

But this time, after experimenting with my senior students I have to say that while it’s very powerful, it has a steep learning curve for both teachers and students and I’ve found this to be a significant barrier to school-wide use. Our work with WikiEducator came to a similar conclusion–the editor was too complicated–and so people were putting their energy into making the tools work instead of making content.

Now, I like the ideas in moodle, and to be to be fair to it I have to say we are a small school with limited resources and maybe a bigger operation could put more people into developing the platform. But that doesn’t get around what I think is a more fundamental problem. I’ve been told moodle was developed as a tool to manage distance learning; but even if that’s not true, it is a tool that requires a lot of centralized management and it’s a tool that fosters lock-step instruction. It takes a fair amount of work to create an online lesson in moodle and if I am going to invest that time, it would have to be for something I was going to use over and over again (a legacy of its distance-learning roots?) But I very rarely use exactly the same material in my teaching from year to year and even when I do I very rarely teach the same thing the same way twice. Each year my mix of students is different, I’m different, and the way we interact and what we collectively know is different, so I just don’t find a battery of lessons and quizzes all that useful.

Moodle is just too muscly for me. I do like the way it handles calendaring and student submissions, but I think I can’t get that in the more nimble and user-friendly Edmodo. My Grade 8 and 9 students and I are playing with that platform right now. We’ve only just set it up, but the initial response is more favourable than it was for moodle.

I’ll keep you posted.