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.

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.