Test Drivin'

Hey there, so today is an exciting day. Post #2 on this lovely young blog sees me sitting at my desk trying to figure out how to type on a touch screen. Yup - we have our first iPad, or more accurately, we are borrowing one for the day to see how it works. Early learning includes:
1) Super cool! The wow factor delivers on this machine and I can see what all the hype is about. There's something oddly satisfying about the wipes, the scrolls, the page turns. Nice!

 2) No manual means intuitive? Sure, but there are normal things that I don't yet know how to do, like upload a pic to this blog! I'm confident that it will become more innate, but what I wouldn't             give for my arrow keys.

 3) Already I want a keyboard - searching for punctuation is not fun, and could even result in reluctant users (of punctuation) to abandon it altogether. Did I mention that I'm an English teacher?

4) Is the screen always going to be this dirty? Seriously - we work with up to 100 18-21 year-olds, I wonder if we can get a salad bar sneeze guard for our precious screens.

 5) The first thing I did was jump on google. You see, long before the TLLP came into our lives we were planning on implementing a Google based course delivery system using their cloud and Google Drive - how disappointed we were when we learned that our much beloved Google platform would not work seamlessly with the iPad. There is talk of chrome and drive being available for iOS products in the coming year. If it arrives soon enough we'll share our thoughts on the potential for pairing the two items.

Those are just some of our initial reactions. As mentioned, we haven't yet purchased any tablets, but we are leaning towards the iPads. If anyone has information on using an android powered tablet in a secondary classroom (or any classroom, for that matter) let us know what you think.