Using the iPad as an Educational Tool

Attached (iPad 5) is a mind map showing the different apps I have been experimenting with during this course, created with the free simple minds app. I believe you will need to have the simple minds program on your computer to view the link.  I have had a lot of trouble trying to transfer this mind map from the original program into any other program or format to make it visible to others or add it to this blog so I sincerely hope you will be able to use the link above to see my experiment with creating a mind map with the simple minds app.

Apple has purposely created hundreds of educational apps to encourage the use of this form of ICT in education. There are also many schools involved in program's to see if iPads will work for them. An interesting website that is more of a 'gateway' website called iPads in Education provides links to some of these iPad school trials. This site also provides links to educational app reviews that are written by teachers, useful apps and other iPad educational resources such as lesson plans that incorporate the use of iPads.  One of the review sites that I found especially useful is iPad Curriculum

It is not necessarily a cheap exercise to equip every student within a classroom or even a school with an individual iPad. One strategy around this possible limitation is demonstrated in the photo below.

1. 
2. iPad in Education 205, a photo by LisaThumann on Flickr.
3. Photograph by Lisa Thumann, sourced from Flickr on the 19th April 2013, link http://www.flickr.com/photos/lisathumann/5123047943/

(I used a slightly different strategy to insert this picture into my blog than previously tried. Instead of using the HTML code, I 'shared' the photo directly with my blog from Flickr. This created a new blog posting containing the photo and attached information, which was chosen back in the Flickr site. The next step was simply to cut and paste into this posting and delete the now blank posting. At one stage I tried to use the familiar process of transforming the page into HTML coding to embedded the photo but this seemed to cause the blog page to freeze while saving, which resulted in the majority of the posting having to be rewritten.)