After reading my previous two blog posts, you will know that I am attempting to design a presentation that can be shared with my colleagues that will highlight the benefits of using the iPad to share student’s learning in math.

I decided to create a powerpoint presentation that can be uploaded and shared with Slideshare.  I chose this format for several reasons.  One, I wanted something that could be easily edited in the future when I had better examples of student work to share and two I am fairly comfortable with powerpoint and wanted to spend more time learning the apps than figuring out a new presentation tool.  Prior to deciding to use Slideshare, I considered doing a Prezi as Prezi seems like a web 2.0 tool a lot of people are using.   When I really thought about the purpose of my presentation and what I wanted to include I decided that a powerpoint would suffice. I have used Prezi to do a presentation in the past and was not overly impressed with the style of presentation it creates.

My powerpoint presentation allows me to embed videos that I have found on the web and videos I created of sample products.  However, I discovered when I tried to upload a sample powerpoint to Slideshare the embedded videos won’t play.  A user needs to download my presentation before they can watch the videos.

I selected several apps I wanted to test out for my powerpoint presentation (I wanted to include three samples).  I do not have my own iPad and the school is closed for spring break so I borrowed a family member’s.  I wanted to try out Draw and Tell and Explain Everything because I knew we had them on our school’s iPads but I soon discovered that they cost money.  Since I don’t own this iPad I know I would never use these apps again so I changed my plans and decided to try out several free apps.  Because I was using a family member’s personal iPad an email was set up and I could easily email the videos I created to myself which I could then embed in my presentation.  However, I can see how I could run into a problem if I had used my school’s iPads.  An email address is not set up on the iPads and we have not downloaded dropbox.  If I was to get dropbox approved for the iPads, would I then need to make sure I signed out the same iPads every time so that I would need to set up our class dropbox on every iPad?  I’m not sure how I would get the videos off the school iPads onto a class blog.  Any ideas?  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have one iPad for the class or even a class computer!  Think of the possibilities.

While some of the apps I tried were not what I expected by trial and error I discovered several ways I could use these tools throughout my instruction.  I’m planning on using Skitch for our plant and butterfly unit as well as in the block centre.  Book creator was a little complicated for simply documenting a math activity but I could see this being used with our buddies.

Overall, I haven’t run into any major problems but I do wonder how I can share work from school iPads and export the products to a class blog without dropbox or an email being set up.  How do other schools do this?  Do they have one email account or several?  Do they have one dropbox or several class ones?