Question about Apps and Student Creations
Given this week’s topic I was wondering if anyone is this course has been using Ipads in their classrooms. I am scheduled to receive a class set of Ipads at the end of this month from my district. We will have them for two months.
My question concerns the fact that when students create a story, or other form of digital media on an app it saves to the Ipad. You can share it to Facebook, Twitter and so on but I would prefer to create some for E-portfolios for my students. I was thinking of creating individual student blogs where students could embed HTML codes of things they have created. It just seems like such a shame that once the Ipads leave our classroom, their work disappears, unless we save it to somewhere else.
Has anyone else had to mitigate this problem? If so, how did you do it?
Posted in: Week 05:
teacherben 4:57 pm on October 6, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
It depends on the app. Some have a cloud backup and some don’t. So, in some cases, you can still access your work by logging in to a website, and if you install it on another device, you can login and get all your work back. With others, it’s gone.
There’s stuff like this (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/book-creator-for-ipad/id442378070?mt=8) that allow you to create books right on the device that can then be shared. This one costs money though.
We usually do our content creation on computers and put it on the handhelds to see and share (such as ebooks and games.)
It’s pretty surprising how widespread the iPad adoption has been in the classroom and yet how little Apple has worked out the nuts and bolts of how schools would be using them and how they could support that. Usually this is one of their strengths. They still don’t have any official word about syncing and devices per account. We have a few dozen in our lower elementary and we sync them all to the same account. It’s great for us, since we only pay once for an app, then run it on a ton of devices. Sooner or later, they will need to come up with a special system for large deployments and hopefully this will solve your problem as well. They only just acknowledged the fact that some users share a device and allowed for multiple accounts in a recent update.
Good luck.
jenbarker 5:15 pm on October 6, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I’ve also wondered about licensing issues with the apps. I heard that we are allowed to legally sync an app to ten devices but that is it and this is actually a new Canadian law within the past year. I spoke with our tech consultant in our district and he said that the bulk purchase prices works out to be higher than buying the app and sharing with the amount of devices it allows (i.e. 5). Education is a vast market and one would think Apple would be doing everything they could in this area.