Jan 10, 2012

Your experience with your tablet...

I would love to hear from faculty about their experiences with the tablets. Which tablet do you have? What apps do you use and how do you like them? What do you like best about your tablet? What limitations frustrate you? Are there tasks you'd like to do on your tablet but you don't know what app to use?

The merging of the Tablet Pilot blog with this one did not preserve comments from that blog. The comments for this post are below:

3comments:

  1. I have found that without "full" access to the lotus notes databases, using the tablet for a large portion of my daily activities is not feasible.

    In addition, lack of compatibility between Blackboard and the iPad make using Blackboard (other than just reading) unproductive.

    However, for activities like "reading", the iPad is excellent. Also great is the email---but, I upgraded to the $0.99 Gmail App. That plus the Google Docs app mae the iPad super useful in many meetings where I would be otherwise unproductive.

    Lastly, the news aggregation capabilities of the iPad are awesome (such as the Flipboard App). Now, I can be up to date on News in much less time that before. Thus, in many ways, this has been a productivity boost.
  2. I concur with Ramon on many points:

    LN runs our life here, and its incompatibility with iPad makes me still rely more on my laptop, so investing time in organizing my iPad for frequent work use seems unproductive.

    Reading is really a delight, especially using a machine that has a larger screen (compared to a phone) but that is lighter and quicker (compared to my laptop, including boot-up times, etc.).

    I downloaded Flipbook right away, but my most elusive commodity is still time. I need to spend some worktime fiddling/learning so that I can implement the apps for the sake of efficiency and convenience. I have not yet found myself able to allocate time for that during the workweek. Perhaps if I wrote a little less frequently, I could frame out time to read/learn.

    An alternative might be to spend 'non-work' time (aka vacation) fiddling...
  3. I read both of the above comments and agree as to the Lotus Notes issue. I do use my iPad preferentially for email and for other reading.... also I have been using the iPad iPhone combination successfully for enterine swimming data such as swim times for the newspaper reporting. Therre are some useful biology and science apps which I have donloaded and they are typically very useful but only for specific lessons.

    I have spoken with some students. Theuir reaction has been that the iPad is both fascinating and can be a big distraction to them. The students I spoke to are using their iPad in science classes and they are using the Al Gore "Our Choice" app.

    I have played with the potential of Dragon Speak for facilitating comment writing (a voice recogniton software program) but ultimately you have to speak so slowly and do so much editing that it is not that much of a time saver. I suspect that in general the iPad makes consumption of info easy, but production of information is much harder
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