Teaching with an Ipad 2

Although this is not directly connected to the excavations, I thought I’d share a very interesting pedagogic development that I am trying out. Next week, the academic year begins and I return to teaching. Now that I have access to an Ipad 2, I’ve decided to try to teach my classes with it – giving the PowerPoint presentations with the Ipad 2.
So far, seems as it will work out! What I did is the following:
1) Loaded Dropbox on the Ipad, which gave access to updated files from my desktop computer
2) After trying a few apps with various PowerPoint-like features that were not that good, I loaded Keynote, which works very well – reading almost seamlessly the various presentations that were made in PowerPoint.
3) Then, I simply download the relevant files from Dropbox and open them in Keynote and they work very nicely! Keynote for the Ipad has some nice features, such as a “laser pointer” like feature, where if you press the screen, a red dot like from a laser pointer appears on the screen – quite handy!

What I still have to get is an adaptor to connect between the Ipad and the VGA connector of the projector (such as this).

Next week, I’m going to try this out. So far, it looks really nice. If it works out, it will save me a lot of schlepping, the need to always have a computer and/or “disk-on-key” – since all the files can be downloaded from the wireless internet on campus.
And – it is quite cool! :-)

I also came across a really nice application – Webpad – which enables you to draw on the screen and anyone with the correct URL can see what you are drawing. In theory, if all students have an online laptop – you can use this instead of a blackboard!

I’m quite excited about trying all this out!

Aren