The Great iPad Reset

I’ve finally conceded defeat that 6 iPads per class isn’t working. 6 iPad is just not useful in your average classroom as it’s difficult to use as a whole class and involves careful planning to make use of them in small groups. Compared to the daily use in Foundation Stage, the KS2 iPads were just sitting in cupboards. Which isn’t great!

So, we’ve decided to turn those 30 iPads into two class sets, one for upper KS2 and one for KS1. Ideally, I’d love to have a proper sync/charge box, but there isn’t the budget for that at this time of year. So instead it’s a case of wiping (which is easy, thanks to Apple Configurator) and then an old-school iTunes sync. We’re going to charge them in some IKEA lockable cabinets and then sync them with iTunes over wi-fi. We’ll then have a plastic box which teachers can transport the 15 charged iPads to their classes.

Let’s hope that increases their usage!

Photos won’t sync

Just been updating some photos on my home iPad and discovered that a lot of them weren’t syncing. Very annoying! After much Googling and poking around in preference files, I decided to try syncing a small iPhoto event across and seeing which ones didn’t sync. It turned out that some of my photos didn’t have a title (‘untitled’) and it was these photos which weren’t syncing. After a quick Photos>Batch Change and then changing the title to the filename, this seemed to fix the problem. Phew!

iPad mini – hands on

Yesterday I (finally) got to try out an iPad mini. The “sorry, we’re sold out” sign outside the Apple Store suggests that it can’t be all that bad. And I don’t think it is.

The size is really nice. It’s small enough to hold in one hand, but the screen is definitely big enough to interact with. It does indeed remind me of the 11″ MacBook Air with its diddy but high density screen, which allows you to get everything done just as well. I don’t think it would work so well as a shared device though, but who’s to say. I’ve done some work with kids using iPod touches one between two and that seemed to work fine.

It does remind me of the iPod touch in terms of portability but without the use restrictions. I’ve heard people talk about using 1:1 iPod touches in schools, but to me there didn’t seem to be so much you could do on it. Whereas an iPad mini suggests many opportunities.

Other pluses:

Better camera
Lovely build quality
Super light
Great price

Anyway, enough of my sales pitch…

Can’t connect to iTunes Store

…is an annoying message.

Whilst trying to install an app on one class’s set of 6 iPads I kept hitting a ‘cant connect to iTunes Store’. Strange and frustrating. I tried using the trick of changing the date to some point in the future but that didn’t work.

What I did do was reset the iPads, wiping all content and settings. It’s a little extreme, but it did seem to do the trick! And restoring off an iCloud backup is super simple.

Except when you’ve only got a 20meg pipe.

This is the major drawback with running a ‘cloud’ setup with iPads. It’s been good up to now, especially with keeping the costs down, but in future getting a sync and charge case and going down the wired iTunes route is probably the best idea.

Thoughts on iPad mini

I’m really excited about the iPad mini although I have yet to actually hold one in my hand. They’ve been out for barely a week, but they appear to be selling like hot cakes. I think they hold great potential for doing a 1:1 deployment in a school. Here’s why:

Cost. It’s only about £50 less that the iPad 2, but that’s nearly a 20% saving. Which is not to be sniffed at, especially if that nudges a bulk purchase into the realms of affordability.
Screen size. It is quite diddy (I’ve made a paper mock-up of the screen size already!) but not unusuably so. And because there’s the same number of pixels as an iPad 2, you can still do as much on i. I use an 11″ MacBook Air every day, which has a poky screen compared to a retina display MacBook Pro. But because it has such a dense display, you’ve still got plenty of pixels to play with. I’m guessing the same applies with an iPad mini.
Better camera. Always good, especially in a school where making movies and taking photos has so many uses.

Maybe once I get to hold on in my hand I might change my mind, but at the moment I’m pretty hopeful about their usefulness.

iMovie Export Fix

The Year 5 teachers have been making exciting iBooks about the Greeks using iBooks Author, and as part of that they’ve been making some movies on iPads with iMovie. However, we just hit a snag where the movies would fail to export to the camera roll. Arrgh!

Thankfully, Apple Discussion Forums came to the rescue, with the suggestion to check the privacy settings for photos. The fix worked – yay!

Explain Everything

I have been hunting for a while for something that would replace smartboard functionality on an iPad. Display mirroring to an AirPlay receiving device (such as an Apple TV or a Mac with Reflection running) is half the battle, but the other is finding an app worth its salt.

There are a few possibilities for free, but they have their shortcomings. Such as:

Educreations. Simple, allows drawing and writing, well written. Unfortunately you cannot save and then edit a slideshow – it only lets you record one and play it back. Which essentially renders it useless for advance planning!
Doceri. There’s a free and a paid version and it seems nice. The display mirroring mode is cool too, allowing the iPad user to see the controls but for them not to show on the big screen. The handwriting tools are particularly effective. However, it doesn’t let you enter text.
ShowMe Interactive Whiteboard. Not bad but doesn’t allow you to enter text.

SMART have now released an iPad version of their Notebook software (for the tidy sum of £4.99) but it’s pretty much useless on several accounts. Firstly, when mirroring the app, the iPad still turns off the screen after 2 minutes, which is not helpful. Secondly, the internal file system is bust as whenever you import a new notebook file it just opens the most recent file instead. Oh, and then pen functionality sometimes doesn’t work too.

So, I was very pleased when I discovered Explain Everything. It can be a little clunky to use, but has the following plus points:

Gazillion ways of getting files in and out of the app (Dropbox, Evernote, WebDAV etc)
Allows you to type text
Robust onscreen writing
Prevents the screen turning off when in use
Easy manipulation of anything onscreen
Can record audio as well as an animation of all your interactions

Generally good stuff. And a bargain at £1.99!

iPod Touches and Parasync

With great rejoicing, a set of 16 iPod touches arrived the other day, along with a clever Parasync case and docking system thingy. The idea is for them to be used as digital still/video cameras with children, plus the use of apps such as Safari etc. I have always been a bit snooty about syncing devices, being rather loathe to spend substantial amounts of money on a glorified USB hub in a box, but I think I am now convinced of their value, if only that 16 devices can all be charged using just one power lead.

Setting them up was a little bit more of a challenge, partly because I was trying to be too clever. I initially tried using Apple Configurator to set them up, which would allow me to set a pretty lock screen with the iPod number on it. However, this didn’t work so well, with several iPods refusing to accept the configuration profile. They also then didn’t allow images to be downloaded to iPhoto or iMovie as the ‘Supervision Mode’ configuration profile essentially completely locks the device down.

I then tried the old-school but tried-and-tested approach of using iTunes (boo!). Which worked really well! The steps were as follows:

Disable automatic backups
Download apps etc. on iTunes
Plug in one iPod, sync across apps and set it up just how you want it (e.g. email accounts etc.)
Backup that iPod to iTunes (right click on it in the left hand column and select ‘Backup now’), making sure that the backup is encrypted (this saves all the passwords etc.)
Plug all the other iPods in and then restore from the initial backup
Rename all the iPods to their correct names

I also used iPhone Configuration Utility to add a configuration profile for the Wifi and for Meraki on each device.

Definitely much quicker!

I showed the iPods to the staff team quickly at today’s staff meeting (after a few Q jokes as I open up a slightly formidable flight case) and people seemed enthusiastic. Hopefully they will get used regularly across the school!

Why not to do 1:1 iPads

I had an interesting discussion last night with a friend about 1:1 iPad deployment in a primary school. She was horrified at the thought of every child getting an iPad which they could use all day long. She has an iPad at home that she lets her kids use, but she is always concerned to limit the amount of screen time her children are having, even if they are playing educational games. Life is bigger and wider than staring at and tapping on a glass screen all day. Maybe she has a point?

Updating to iOS6

One of the horror stories I’ve heard about iPads in schools is when it comes to iOS updates. Our apple reseller warned it was a laborious process of plugging iPads into iTunes one by one and then waiting an hour per device. Not fun. So I was intrigued to know if iOS 6 would be able to update on the device or if it needed a wired connection to iTunes. The good news is that wireless updates work fine!

Our iPads are set up to work completely independently from iTunes; after an initial setup with Apple Configurator. Updating them just involved tapping ‘install update’ in Settings and then waiting a short while for it to install. The iPads even helpfully pre-downloaded the update when sitting charging on wifi.

The only slight annoyance is that the iPads seem to forget their Apple ID for the App Store after the update, but that’s not too much of an inconvenience to fix. It does mean that I can’t so easily just ask a teacher to do the updates on their iPads as the Apple IDs are all slightly obtuse iCloud accounts I have set up…