With great rejoicing, our class teachers all received an iPad 2 last week for use in the classroom for teaching and learning. As we’ve now got some class sets of iPad minis for children (which work really well! The sweet spot between affordability, size and therefore quantity you can put in a classroom. Maybe I’ll post about that sometime…), we had some older iPads that needed to find a new home.

I decided I would completely set up the iPads for the teachers rather than leaving some stuff for them to do. This took rather along time, but I reckon it was worth it in terms of saving precious time for teachers and making sure that everything was set up how I wanted it to be for teachers, rather than hoping they follow my instructions!

The steps were as follows:

• Follow the setup assistant, entering in the wifi code and agreeing to various stuff.
• Set up the Apple ID for each teacher using the school email address.
• Enroll the iPad to our MDM server (the glamorous Mountain Lion Server Profile Manager). This then automatically sets up the email settings (as described in a previous blog). I then could verify the email address for the Apple ID straight from the iPad
• Begin redeeming VPP codes on each Apple ID. This was a bit time consuming, but was sped up by emailing the URLs found on the VPP spreadsheets
• Hand to teachers, after pushing out a profile that requires a passcode on teacher iPads

It was a lot of tapping and then waiting, so I tended to try and do several iPads at the same time, swapping between the two whenever I had to wait before tapping the next button.

The results so far have been teachers making use of iPads in lots of unexpected but very sensible ways. Such as taking photos of children’s work, modelling how to use an app whilst reflecting to the big screen, prepping for an iPad lesson, using the iPad to differentiate for SEND children, keeping up to date with emails etc etc. I’m hoping it will help teachers think of more and more creative ways of using iPads as a tool for learning in the classroom.