Last year, when I heard that our new Year 7 kids were going to be given - or, rather, leased - iPads, I went and bought my own, so I could play around with it and learn lots. Well, I did learn lots and this year, I could hardly wait to get started with my Year 8 class.
But they are still just getting their computers back in dribs and drabs and meanwhile, I have discovered that some of the things I was hoping to do are going to be difficult or impossible because the kids don't have access to the iCloud which would enable them to email me their work. And their ebook app is only Kindle, which means I can't set up the ePub ebooks from the wonderful app I bought, because they can only use Mobi. I'm limited to taking posts off a blog and putting them together in Ebook Glue, which allows you to put together the last 25 posts from your blog. I've set up a special blog, but I've had to do a class blog on Kid Blog and from there I will have to copy and paste their writing into the Blogger blog, from which I can ebook their work. A bit messy and will mean more work for me, but the only way. It doesn't supply you with a proper cover, just the standard thing you get in books you download from Project Gutenberg, and the title will always be the name of your blog. But I can do it.
I do understand why the school has to put some restrictions on, but why so many that the iPads can only be used to look up stuff on the Internet? They have supplied Pages and Keynote (the Mac version of PowerPoint), but you can't email work done on them to the teacher, and I'm not even sure the print utility is working. A student told me that you can email via Messages, and I will have to get him to show me how, but guess what? They have blocked Messages too!
Some kids are missing apps that others have and apparently, this year's Year 7 kids have more apps than the Year 8s and for most of them the App Store is greyed out.
Rolls eyes! Looks like another year of working around restrictions! Oh, well...
But they are still just getting their computers back in dribs and drabs and meanwhile, I have discovered that some of the things I was hoping to do are going to be difficult or impossible because the kids don't have access to the iCloud which would enable them to email me their work. And their ebook app is only Kindle, which means I can't set up the ePub ebooks from the wonderful app I bought, because they can only use Mobi. I'm limited to taking posts off a blog and putting them together in Ebook Glue, which allows you to put together the last 25 posts from your blog. I've set up a special blog, but I've had to do a class blog on Kid Blog and from there I will have to copy and paste their writing into the Blogger blog, from which I can ebook their work. A bit messy and will mean more work for me, but the only way. It doesn't supply you with a proper cover, just the standard thing you get in books you download from Project Gutenberg, and the title will always be the name of your blog. But I can do it.
I do understand why the school has to put some restrictions on, but why so many that the iPads can only be used to look up stuff on the Internet? They have supplied Pages and Keynote (the Mac version of PowerPoint), but you can't email work done on them to the teacher, and I'm not even sure the print utility is working. A student told me that you can email via Messages, and I will have to get him to show me how, but guess what? They have blocked Messages too!
Some kids are missing apps that others have and apparently, this year's Year 7 kids have more apps than the Year 8s and for most of them the App Store is greyed out.
Rolls eyes! Looks like another year of working around restrictions! Oh, well...
