Can you successfully share an iPad?

My parents have a vicious Dachshund that will chew appendages off of toy geese with embedded squeakers. This has nothing to do with this blog post, but this should be noted nonetheless.

I thought I’d put an item on the blog that I’ve been passing around via email this morning with several other leaders in the K-12 tech community, including Marty, John and John David. There has been much discussion about the adoption of the iPad recently and it presents challenges for the K12 technology leader. For all of the wonders of the touch interface, cameras in each direction and the amazing applications that developers are creating every day, the fact remains that this device is less enterprise-friendly than it is consumer-friendly. I’ll paste in one portion of an email I shared today. It details one challenge that several districts are dealing with. I welcome any input into the best way to work through this dilemma:

Here’s the issue on my mind at the moment… If the iPad isn’t dedicated to one particular student (e.g. cart-based environment), how will the student best be able to transfer created content to the teacher? Here are a few things that have been suggested, along with the challenges:

• Dropbox – This could work well in a dedicated environment, but I’ve been told that you can’t easily (if at all) log out of Dropbox once the app connection is established. If you can’t log in and log out, that hinders the creation of a student-specific Dropbox and you’ll face issues with shared boxes that could lead to unauthorized viewing, creation or deletion of student work.

• Email via profile – This is another option in a dedicated environment, but will be a challenge if different students have the iPad from one period to the next. Continually deleting and recreating a mail profile doesn’t seem like a good option.

• Email via OWA – Multiple people have told me that you cannot send attachment via OWA if connected from the iPad Safari browser.

Are there other ways to do this? I’ll share one suggestion I received from our Naperville contact and one potential option that I was reading about yesterday.

• Email via ‘generic’ account – You could set up a generic account for the iPad and use it to email assignments to the student’s account and/or the teacher’s account. There are some instructional hurdles here as well, but it’s an option that @JDSCIO said they had been trying recently. Could a student access another student’s work via the ‘sent items’ in that email profile? Could that account be used to send objectionable emails? Perhaps in each case, but it is at least an option worth considering.

• Moodle and/or mBook app – I haven’t yet checked to see if this solution would allow for better logging in and out. I haven’t tested the mBook app for its feature set. I simply wanted to point out that there is a $3.99 app called mBook that is supposed to bring Moodle features to the iPad. Of course, if you aren’t using Moodle, that means that there’s an entire course management system to get installed and implemented. Moodle’s course structure might be a good way to transfer assignments, though, and that could become a standard that would be used whether or not iPads were the device of choice.

We’ve had some great follow-up on this topic, with Marty noting the fact that we really need to avoid the concept of “files” needing to be transferred at all. If teachers are after the students’ ideas and content, are there web-based ways of capturing that? Comments on blog entries, online forms, course management systems and similar technologies are available.

It’s an interesting topic and a challenge for all of us, so feel free to offer input and I’ll try to follow up as solutions are attempted and evaluated.