When it was announced that the iPad would be available on April 3, I thought to myself “what a perfect birthday gift after 3 years of waiting.” Needless to say, I got the iPad as a birthday gift for myself yesterday, and I’ve yet to have buyer’s remorse.

For the last three years, I have been trying to find a way to use iPods and iPhones in education. I’ve always believed that we are moving towards mobile content as the future of education, and since the introduction of the iPod I have been waiting for the rumored “tablet” to finally bridge the gap between the limitations of the iPods and the overkill of a laptop.

In a K-8 setting, I have often argued that students and teachers alike seldom use laptops (in our case MacBooks) to their fullest capabilities. That doesn’t necessarily mean that laptops are bad, or are not used. It’s just to say that when I’ve surveyed our staff and students to see what they use laptops for in the classrooms, the most popular responses have always been research, websites, and word-processing/presentations. Teachers responded that they liked using the laptops because they were portable, and students could use them in the classroom. An answer like that seems like a “no-brainer.”

However, there has been reluctance to adopt more mobile technology in the classroom outside of laptops. In our district, we currently have a class set of iPod Touches and while they are used, teachers have not adopted as readily as devices capable of more than using a few apps and for listen libraries. They are not wrong either, as the iPod has limitations.

Enter the iPad.

It would be easy for me to sit here and sing the praises of the iPad using words like “magical” or “revolutionary.” I am a self-admitted Apple Fanboy. However, while I think this device is a fantastic product, I truly believe its potential has yet to be realized.

For everyone who called the iPad on iPod on steroids, they are essentially correct. The iPad provides us a much larger screen with a similar interface to the iPod/iPhone OS. There are several improvements to the basic interface such as allowing more than 4 apps in the dock, and the orientation changes as you rotate the device, making it easy to navigate any way you hold it. When it comes to holding, the iPad is considerably bulky to simply hold in your hands.

The native apps for iPad are really something special and are clearly better than native iPhone apps that must be upscaled to use the full display. iWork on the iPad is easy to use, rather intuitive, and provides the best solution to-date for word-processing and composition on a mobile device.

The iPad has obvious limitations, that have been beaten like a dead horse (no flash, no camera, no USB ports, etc).

But where the iPad can really shine will be how well it can utilize cloud computing. More than any mobile device to date, the iPad can prove to be the first device that full embraces and utilizes cloud computing. Due to the limited capabilities of mobile devices, particularly when it comes to hardware compared to laptops or full-fledged computers, devices like iPad and iPod touch are unable to run robust apps that require a lot of saving of large files. The lack of a traditional file-tree structure makes it a perfect candidate to utilize cloud computing and file storage.

Web-based applications like Google Apps have improved on the iPad along with Apple’s iWork.com. Still, these web-apps are unable to allow editing (other than spreadsheets) or collaborative writing. Steve Jobs described the iPad as the missing link between the iPhone and the MacBook, and the ability to create ubiquitous access to all your files via a cloud could be a very interesting way to help enhance that link.

Apple shines with its Mac OSX Server software along with the Xserve and Mac Mini Server, and in my district we are lucky enough to use them. Apple has an interest feature built in to Snow Leopard Server called Mobile Access. Yet the features are still limited, and do not necessarily allow users to edit documents stored on a file server, just view them.

It will be interesting to see how Apple can integrate these products to allow users access to the files across all their devices. This is particularly interesting in a K-8 setting, that would allow kids to work on documents on the iPad, MacBooks, and computer lab.

Some of the apps that are very interesting to me are the ones that allow you to connect remotely to PC’s and Macs. Some of the apps allow you to run and control applications on your remote computers. This concept is interesting to me, because it proves that through a web-interface, the iPad is more than capable of running web-applications extremely well. By utilizing this technology, we can see using the iPad for some very robust applications in a very light way that does not rely on all of the resources of the iPad.

I do believe the iPad will have a place in education. From a cost standpoint, it can cost nearly 30% less than MacBooks (including accessories and apps). If Apple can create or put out a way to help for mass-deployement of the iPad, I can see it really taking off.

I wanted to look at the iPad a little differently than all of the reviews out on the web. I think there are clearly good and bad aspects of the iPad, but the price, it is clearly worth it considering how expensive the original iPod and iPhones were. I think that the developer community, as well as the feedback from users can really drive this product to a whole new level.

How can you see the iPad fitting into education? Do you plan on purchasing them for your classroom? If not, what changes need to be made in order for you to want one?

Tags: Apps Cloud Computing ipad