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.”