"Right now, if you buy a computer system and you want to solve one of your problems, we immediately throw a big problem right in the middle of you and your problem which is learning how to use the computer. A substantial problem to overcome. Once you overcome that, it's a phenomenal tool. But there is a barrier of having to overcome that problem.

What we're trying to do … is to remove that barrier so that someone can buy a computer system who knows nothing about it and directly attack their problem without learning how to program their computer.

Our whole company, our whole philosophical base, is founded on one principle. That principle is that there is something very special and very historically different that takes place when you have one computer and one person. Very different than if you have ten people and one computer."

Steve Jobs, 1980

This is why I get up in the morning. I have nothing to add.

On the state of ebook use in schools:

The ownership model for ebooks is out of step with the way schools buy and use most books. Unfortunately, Apple’s announcement didn’t change that much. I had hoped that on Thursday we would see a mechanism for checking books out and back into some kind of “school library” through iBooks. Instead we got a modest price cut on textbooks alone.

On iBooks Author:

It’s almost like Pages and Keynote got together and produced a child. ... iBooks Author can do for books what Keynote did for presentations: an accessible way to create very high-quality results with little effort.

On the new iTunes U app:

If you’ve ever tried to “take” a course from iTunes U, you may have found it a bit frustrating. It was never really a full course, just some lecture materials and a reading list. Where are the books? Where are the exercises? It was difficult for course authors to communicate the intended progression of learning.

With iTunes U, Apple has solved the problem of communicating the learning journey. It’s no longer “read this PDF, then watch these videos.” Courses can now contain audio, video, documents, links to iOS apps and iBooks. There’s deep integration between iBooks and iTunes U through which notes and highlights from a book can be reviewed in the iTunes U app.

Commercial iBooks textbooks are a marketing head fake. They're the equivalent of carbon fibre buggy whips. iTunes U is the game changer. Put iBooks Author and iTunes U into the hands of great teachers, put iPads in their students hands, put them all in a room together then step back and see what happens. That's the ballgame.

The full piece is over at Macworld.

This line, though:

Ms. Rosenbaum said she could not fathom how students would have the discipline to sit in front of their computers and follow along when she had to work each minute to keep them engaged in person.

I don't know: could working to learn and express your learning on a computer be more engaging than working to a standardised test with a pen and paper? That's been my experience over the last two years but it didn't magically happen the minute you hand out an iPad. Like I keep saying: technology, pedagogy and curriculum.

If you're fighting every minute to keep kids engaged, it might be time to try something different.

Here is the advice - and remember it is wrong:

All those apps in the multitasking bar on your iOS device are currently active and slowing it down, filling the device's memory or using up your battery. To maximise performance and battery life, you should kill them all manually.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. There are caveats to this but anyone dispensing the advice above is clearly uninformed enough that they will certainly not be aware of these subtleties.

Let me be as clear as I can be: the iOS multitasking bar does not contain "a list of all running apps". It contains "a list of recently used apps". The user never has to manage background tasks on iOS.

Except in a few cases, which I'll explain, the apps that appear in the multitasking bar are not currently running. When you press the home button, iOS will tell the app to quit. In almost all cases, it quits, it stops using CPU time (and hence battery) and the memory it was using is eventually recovered if required.

Let's get technical: iOS apps have five states of execution. These are:

• Not running - the app has been terminated or has not been launched.
• Inactive - the app is in the foreground but not receiving events (for example, the user has locked the device with the app active)
• Active - the normal state of "in use" for an app
• Background - the app is no longer on-screen but is still executing code
• Suspended - the app is still resident in memory but is not executing code

Active and Inactive are not interesting for this discussion. Most of the confusion is around what happens as an app goes from Active to Background to Suspended to Not Running.

When you press the home button, the app moves from Active to Background. Most apps usually then go from Background to Suspended in a matter of seconds.

The first technical caveat is that Suspended apps remain in the device's memory. This is so they can resume more quickly when you go back to them. They're not using processor time and they're not sucking battery power.

You may think that, if an app is resident in memory, you have to somehow remove it to conserve memory. You don't because iOS does it for you. If there are Suspended apps lying around and you launch a memory-intensive app such as a big game, iOS will start to purge Suspended apps and move them to the Not Running state. That is, they will be completely removed from memory and will launch afresh the next time you tap their icon.

Where some people get confused is this: all of the above has no impact on what you see in the multitasking bar. The multitasking bar always shows a list of recently used apps, regardless of whether they're in the Background, Suspended or Not Running states. You may also have noticed that the app that is currently Active does not appear in the multitasking bar.

Background Tasks

When an app is sent to the Background, it usually moves to the Suspended state in a few seconds. An app can request an extension to this by declaring that it's starting a "background task".

A good example is an app that downloads largish files from the web such as Instacast, my favourite podcast app. When Instacast is Active, it can start to download new podcasts. If I then hit the home button on my iPhone, Instacast gets five seconds to run in the Background state and then it's Suspended. That interrupts the download of my podcasts, which might take 5 minutes or more.

iOS allows Instacast to declare that a download is a "background task". This allows Instacast an extra period of background running after I hit the home button to complete the podcast download. While apps can request additional Background time, that time is not infinitely long. The app gets about 10 minutes of Background running time and then it is forcibly suspended by iOS. Again, you don't have to worry about this yourself.

Indefinite Background Running

All apps get 5 seconds of Background running. Some apps can request a 10-minute extension. There are a small number of apps that genuinely need to run indefinitely in the background and iOS allows this.

There are exactly five kinds of apps allowed to run indefinitely in the Background state in iOS 5:

• Apps that play audio while in the Background state. A good example is Instacast while it's playing a podcast.
• Apps that track your location in the Background. For example, you still want voice prompts from your TomTom navigation app, even if another app is Active.
• Apps that listen for incoming VOIP calls. If you use Skype on iOS, you can receive incoming Skype calls while the app is in the Background.
• Newsstand apps that are downloading new content.
• Apps that receive continuous updates from an external accessory in the Background.

All well-written apps in the above categories should become Suspended when they are no longer performing the task in hand. When Instacast finishes playing a podcast, it should be Suspended. There are some built-in apps that also run continuously in the background on iOS - the most-used one is probably Mail.

As long as these apps are running in the Background state, they will consume memory, CPU time and power. In general, though, you would know that you were using such apps. The developer has to declare which category of Background running they require and part of the App Store review process is to check that these declarations are not being abused.

I said earlier that "the user never has to manage Background tasks on iOS". The only exception to this is when one of these Background-running apps goes berserk and will not terminate properly. That, however, is an exceptional situation and not a normal part of being an iOS user.

Summary

Let me wrap this up by giving you a quick summary:

1. If someone tells you that all the apps in the multitasking bar are running, using up memory or sucking power, they are wrong.
2. When you hit the home button, an app moves from Active to Background and quickly to the Suspended state where it no longer uses CPU time or drains power.
3. An app may request an additional 10 minutes of Background running to complete a big task before becoming Suspended.
4. If memory is becoming scarce, iOS will automatically move Suspended apps into the Not Running state and reclaim their memory.
5. Five classes of apps - audio, GPS, VOIP, Newsstand and accessory apps - and some built-in apps such as Mail may run indefinitely in the background until they complete their task.

Put simply: you do not have to manage background tasks on iOS. The system handles almost every case for you and well written audio, GPS, VOIP, Newsstand and accessory apps will handle the rest.

It was two years ago this week - December 2009 - when we first met to discuss the problem of how to get more computing resources into the hands of teachers and pupils at Cedars. Back then, we had 12 MacBooks and 12 iMacs for a school of around 85 pupils - a ratio of 3.5 pupils per computer; about the Scottish national average.

Teachers were frustrated that they either had to lug the laptops around the school (difficult) or book the lab (nearly impossible). What we all wanted wanted, mostly, was access to the web and a word processor. It's amusing, now, to think of the limited ambitions we had for the project but that was the impetus for the project: the web. I often say to people that, if the only apps the iPad ran were Safari and Pages, we would still have deployed it.

I won't lie to you and pretend that we had everything worked out for day one. I genuinely thought that this would be a simple deployment of computers and that the school would carry on as usual. I could not have been more wrong.

As we have gone through the last six terms, we've learned a lot about teaching with modern technology at a 1:1 ratio in school.

I've done a lot of speaking on this topic in 2011 and there are several points that keep coming up that I want to share.

I express these principles as the "three mantras" that guide the way I think about technology in school. There are more but, for most teachers, parents and school leaders, these are the three core ideas.

Technology as Accessible as Paper

The early tabloid assumption was that we were "throwing out" pen and paper in favour of the iPad. That was never a specific aim of the project but I'm more interested in thinking about books. The trials and tribulations of deploying eBooks in the face of, frankly, obnoxious greed on the part of publishers, deserves its own post sometime. Here, though, I want to think about our attitude to children, paper and technology.

Only the most retrograde automaton of a teacher would prevent a pupil from following their curiosity into the pages of a book. We would - or should - never accept a world in which a pupil wishing to learn something was told "wait until Thursday, when we get our turn at using the book cart".

A teacher who simply refused to allow books into their classroom would - well, should - be sacked.

This, sadly, is exactly the situation we accept with computers. I have written before about the high ratio of pupils to computers in our schools: on average 3.2 pupils per computer in Scotland; 25% of pupils sharing one computer between five pupils.

We make no attempt to force technology use ahead of paper. Each have their strengths and we recognise and make use of both. We simply try to achieve equal access to the digital and the paper. Digital tools should not be locked away for special times - they are as fundamental as paper-based resources.

A Computing Platform for Everyone

In a previous life, my job was to coordinate computing cluster deployments for the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Durham in support of the analysis of data coming from the Large Hadron Collider. It was a heck of a first job and the learning curve approached the vertical at times. A steep learning curve is great because it means you learn a lot in a short time.

You might not think that deploying parts of a virtual supercomputer is a great preparation for running IT in a small school but you'd be wrong. I learned so much about systems administration, system deployment, taking advantage of commoditisation, trying not to over-allocate resources too early, anticipating the leading edges of both Moore's and Kryder's laws (as well as, at times, Sturgeon's law) and, ultimately, trying to skate to where the puck is going.

As I visit schools, I'm often struck by the heterogeneity of their technology. Some PCs here, some netbooks here, some Nintendo DS over there, a Wii, some AlphaSmarts and always, always, the hateful Interactive Whiteboard.

To my mind, this is a house of horrors. The cost of managing such a diverse range of hardware must be so high, assuming that having everything working and available is a high priority.

One of the most pleasing aspects of our iPad deployment is that it works for everyone in the school. It works for five-year-olds in Primary 1, it works for 16-year-olds sitting exams and it works for teachers and school managers. One computing platform for everyone.

It's not just that the management costs are lower, although they are. It leads to educational benefits too: any teacher can cover any class and feel familiar with the computing infrastructure in that classroom. We have explored peer-tutoring both within classes and across various age ranges to substantial benefit. Not just benefit to the pupils' skills at whatever task they're working on but benefit to the social cohesion of the entire school: older and younger pupils who have worked and learned together are not strangers to one another.

We have one computing platform. We speak one technological language. Everyone understands it and everyone gets a voice.

Technology for Subjects Not Traditionally Well-Served by Technology

As a Computing teacher, it's never been hard to get access to computers for my pupils. That's a subject that's well-served by technology. Other subjects and other stages of the school are not always so fortunate. In many ways, the interactive whiteboard is a workaround for the fact that you don't have enough computers in your classroom: it scales up the display and interaction surface such that four or five pupils can have the illusion of using a computer at once. It is only an illusion, though, since most IWBs are not multi-touch devices.

I use the iPad in Computing but I gain most satisfaction from seeing how easy access to technology is changing classes that used to have to fight for access. In Art, English, Modern Studies, Science, History and French as well as across the Primary department. All of these subjects and curricular areas are being transformed by access to a toolkit of apps and a wealth of information.

If a 1:1 iPad program was just in pursuit of traditional ICT goals, it wouldn't be worthwhile. If this was merely the conceit of the Computing teacher, it wouldn't fly. Curriculum for Excellence repeatedly uses phraseology like "throughout my learning" and "across the curriculum" when talking about the experience of ICT that pupils are entitled to. To my mind, that explicitly rejects the traditional model of teaching ICT in isolation and demands that technology is made available in every area of the curriculum.

I do not claim that technology alone can make the difference. In my talks I often end with an equation, and I'll do the same here: technology + pedagogy + curriculum = change.

Neither modern technology, updated pedagogy or a relevant curriculum are, by themselves, sufficient conditions to produce the kind of change we want. I do believe that they are each necessary.