The iPad Project: Bits, Pieces and Q&A

Lots of little things are happening right now, along with some bigger things that aren't ready to share yet.

Mean Time To Repair

A lot of people never connect their iOS device to a computer but I was keen to embed the process of regular syncing in our workflow to ensure that our devices are backed up.

We had our first hardware failure late last week. One girl's iPad developed a dead strip across the screen that was unresponsive to touch. She dropped off her iPad, I backed it up and restored that backup to one of our spares and she was back in business within one hour.

Media Interest

Media interest in this little project has taken off over the past week or so. It all started with the Daily Record and their slightly unfortunate and, um, wildly inaccurate claim that:

pen and paper have been pushed aside in favour of computers. At Cedars School of Excellence, in Greenock, all the lessons are now taken using iPads.

Well, not exactly. Using the iPad in every subject is not the same thing as saying every lesson is delivered using the iPad. Some will be, some won't.

Lots and lots of tech blogs simply regurgitated the Daily Record's piece without verifying any facts with me. I guess that's the nature of the beast.

Some actual journalists did do some actual work, though, and here are a couple of good pieces:

• Parmy Olson at Forbes: The School That Gives Kids Their Own iPads
• Nicole Kobie at PC Pro: Q&A: The Scottish School That Bought All Its Pupils iPads

Don't miss the comments on the PC Pro story, though. Really, they're a hoot.

Q & A

Some questions or, should I say, assumptions commonly arise in these comment threads. I'd like to answer some:

1. Did my taxes pay for this outrage?

   Not one penny of it. We charge parents a fee and cover our costs that way. Incidentally, those fees come out of money that's already been taxed to pay for that child's state school place that's not being used.

2. Are you no longer teaching children to write?

   No, kids are still learning to write. Consider, though, that a child starting school this year will not leave until 2023. Now think about how much you hand-write today and imagine how much less you'll be writing in 2023. I can't see handwriting retaining its privileged position forever.

3. Are you no longer reading books?

   We're experimenting with eBooks and I'll report back on how that goes. I can guarantee you, though, that school pupils rarely value the "rich texture of paper". Most school books get printed on stock that looks more like a slightly stiffer sheet of Andrex than the weighty, luxuriant pages of a fine-art book.

   Many printed materials for Scottish education are not availale in electronic form so, even if we wanted to eradicate the paper book, it will take some time.

4. Won't the children lack "proper" computer skills?

   Define 'proper', 'computer' and 'skills'. Now define them as commonly understood in the year 2023, which is when a pupil starting today will leave school.

   I've never taught to specific software packages and never will. Of course, we have to use actual real software, but there's a big difference between "teaching Excel" and "teaching spreadsheets". Don't forget we still have MacBooks and iMacs too.

   This is a constant tension in educational technology: do you teach for the current "business environment" or do you teach for learning? I prefer the latter. I'm not doing this just to produce the next generation of cubicle fodder.

   A child graduating our school this year started school when the Apple Pippin was still current. How can I possibly know what specific technologies will be used in their career? It's beyond absurd to even pose the question.

5. Aren't you experimenting with children's futures?

   Yup, but that's nothing compared to the experiment that all of Scotland is engaged in with Curriculum for Excellence.

   This might not work. In three years we might not renew our lease and we could easily go back to a situation where kids get an hour a week using computers. Does that sound like it will be a defensible idea in 2013? Not to me.

The iPad Project: Apple Remote iPad

One of the applications I depend on every day in school is Apple Remote Desktop. Now, many people think of ARD as a kind of steroid-enhanced VNC app. It is that, but it's so much more. Please don't email me recommending VNC apps. I have them and use them but just looking at another machine's screen is only a part of the problem.

I wanted to write about what I feel the next generation of Apple Remote Desktop should look like, in a world where one is as likely to be administering iOS devices as Mac OS X computers.

What I want is a Mac OS X app - let's call it ARD 4 - that will let me both observe the screen of an iPad but also perform several administration functions of a similar nature to the kinds of things that ARD 3 can do for Mac OS X clients.

In case you're not familiar with ARD 3, here are some tasks I regularly do with it:

• Observing remote screens
• Using the list view to see who's logged on and where
• Using the list view to check that all machines are running the latest OS update.
• Performing a software inventory on remote machines.
• Firing off parallel command line operations on all machines (e.g. invoking softwareupdate(8) across the cluster).
• Logging out users who have left themselves logged in
• Installing package files
• Copying files to or from users' desktops.

Now, of course, not every operation maps directly to something you could do to an iPad but here are some operations I'd like:

Find That iPad

Where's that iPad? Even though we're not using 3G iPads, it would be useful to at least know which iPads are in school and which are elsewhere - even if the 'elsewhere' can't be known.

Push a Notification

The ability to push a notification to selected iPads would be awesome.

Install an App

Our syncing infrastructure is working well but I'd like to be able to push an app out to devices.

Observe the screen

It's oftentimes necessary to look at remote screens. To be able to see what's going on with someone's iPad would be invaluable, particularly if it could be combined with a two-way audio session. Also, the ability to save a snapshot of the screen to the admin computer.

Run 'Update All' on a device

We are syncing devices regularly but can only do two or three devices in the morning guidance class (15 minutes). It would be really great to be able to fire off an App Store "Update All" on a bunch of iPads over lunchtime.

Software Report

Because we're not able to sync all devices at one time, we sometimes run into the problem of everyone having a different set of apps, at least until everyone's synced their iPad. To be able to gather data about which devices have which apps would be very useful.

Install and Remove Configuration Profiles

There are various techniques for doing this, but Apple doesn't provide an easy solution of their own. If I could push new and updated configuration profiles to devices without user intervention, that would be very useful.

Battery Diagnostics

If you've ever taken an iPhone to an Apple Store, you might have seen that they have some really sophisticated battery diagnostics tools available at the genius bar. They can see the average time between recharges, how long charges are lasting and the number of cycles on each battery. To have those tools to hand would be great.

The iPad Project: MacVoices

It's been a while since I posted something. I finally had to sit down and figure out not only how I was going to teach but also the what.

The deployment continues to go well. No failures and no hiccups so far. I wish we could sync devices faster in the mornings - we're only able to sync about two iPads in each 15-minute morning assembly, so it's taking a while to roll out applications to the entire school.

You might be interested to listen to an interview I did with Chuck Joiner for his MacVoices podcast. It runs about an hour and covers a large chunk of the project but also wanders off into some broader discussions:

• MacVoices #10101: Fraser Speirs Discusses A Real-World Deployment of iPads in the Classroom

I'm not done with this story yet but now that there's actual teaching to be done too things are going to be a bit slower.

The iPad Project: What Kind of Day Has It Been?

Day one is over and it was pretty much an unqualified success. Early days, of course, but I'm just delighted that it all worked exactly as I had planned.

I'd love to tell you a story of techno-heroism in which I saved the day from certain disaster, because that would make a great story. Instead, like all the best flights, today was calm to the point of almost a wee bit dull.

Had a few classes today: a double period with S4 and another double period with S5. I took them through a quick tour of the iPad, including:

• The text selection and Cut/Copy/Paste UI, spelling and keyboard autocorrect.
• The main features of Pages and Keynote.
• Saving PDFs in iBooks and reading them.
• Sending and receiving documents via email.

Then we all read the Acceptable Use Policy together and in detail.

It was quite interesting. The kids were obvously excited to be getting iPads but not to the point of stupidity. I was pretty pleased with the way they fitted into the way the school works.

I got the impression that the kids were almost relieved to be working with iOS. I have no doubt that, for a lot of them, it's already the OS they interact with most often.

One amusing anecdote: we installed a drawing app - I forget which one but it might have been Doodle Buddy - that allows kids to collaborate on drawings over the network. The kids were fiddling around with this app when there was a knock on the door. "Errm....Mr Speirs? Are your children doing something to my class's iPads?"

Turns out some kids had been joining shared whiteboards on iPads in the other classroom. Hilarity ensued, of course.

Jailbreak

I mentioned the other day that I was lacking a document camera to present the iPad UI. This morning, feeling under a little pressure, I performed a jailbreak on my demo iPad and installed the DisplayOut extension.

I'm not really a fan of jailbreaking. I prefer to be running well-tested and fully supported configurations but DisplayOut was a bit of a necessity.

Apple people: rdar://problem/8342631

Generally, once the jailbreak was done, DisplayOut worked pretty well. It doesn't show on the screen where the touches are happening, though, which would be a nice feature as and when Apple come to support this.

Anyway, we're done. The school is open, the iPads are working and everyone is happy. Me, I'm completely enervated. Launching a program like this is not trivial and I assert my right to feel just a little accomplished and take the rest of the evening off.

The iPad Project: The Night Before Christmas

The school opens for business again tomorrow. iPads have been sync'ed and we've had the debate about whether it's sync'ed or sunk. I wanted to write a little about our take-home policy, since it's the question I get almost more than any other.

We are planning to allow pupils from Primary 6 upwards (age 10-11) to take the iPads home, subject to a signed agreement from home.

From the school's point of view, take-home has several advantages.

At a practical level, because the iPad has such great battery life, we can send the chargers home and simply ask that the kids bring the iPad to school with enough charge to get through the day.

Another problem we've always had is that setting any kind of practical homework that involves using the computer is an open door for "Sorry, sir, my computer was broken". Now, in some cases, that's actually true. It's remarkable, though, how frequently the slackers' computers break compared to the computers owned by the hard-working kids.

An iPad take-home program lets us deliver a standard hardware and software configuration to pupils' homes as well as to their school desks.

I had originally planned to start the take-home program around October, after there had been a bit of a probation period with the whole iPad system. We quickly realised, though, that most teachers were planning to deliver so much work - and, in particular, homework - digitally that to wait would only mean that we would have to figure out interim methods of delivering what we had planned to do until the iPads were allowed to go home.

So beginning, I think, on Tuesday, we'll be sending home some documentation and forms for signature. I can guarantee that the return rate on these forms will be unprecedented in the history of education.

From a sysadmin point of view, there's a lot more we can't control when a device goes home. This worries me a bit.

In particular, my number one concern is that a pupil will plug their iPad into a home computer and, accidentally or otherwise, blow their entire configuration away.

At some level, you have to trust that people will use your stuff properly. The true BOFH, however, backs all that up with policy.

Earlier this year, I completely rewrote our Acceptable Use Policy and developed an 'iPad Owner's Guide" that explains in some detail the kinds of things you are and are not allowed to do. I'll try and share some or all of it on this blog later if I can.

Other Things

Over the weekend we discovered that syncing iPads to user accounts that are mounted from a server over WiFi is a Very Bad Idea. I've moved all the sync computers that I can onto our gigabit ethernet network. The words "night" and "day" come to mind. WiFi is great but you can't beat some GigE.

I really want-slash-need a document camera of some kind to use when teaching about iPad applications. It's a shame that the iPad VGA adapter can't just mirror the entire screen on a secondary display. I'm hoping to be able to figure something out with an old video camera and a tripod but haven't succeeded so far.

We're also looking for a good iPad attendance marking app but, it appears, there are none.

I'll leave you with this photo that I took over the weekend. To see where we're going with this, just imagine this scene with the iPads replaced by laptops or netbooks.