Let’s face it – we’re blessed to have quite a variety of tech devices available to us. And now, given that I have a 12.9” iPad Pro and a 13” MacBook Pro that have close to the same screen real estate available, It’s fair to raise the questions: “What’s the best use of each device?” and “What’s the best device to use in the classroom?”
I typically bring just the iPad to class. Luckily we have Windows machines in one building I teach in, and all our instructor stations in Terrell are MacBook Pros. So I don’t need to bring my MacBook Pro to show clips or slide shows.
If you were to look at my iPad during class, it would likely be in split screen mode with the Magic Keyboard. A good reason to upgrade to iPadOS 15 is the much easier interface to utilize split screen — all you have to do is click on the three dots at the top of the screen, and you’ll see icons that will allow for slide-over mode or to put the current app on the left or right. It’s no longer necessary to do the convoluted swiping and finger gestures of the past to multitask. [1] See Simply Computing’s guide to multitasking in iPadOS 13 – scroll down to the “Switch Between Apps” section, and you’ll see what I mean.
On the left hand side is OmniOutliner with the outline for the class, and on the right is most likely PDF Viewer with the syllabus for that class available. I’ve alternated between having PDF Viewer and PDF Expert for the syllabi, and either app will do the job. Maybe it’s the geek in me, but I do have several PDF apps for the iPad. From a teaching/productivity/sanity viewpoint, the biggest issue is knowing what I’ll see when I open an app. I’ve found it’s easier to have each of the PDF apps that I have focus on one particular part of my life. So when I open PDF Viewer, I know that I’m dealing with anything school related. My syllabi, the rhetorical theory handout I’ve been going through in Disaster Rhetoric…all those are in PDF Viewer. That leaves me with Goodreader, PDF Expert and Adobe Acrobat Reader as my other PDF apps (I have MarginNote and Highlights, but I never really warmed up to those two apps for some reason). I honestly like PDF Viewer more because of its excellent integration with the Files app. Acrobat Reader has made it a little easier to get to other files on the iPad – selecting “Browse More Files” in the left-hand navigation will eventually get you to a Files-like view. So that could become app #2, except for one minor problem.[2]The problem is that I have a personal Adobe account and a school Adobe account. And the two don’t mix very well. The iPad also contains my personal pictures that live in Lightroom Classic. If only … Continue reading
If I’m doing any kind of rhetorical analysis with students, or if I’m teaching about a journal article, then Liquid Text is on the right-hand side with my annotations noted for that particular text. I haven’t yet gone with Liquid Text Live. Spending $96/year for what would essentially be for adding optical character recognition (OCR) is a bit high for what I use in Liquid Text. [3]But to be fair, they also allow you 10 installations, including Windows, Mac, and iOS, as well as syncing between machines and a bunch of other stuff, so that’s not a terrible price if you were to … Continue reading Now if I had been better about doing the OCR before I put it on my iPad, that wouldn’t be an issue… but let’s be honest. Most of us find the article or text we’re interested in for class and put it straight into our computers/iPads without double-checking if the OCR was done.
I suppose the other way to do things would be to use DevonThink to Go on the iPad, and let it handle the OCR, and put my annotations in DevonThink. But the annotation abilities of Liquid Text far outclass DevonThink. It is awfully handy to be able to search through a text during class if necessary… [4]Acrobat could do that, if I stayed signed in to my Georgia College account, but I don’t want to deal with the mess of two different Adobe accounts. I feel like I’m repeating myself… 😉 but I do like the way Liquid Text lets me put handwritten notes through Apple Pencil, or clips from the same file or any other file next to the text. I know I’m not even using the full capabilities of Liquid Text Pro, which is the version I have on my iPad.
Occasionally, I’ll use the iPad Pro to look up something that I don’t want to look up on the screen in front of students, or I’ll have some of the questions students posted in their journal entries on the iPad. [5]This will be something I address in a future post – how my students are doing pre-writing ahead of time, and how I can see what kind of notes they’re taking.
So what role does the laptop play? I use Outlook on iOS (we are a Microsoft campus, after all), but it’s woefully underpowered compared to Outlook on the desktop.[6]Microsoft, to their credit, has made tremendous strides when it comes to feature parity for the rest of the Office apps between the desktop and iOS/iPadOS. I even prefer SharePoint for iOS – … Continue reading
Since there’s no version of InDesign for iPadOS, I’m still using the laptop for that. And sadly, I can’t use all the cool Adobe fonts on the iPad in every app.[7]Although OmniOutliner brought back 3rd party fonts in the latest update. Yay! While it’s possible to bring in articles into EndNote for iPadOS, you can’t do OCR through EndNote without a three-step process.[8] Find article – save to downloads. Run OCR through Acrobat or another program. Import file back into EndNote. So I just OCR the articles using Acrobat and then bring them into EndNote on the laptop. Besides, the laptop is so much quicker when it comes to OCR.[9]And whenever I decide to make those OCR’ed files truly accessible — in other words, verifying proper tagging, artifacting, etc. — it’ll have to be on the laptop or the Windows machine. There … Continue reading
Notes
| ↑1 | See Simply Computing’s guide to multitasking in iPadOS 13 – scroll down to the “Switch Between Apps” section, and you’ll see what I mean. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | The problem is that I have a personal Adobe account and a school Adobe account. And the two don’t mix very well. The iPad also contains my personal pictures that live in Lightroom Classic. If only Adobe could come up with a system: apps A, B and C get tied to Adobe Account 1, and apps D, E, and F get tied to Adobe Account 2 — then I’d probably even consider Acrobat as my primary PDF app on the iPad. Alas, not yet possible. |
| ↑3 | But to be fair, they also allow you 10 installations, including Windows, Mac, and iOS, as well as syncing between machines and a bunch of other stuff, so that’s not a terrible price if you were to have it everywhere (I could actually have 7 between all of the machines I use, but that’d be a bit excessive…). The full details are here: https://www.liquidtext.net/pricing-features |
| ↑4 | Acrobat could do that, if I stayed signed in to my Georgia College account, but I don’t want to deal with the mess of two different Adobe accounts. I feel like I’m repeating myself… 😉 |
| ↑5 | This will be something I address in a future post – how my students are doing pre-writing ahead of time, and how I can see what kind of notes they’re taking. |
| ↑6 | Microsoft, to their credit, has made tremendous strides when it comes to feature parity for the rest of the Office apps between the desktop and iOS/iPadOS. I even prefer SharePoint for iOS – it’s wonderfully intuitive. Outlook, however, is a whole another story…. All serious email work is done on the MacBook Pro. |
| ↑7 | Although OmniOutliner brought back 3rd party fonts in the latest update. Yay! |
| ↑8 | Find article – save to downloads. Run OCR through Acrobat or another program. Import file back into EndNote. |
| ↑9 | And whenever I decide to make those OCR’ed files truly accessible — in other words, verifying proper tagging, artifacting, etc. — it’ll have to be on the laptop or the Windows machine. There isn’t really a good accessibility remediation option for the iPad yet. |