Annika Wasson

IPad Experiment Blogs: Annika Wasson

September 4, 2012

WEEK ONE:

With the increasing amount of technology coming out every day, it only makes sense that schools keep up with this progress. Journalism is shifting to more online and instant accessibility, and I think it’s great that The Little Hawk has access to cutting edge technologies! Throughout the next month as the staff experiments with the iPads, I hope we can use them to enhance our website and newspaper. As a sports reporter, I think the iPads will be extremely helpful in getting game stories and pictures up on the website quickly, which puts us at a more professional level, and allows other students to see what is going on in the school community. I also hope the iPads will provide us with a way to do more things besides just stories such as feature videos, video interviews, and things of that nature. I think the iPads will provide us with more and a greater variety of content on our website, which is important if we want to stay at website Pacemaker level.

Aside from the fact that the iPads will improve the work of the newspaper, I think bringing them into all classes would be extremely beneficial as well. It would be much more environmentally friendly and would provide students with more opportunities to do their homework and projects. Students are doing more work online nowadays anyway so it seems logical that the next step would be to move totry stems like one to one. I hope to look into more ways to better my school work throughout this trial period as well.

I am extremely excited to participate in this experiment and I think it will put us at a level above other schools in the area. This project is just one more thing that makes City High, the school that leads.

WEEK TWO:

Over the past couple weeks the relationship between my iPad and I has grown tremendously. At first I was a little sceptical as to how helpful they would be because of all the distractions the iPad presents. However, now, I don’t know how I ever lived without one. It makes everything seem so much easier and I feel so high-tech! I guess the iPad hasn’t given me anything that I can’t do on a computer, but it does give me a way to do those things quicker and on-the-go. I also now have a way to edit photos and put a story up, and I don’t even have to be at school! I’ve experimented a little bit with movies to do a movie project and I think the iPads will make things like that easier too. Needless to say, I’m love struck by my iPad. I don’t ever want to give it back. I feel like I don’t have enough time in this four week test to try everything the iPads allow me to do. There are so many opportunities and I’m learning new things to do every day. If I could, I would be on my iPad all day everyday because it is so quick, easy, and helpful. I can already see in the short time we’ve had them, that they would open so many doors for all classes, not just journalism. I can access online textbooks, look at my google docs, write a paper, anything, from anywhere at anytime. It has almost come to the point where I don’t need a computer to do my work for classes anymore, which is really nice. Basically what I’m saying is I don’t want to have to go back to the days without my iPad. Please don’t take it away from me!

WEEK THREE:

Once again I’ve found another cool aspect of my iPad. This week I download Pearson’s app for eTextbooks. I was able to connect to my AP Government textbook and without having to lug my textbook home, I was able to read the chapter and study for the test. The app allows you to highlight and put notes on the pages of the textbook which I found extremely helpful when I was going back to look over the important parts of the chapter. After using the app I honestly think that tablets and iPads are the future for textbooks. There is close no difference between reading from the actual textbook and reading from this app other than not being able to physically feel the book in your hands and turn the pages. There are so many benefits that out weigh that single argument. If every student had an iPad with an app such as this one, they would be able to have all there textbooks on one device and the school would not have to continually buy new copies of the textbooks every few years when the book is updated. Along with that, think about how many trees we would save if we didn’t have to buy thousands of textbooks for every school, and who doesn’t want to be environmentally friendly? IPads are the next step for education in the United States, I truly believe that. The tricky part of the deal would be to prevent stealing and damage, but I think if each student was given an iPad, there would be a mutual respect among all the users and everyone would take responsibility for their own device. Some schools give out computers to their students at a certain age and the students keep them throughout high school. This system works for those schools, and I don’t think a similar system with iPads would be much different here. I suggest we just take the step and provide better learning tools for all of our students.

WEEK FOUR:

In the final weeks of the iPad experiment I worked with another app very useful in journalism, iMovie. In iMovie I was able to easily create videos to put up on the website from anywhere, at anytime. I think that people are more interested in watching video interviews because they want to see their peers and hear what they have to say, so in this sense, I’d say my video interviews enhanced the content of the website.

IMovie was extremely easy to use, and whenever I did have questions, there was a helpful bar to give me directions on how to do things. All I had to do was take videos on my iPad, which has pretty good quality, and place them on a layout in iMovie. From there I was able to quickly edited, cut and put together all the video pieces into one movie. There were also options to do voice overs, which would make for a very good video story.

With iMovie I was able to talk to people quickly at events and put video interviews up that day. I think that video interviews really enhanced the websites because students want something different to see on the site other than just stories, and I think they like seeing their peers in the videos and hearing what their peers have to say. In addition, videos are a good extra to go with a story. You could have a longer story on an event, such as state cross country like I did, and then a video interview with one of the runners, and then everything gets tied together.

I will definitely be using iMovie in the future when making video interviews and it has shown me yet another great aspect about the iPad.

The Final Project Ryan Young and I made:

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