Using the Ipad at ASCD

I recently attended the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, a 9000+ person annual conference, this year held at Moscone Center.  I wanted to "travel light" so I brought along my Ipad one day instead of my laptop.  Good news: The conference had free internet access - didn't even have to use a password.  More good news: lots of people had Ipads and there were sessions on their use.  I went to one given by the tech people from Acalanes (East Bay) High School.  It is a large public, but well resourced, school.  They are not really a one-to-one and instead of laptop carts, they have Ipad carts.  Now, the bad news that got me thinking that we are not really ready to replace laptops with Ipads.  I went to a session on using Google Earth in the classroom.  While there is a Google Earth app, the one I have on my Ipad does not do all the really meaningful things the version on my laptop does.  But the story has somewhat of a happy ending.  During this session with the Acalanes folks, there was a "back session" going on and I lamented this problem with the Ipad Google Earth app.  Some anonymous fellow conference goer suggested that those features of Google Earth I wanted use "flash", which is prohibited on Ipads.

submitted by Margaret