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Saturday, December 8, 2012

Improvements in Accordance for use with an iPad, but . . . AND using the iPad administratively

The chief reason I wanted to try out an iPad in the classroom was the opportunity it offered me to bring an ancient text program into classroom use that I had so far been able to use only on my office computer. The company that sells the program, Accordance, had launched its iPad version just before the iPads in Education project started. As it turned out, the ease of use was not what I had hoped and more often than not I have despaired of putting the program and the iPad to good use in my classroom. However, Accordance recently made some reasonable improvements that are increasing the usefulness of the program. Those changes offer some reason to hope that the match of hardware to software will improve enough to make Accordance genuinely useful in class. In the meantime, it still remains too cumbersome for my tastes. The ease of using technology needs to come to such a point that it never gets in the way of pacing a class session, and we're not there yet with this pairing.

An added comment: I read Lydia's post on iMovie and was reminded of a use of the iPad I have been making but haven't mentioned. It has become a very convenient tool for tracking the administrative duties I have in various roles and for ensuring I have a calendar with me at all times. On that front it has been a great resource for me and for that I'm quite grateful. (I know, some of you are saying, "Kugler, have you never heard of on iPhone?" And those who are saying that have never seen me try to type on an itsy-bitsy screen.)

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