Air Head

03. April 2011 · 7 comments · Categories: Technology · Tags: , , , ,

This is going to be a long, fairly technical post about how I manage files and use my new MacBook Air. If you’re here for leadership-related stuff, check back soon!

In my house, we generally run on a 3-4 year laptop replacement cycle. My 2007 MacBook Pro 15″ (pre-unibody) started showing signs of being long in the tooth shortly after it was out of AppleCare warranty (naturally). Dodgy fan issues, spontaneous shutdowns, and other issues made it unreliable for dissertation-writing and general use.

When the new MacBook Airs made their appearance in October of 2010, my initial thoughts were, “Way cool! But not for serious work.” After taking a long, hard look at what I actually use my computer for (writing, surfing, emailing, light podcasting, light photo editing) instead of what I wish I used a computer for (massive video editing and audio recording, professional-level photo-editing), I decided that I would probably be very happy with an Air — especially in the portability department.

I’d been saving for a while and, despite almost backing down at the eleventh hour and ordering a 13″ MacBook Pro, a considerable amount of research pushed me over the edge and I pulled the trigger on an 11″ MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM and a 64GB of SSD.

Rookie Mistakes

Moving in to a new computer is always liberating and stressful, but when your new digs only provide 64GB of disk space, some extra diligence is required. Prior to the new machine’s arrival, I started a Simplenote with all of the apps I use regularly. These were the ones I’d install right away.

I overcompensated a bit, though. I moved my entire 90GB iTunes library onto an external USB drive. I did the same with my Aperture library. If you’re reading this looking for tips on MacBook Air file management, let me give you a big one: DO NOT DO WHAT I DID!

In theory, having your iTunes library on an external drive sounds like the way to go. That is until you actually want to sync an iPhone or listen to music. Then you have to have your drive with you and plug it in. I found this to be unacceptable since one of the main reasons I bought this machine was to have the extra portability.

Further, I found it to be ridiculous hauling my entire Aperture library around with me all the time. Plus, having my images on the external USB drive killed the zippiness that the SSD provides when it comes to accessing and navigating through my images.

So the external drive solution killed the two biggest benefits of moving to an Air: Being tethered to an external drive lowered the portability factor, and moving large image files back and forth over USB 2.0 negated the speed benefits of the SSD.

How I Roll

After living with this for a few weeks, I’ve come up with the following solutions that work well for me.

I have to credit The Mac Instructor Blog for pushing my thinking on the iTunes issue. The author, Rick Stawarz, had a great post about Home Sharing which is arguably the most under-utilized feature in iTunes. If I’m being honest, at any given time I’m probably actively listening to less than 500MB of my 90GB library. I turned my old MacBook Pro (which has been relegated to Club Penguin duty since it constantly has to be plugged in) into my “main” music library. With Home Sharing enabled on both my Air and my old Pro, I can delete music from my Air with the confidence of knowing it will remain in my “official” library on my Pro. I have also set up iTunes on the Pro to auto-import new music and apps from my Air so I also have the assurance that anything I purchase on my Air (or on my iPhone or iPad which are synced to the Air) will eventually find its way back to the Pro.

So all of my music and movies reside on the Pro with its 500GB hard drive. The Pro is also the machine that syncs video with my (first-gen) Apple TV so this works very well. Just within the last week, I’m seeing some promise in Amazon’s Cloud Drive for those of us with more music than disk space.

For images, I read a post at the Aperture Users Network that turned me on to Aperture 3′s library splitting/merging features. In short, I can keep my full Aperture library on an external USB drive while still carrying around, say, my last 30-days worth of images. Images I add or changes I make on the Air will sync when I plug in my USB drive and “merge” libraries.

As it stands right now, I have 30-days worth of images and a decent library of my current favorite music on my Air and I’m sitting with just over 22GB of free space.

Back That Thing Up

The last piece of the puzzle for me is backup. Having been burned last summer when my wife’s 2006 “BlackBook” died very suddenly, I have become a little obsessed with backup. I have taken many of the ideas herein from the comprehensive backup strategy shared by Frank Chimero.

For starters, I use Dropbox for most of my working files. I have cleaned things up quite a bit and now use a similar system to that described by Chimero for folder and file naming. Older stuff has been zipped up and pushed to my Amazon S3 account (more on that later).

I recently discovered Amazon S3′s Reduced Redundancy Storage. Using a nifty, lightweight app called Arq, my entire home directory is backed up to my S3 account. (I also installed Arq on my wife’s MacBook Pro and it does its thing without ever getting in her way.) My bill for March, backing up both of our machine’s to the cloud, was $2.22. Considering most of that was for the “throughput” of the initial backup (subsequent backups just make incremental changes and push far less data), I’d say this is a pretty economical solution. Almost too cheap and easy not to use. There is no excuse for not backing up.

In addition to all that, once a week I use SuperDuper to clone my entire 64GB hard drive to one of two external USB drives. This is a 500GB portable USB drive partitioned into three sections: (1) backup, (2) libraries, and (3) scratch. My cloned HDD image is stored in the backup section. My Aperture library and a backup copy of my iTunes library are stored in the libraries section. I use the scratch section for moving things back and forth, or for audio or video recording and editing. This drive is small and travels with me in my Tom Bihn Ristretto.

Finally, the entire 500GB drive is cloned once a week to an identical drive that I keep at work.

I told you I was a bit OCD about backups.

Bored Yet?

If you’ve made it this far and are still awake, thanks for reading. I hope that you’ve found some of this to be helpful in some way. In short, if you’re contemplating a jump to the MacBook Air, do it! You won’t be sorry. And once you tweak some of your file management techniques you’ll be glad you decided to on the smallest, lightest MacBook to date.

Reaching Out

20. January 2011 · 8 comments · Categories: Communication, Technology

Coming to a new school can be an exciting opportunity to implement some ideas that have been percolating in your head. Maybe it’s a generational thing, or a function of my own personal level of geekiness, but one of the first things I did after being appointed to my new position this year was check out the school’s website. I envision a school’s website as a “one-stop shop” for anything and everything parents, students, community members, or prospective home buyers would want to know about the school. When I saw what was in place, I knew it just wasn’t going to work for me.

I spent more than a couple days pondering how I would begin to make this change without being “that guy” who comes in and wants to change everything. I started by connecting with our media specialist who, also being new to the building, had no preconceptions about how the site should look. She was in and out of the building over the summer so we met a few times to talk about my vision for our web presence, her comfort level taking a leadership role in the change, and what she thought a middle school web page should contain. Lucky for me, she is curious and highly self-directed and jumped on board from the beginning.

The Goal

I mentioned earlier that I wanted a “one-stop shop” for visitors. I also wanted each core team (we have six) and the elective team to have their own site where they could keep parents up-to-date on the “goings on” for their team.

Getting Started

I’ll spare you the super technical details and tell you that I am self-hosting a WordPress blog that is configured for multiple users. My media specialist and I are the “Super Admins” and the entire staff has been entered as “Users” of the main school site with the rights to create their own sites underneath.

Because I wanted some consistency, I set up the team blogs myself. I wanted all the team blog domains to be conballms.org/teamname without exception. I wanted to make sure that the Tiger team, for instance, didn’t call their site conballms.org/thetigers and that the Falcons didn’t call their site conballms.org/falconsrock. Other teachers who create classroom blogs have the freedom to choose whatever name they want after the conballms.org/.

I also chose to restrict team blogs to a common theme in order to go for a more consistent look and feel across the whole site. Teams had fun finding banner images for their sites in what almost became a kind of competition.

It took some thinking and tinkering to get things to look and act the way I wanted them to. Here are three plugins that were indispensable to me when I was getting things up and running.

  • Import Users by Dagon Design. This plugin allows you to use a big, CSV file to batch create all of your users. Useful if you plan to have more than 5 or 6 people as members of your blog.
  • Unfiltered MU. On multi-user installs, your user-created blogs aren’t allowed to post embed code for things like YouTube videos and the like. This plugin overrides this “feature” at your own peril.
  • Subscribe2. The deal-breaker. This was how I covered the issue of parents who still wanted a regular email. This plugin allows readers to enter their email address and be subscribed to all of your posts.

I hope that you find at least one or two of those useful and that it saves you hours of scouring the web for the solutions to those simple issues.

The Sell

It was actually easier than I ever thought it would be to get teachers on board. In the past, teams would send out a weekly newsletter via email to a mailing list of parents whose addresses were (manually) collected at Back-to-School Night or Parent-Teacher Conferences. It was a model that made the team leader the “list manager” and “editor-in-chief.” Email addresses had to be entered, updated, changed, or deleted, and “articles” from team members had to be emailed to the team leader, copied, pasted, and formatted into the team newsletter.

At a team leader meeting during my transition into the building, I asked simply, “How is that working so far?” Most responses were lukewarm, citing the management issues already mentioned. By this time, I had already put into place our school site and many of them had commented that they really liked it. I mentioned that I would love it if every team had their own team blog instead of sending weekly emails.

I have an expectation that our core academic teams post at least one update per week and I have subscribed to all of the team blogs in my Google Reader. So far, this has worked extremely well for the core teams. I have to think more about what I expect from the elective teams, but I like what we have going so far.

The Verdict

The response from parents has been overwhelmingly positive. I introduced the site formally during our BTS Night in August and invited them to email me if there was something else they’d like to see on the front page. Many have taken me up on it and since the start of the year I’ve added our lunch schedule, the number for the nurse’s office, and some static info that is commonly requested such as the link to order a yearbook. My front office staff listens for common questions from parents and I make sure that the answers get posted.

My media specialist has stepped up in a huge way. From a slightly tentative user, to someone who enjoys posting pictures and wants to learn more about WordPress.

Overall, I am pleased with this contemporary way of reaching out to parents and our community.

What’s next?

I’ve been inspired by this post by Eric Sheninger, but I am being careful not to bite off too much, too fast. I’d like to get better about regular posts to our Twitter feed, finish rolling out a Facebook page, and start next year by committing to posting monthly principal reports like the one he models. Thanks, Eric, for being one of the most consistent sharers of concrete, actionable advice for principals.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t thank Tim Lauer for the extensive conversation we had at ISTE last summer and for being my “phone support” as I was putting my school site together.

Still to Come!

In a future post, I’ll blog a bit about how I stopped sending emails to the entire staff and began the year, cold-turkey, using an internal staff blog instead.

Taking Data Dialogues Online

13. January 2011 · 6 comments · Categories: Leadership, Technology, Tools

One change that I made to existing processes early on in the school year was to digitize our data dialogues. Typically, data dialogues would work this way: Meet as a whole school with teams seated together at tables in the Media Center (in August, with no A/C, this is a steamy proposition). Pass out stacks and stacks of legal-sized paper with an overwhelming amount of student and group data. Teams sit at their tables, answer some guiding questions and make some inferences, then they begin to put together some action steps to address areas of need. In theory, the administrators work collaboratively with teams and receive a copy of team action steps so that all of us continue continue to revisit, modify, and tweak the steps as the year progressed.

In order to move this process into the 21st century and take advantage of the readily available tools for collaboration that are found online, I worked closely with my Leadership Team. This did not happen overnight, in fact I started planting the seeds well before I even broached the topic of moving data dialogues online. First, I began sharing meeting agendas and other documents with them via Google Docs. It was my hope that by starting slowly, they’d get comfortable using (or at least interacting with) GDocs to collaborate and share documents. I would say 75% of them immediately saw the benefits of using GDocs over the traditional method of passing documents around and hoping you were working with the most current version.

Once I was comfortable that most of my Leadership Team were on board, I worked closely with my Instructional Coach — as I usually would with or without GDocs — to craft some guiding questions for our data dialogues. I had her create a GDoc with the questions in it which were shared with team leaders. Team leaders were then responsible for sharing it with their teams and collaborating on their responses. One of the benefits to the teams was that one person was no longer required to be “the recorder” because once the document was shared, any team member was able to type directly into the document.

Through this whole process, my AP, my Instructional Coach, and I all had access to each team’s template so we could monitor their progress any time without having to mail documents back and forth. This freed teams to move from our (extremely hot in August) media center to other locations on campus where they had the resources they needed to do their work.

The Mechanics

I knew I was in for an uphill battle if I owned the process of sharing documents one at a time with each member of the staff so here’s how I set things up…

I created a folder for each team and shared that folder with the team leader, my instructional coach, my AP, and any other special service providers who generally need access to the student data. Now, anything I place in that folder is automatically shared with the team leader whose responsibility it was to invite other team members into their team folder. So instead of worrying about permissions for 50-60 staff, I only had to worry about 7 folders and team leaders.

Once team leaders had invited their team members to the team folder, everyone had access to everything in the folder. Additionally, you’ll see folders for supporting documents, agendas, minutes, and attendance. Those are used by my SAAC chair to track our monthly meetings.

Since most everyone seemed comfortable, if not completely enamored, with this new process, I decided to ask team leaders to keep their regular team meeting minutes in their team folders so that I wouldn’t get seven separate Word documents mailed to me every Monday afternoon that I’d have to open, save, and file. Now all team meeting minutes are in one place and they’re filed the instant they’re created.

Finally, I created a “Data” folder that I shared with all team leaders. Into this folder, I toss every PDF and Excel file that I receive. This avoids the necessity of emailing large data files around that clog up teachers’ email boxes. Rarely do people need to look at those emails the instant they arrive so they either sit in the inbox until they’re needed or they get filed and/or lost. Using a data folder means that everything is easily accessible and that I can avoid re-sending emails if and when data is lost.

Yes. Much of the data comes to us in PDFs. Don’t get me started.

How’s it working for you?

Knowing that this whole process was new to many teachers, it was critical that they felt supported and confident that they could take the risk and stumble. At every Leadership Team meeting, we have an agenda item that opens the floor to input and feedback about the process. During the first month or so of school, I would meet regularly with team leaders with no other agenda other than to have them get out their laptops and practice creating and sharing documents and folders.

Though it eventually tapered off, for the first few weeks I would regularly have teachers come to my office or approach me in the hall and ask for help doing this or that. I was acutely aware that the first time they didn’t feel supported the whole stack of cards I’d been building would become dangerously unstable so it was — and continues to be — very important to me that I personally worked with every teacher who was having trouble for as long as it took them to get comfortable.

I didn’t provide a “way out” or safety net. The only way to capture evidence of a team’s data dialogue and their action plans was via Google Docs. For the few who brought me paper copies, I’d say something like, “This looks great! Make sure you copy it over to your team folder on Google Docs so I can review it.”

“Don’t you just want the paper?”

“No. I’ll lose it. I’d like them all the completed documents in Google Docs so that I know everything’s in the same place and I know where to find everyone’s plans. Thanks for taking the time to do that!”

Not using Google Docs was simply not an option.

Spreading the Word

02. June 2010 · 4 comments · Categories: Education, Leadership, Technology, Tools · Tags: , , ,

I am both excited and nervous about tomorrow.

Over a year ago, I pitched an idea to one of our district-level tech folks to do a hands-on, immersive day (or series of days) where school and district leaders could just… play. We spend a lot of time debating the theory of this or the data supporting that, but too many leaders lack the fundamental knowledge and skills to move forward with using technology to facilitate communication and collaboration in their schools and departments. And unfortunately a few are afraid of looking “dumb” and therefore not comfortable in their ability to support their staff in jumping into this stuff.

They really want to know. They’re hungry to know. But some just don’t know where to start.

It’s taken me a while to bring this to reality (huge thanks to our Director of C&I for actually thinking I was onto something with this idea…), but tomorrow I will be hosting our district’s first ever Leadership Technology Bootcamp. The format for the day was inspired by the bootcamps that Scott McLeod and his posse at CASTLE present to leaders in Iowa. The agenda is very aggressive for the time we’ll have (I doubt we’ll get past podcasting), but I’d rather keep it that way and leave folks wanting more.

My biggest concern going in is the diversity of proficiency in the group. I plan to do a little show & tell, followed by some hands-on time. I’ve also dragged a couple of my fellow TSD Twitterati along to help facilitate small groups.

My greatest hope for the day is that my colleagues see a lot of different tools and, through some experimentation, find one or two that they can see themselves using in the 2010-2011 school year. I also hope that by exposure to some of these tools, they will be in a position to better support their teachers — not necessarily because they know everything about Google Reader or WordPress or Etherpad, but because they know enough to steer a teacher in the right direction when they think something might be a good fit.

And it would also be nice for all of us to continue working together to improve our skills. A true community of practice. A Twitter colleague said it better than I ever could.

As it stands, I have close to 50 school and district leaders signed up to spend the day learning and collaborating. Quite a nice start, I think.

Wish me luck!

iPad Thoughts on Day 2

04. April 2010 · 14 comments · Categories: Hardware, Technology · Tags: , ,

Let me start by saying that this is intended to be a quick overview of my initial impressions of the iPad as a device. If you’re looking for hyperbole about how the iPad will Change Everything in the world of educational technology, this isn’t going to be the post you’re looking for.

First off, I am writing this overview using the Notes application on my iPad. Ordinarily, I’d have used Simplenote and Markdown, but since it’s not yet available for iPad, I’ll write this up in Notes and email it to my Simplenote address for final tweaking.

Why iPad?

For those who know me, there would never have been any doubt that I would have an iPad. I was convinced that there was an iPad-shaped hole in my life. This really all started pre-iPad back in December while I was on my winter break and spending a lot of time at home with the family. There were times when my wife was reading one of her books, the kids were happily playing together, and I wanted to catch up on some RSS reading or other reading I’d bookmarked for later.

I wanted to read some content, but I didn’t feel like dragging out my 15” MacBook Pro to do it, so I spent a lot of time reading on my iPhone. It was OK, but I found that for longer sessions, it was awkward to hold and tiny to read. Still, it was much handier than dragging out my laptop just to do some reading.

With some downtime to do some reading for my own enjoyment, I also re-discovered my first generation Kindle. I downloaded a couple books to read over the holidays and found the Kindle to be the perfect size. Bigger than my iPhone, easier to read, but not as cumbersome as my laptop. I spent some time looking for ways to get my RSS feeds onto my Kindle as I imagined doing sustained reading on the Kindle would be preferable to the iPhone or the laptop.

Turns out there are a variety of ways to make this happen, but not without paying for emails to the Kindle or having to manually hook it up to USB any time I wanted to move content. I know, I know… The ultimate “first world” problem.

My experience left me wanting something that I could use like my iPhone, but would be as easy to read as my laptop. There had long been rumors of an impending Apple tablet, so I held out hope that such a device would come along.

In the meantime, I found myself making a mental note of all the times that my iPhone wasn’t quite enough, but my laptop was way too much. Taking observation notes in teachers’ classrooms, sitting in meetings, hanging out at Loveland Coffee… The device that had yet to be invented seemed to me to be the perfect device. A ‘tweener. Something that could fill the gap between a laptop and an iPhone.

To further complicate things, my trusty MacBook Pro was nearing middle-age. I knew that within the next 18-24 months I’d possibly need to replace it and I’d need to start saving for that, too.

Choosing One

When Steve unveiled the iPad on January 27, I was ready. The rumors had been swirling for so long that I had begun an “Apple Tablet Fund” for myself. I was ready for a device that – based on rumors in the weeks before the event – would sell for about $1,000 US.

Some of us at my school watched the keynote coverage live and when Steve said that the would be 16, 32, and 64GB models available, I looked at a colleague and said, “$799, $899, and $999, I bet.” I was beyond thrilled when the 16GB model was announced at $499.

I started planning. My circa 2007 MacBook Pro is still plenty fast for me. I primarily use it for Aperture, recording and editing Practical Principals, maintaining my websites, and writing papers, including – eventually – my dissertation. Other than running Aperture (which it still handles acceptably well), these are not high-horsepower tasks. I reasoned that since I had maxed out the memory to 4GB when I bought it, upgrading the hard drive from 160 to 500GB would be $75 that would keep me in business for another couple years.

So having allocated $800 to my iPad + accessories + MacBook Pro refresh fund, I was down to deciding which iPad to get. Which size? To 3G or not 3G? The size wasn’t too hard to decide on. I didn’t plan on using it for music or video more than occasionally, and my 16GB iPhone 3GS is never more than 1/3 full even with over 600 images in my camera roll, a couple playlists, and a video or two. I settled on the 16GB model.

The 3G decision was really not much harder for me. I imagined this as a laying on the couch, sitting in the conference room, hanging out at the coffee shop machine. I could not imagine more than one or two times in a year when I would need or want to access something on my iPad in a non-WiFi place, and even fewer occasions when I couldn’t make due with my iPhone’s 3G access for a short period of time. Plus, the extra $130 could be better spent on apps and accessories.

So on the day they were available for pre-order, I went online at 6:30 AM and made a reservation for a 16GB iPad at the Boulder Apple Store. Why not have it delivered to my door on April 3rd? Let’s just say I didn’t want to leave my iPad in the hands of UPS or FedEx.

iPad Day

On Saturday morning, I left my house at about 8:30 and arrived at the Boulder store at 9:09 – a little later than I’d planned, but it was not a problem. I’d say there were 60 or so people in the line as I walked up. When I got closer, I was directed to a much shorter line for people who had reserved an iPad. I would say there were maybe a dozen people ahead of me. They were letting folks into the store in groups of 8-10 as others were leaving. Some left the store with their iPads held high over their heads as they walked past those in line as if they were expecting some kind of applause. Unfortunately for them, while the line folks were cordial and chatty, it was too dang cold and windy for people to take their hands out of their pockets to clap.

In typical Boulder fashion, the store clientele was an eclectic mix. There was not an “iPad type” as I had initially suspected. There were grandmas and grandpas, athletic-types who looked like they’d stopped training for their half-marathons only long enough to dash into the store and sprint out with an iPad, dudes with neck beards who’d slathered themselves in pachouli oil, and yuppies with valet parked X5s waiting in the underground parking area. Most were only removing their hands from pockets or gloves only long enough to snap a picture with their iPhones and Tweet it.

In the store, I was shadowed by a friendly-enough sales person who escorted me around as if I might grab a Mac Pro and bolt at any moment. He let me play for a bit with one of the display models, but given the insanity and the crowd, I asked for my reserved iPad and a couple of accessories so I could pay and leave.

I wanted the dock (sans keyboard) but it was not in stock. I declined the VGA connector figuring I’d get it another time, then spent a few minutes deliberating between an Incase neoprene sleeve and the Apple iPad folio-style case. I decided on the neoprene sleeve which, in retrospect, I regret a little bit. I have used Incase sleeves for my laptops forever, but this has the distinct feel of a case that was designed and manufactured based on published specs for a device that no one on the design team had ever actually touched (go figure). The case is a little loose rather than being snug. The upshot of all of this is that it will protect the iPad in my messenger bag. The downside is that it is not the ideal “walking around campus” case. I know I’ll be ordering the Apple case online.

I grabbed my iPad and case and the salesperson swiped my card and made me sign his iPod Touch POS device using my index finger. He said a receipt would be delivered to my email. Nice. I headed out the door figuring I’d find a spot at Starbucks or Barnes & Noble and try the iPad out. What I should have remembered, though, is that as with an iPod or iPhone, the iPad is useless until you first connect it to iTunes for an initial sync. I turned it on in the car, marveled for a minute at the gorgeous screen as it displayed the iTunes logo with the little picture of a USB cable, powered it down, and headed for home.

First Thoughts

Being the über-geek that I am, I had downloaded several apps on Friday night when iTunes store was fully populated with the first wave of iPad apps. The initial sync was the usual affair – pretty quick because I didn’t include much media.

I configured my MobileMe account and fired up the calendar. For me, this is where the iPad shines. On the iPhone, month-view is not terribly useful because the only way to see that something is happening on a day is to look for a little dot and then tap the day to drill down. The month-view on iPad is beautiful. It looks just like iCal and all events are visible without tapping in to get a closer look.

Next up, Things. Having dabbled with nearly every to-do manager over the last year or two, I always seem to come back to Things. It has everything that I need and nothing I don’t. The folks at Cultured Code nailed the iPad version of Things. It syncs quickly with the desktop version and is actually fun to use.

I opened Mail. Email looks great. I like how turning the iPad on its side brings up a split-pane view while holding it vertically focuses on a single message. I’d been skeptical of the on-screen keyboard, but it find that it is a pleasure to type on in landscape mode (not so much in portrait mode). In fact, I’m well into typing this piece and I’m still using the iPad’s keyboard.

I watched an episode of FlashForward and caught the last 5 minutes of this week’s LOST that my DISH network DVR had cut off… Video looks amazing via the ABC player which allows you to stream for free your favorite ABC shows a day or so after they air.

And the web. Wow. The marketing propaganda suggests that using the iPad to surf the web is like holding the Internet in your hands. Cheesy? Sure. But let me tell you that there is something about interacting with web pages by touching them rather than by pointing and clicking a mouse that is difficult to describe. After years of sitting 3 feet away in a desk chair, I’ve discovered in the last 36 hours that this is not the ideal way browse the web. Nor is laying back with a heavy laptop on your lap. Touching links and images is an entirely new, entirely wonderful experience.

Mind the Gap

For me, this device neatly fills the iPad-shaped hole in my daily workflow. It might surprise you that I’m not a big fan of laptops in meetings or during classroom visits. There’s something about the visual barrier it puts up between people that has always bothered me a little bit, even when I’m the one with the laptop. I’m more inclined to bring a Moleskine for notes and my iPhone for calendaring and to-do list stuff. Now, I intend to bring my iPad instead.

For classroom walkthroughs and summative observations it’s a natural fit. I can create forms in Numbers or, possibly, FileMaker that I can use for data collection.

At home I use the iPad for reading RSS, cruising news sites, and surfing the web. It’s just better. And I look forward to eventually using it as a travel device, especially with the addition of the iPad Camera Connection kit which means I can slurp in a day’s worth of photos from my camera’s memory cards.

What It Isn’t

On the other side of the coin, my MacBook Pro is still the best for doing any significant writing. I also can’t use my iPad to record or edit Practical Principals. And despite the camera kit being a good option for pulling in backup copies of images from a memory card, it’s not a fully-capable image-editing platform.

If you’re planning to make iChat video or Skype calls, you won’t find the iPad to be a suitable replacement for a notebook or desktop computer. But if you’re like me and often find yourself thinking, “I wish I had my laptop with me,” I think you’ll find the iPad to be a great device.

It’s not a “netbook killer” (not that the netbook market needs any help from Apple on that front) or a “laptop killer,” but it wasn’t designed to be. The few netbooks I’ve used don’t do for me the things that my iPad excels at. As Steve Jobs mentioned at the iPad’s introduction in January, “Netbooks aren’t better at anything.” Netbooks strive to do everything a full-blown computer can do in a much smaller package. In doing so, they’re rife with compromises.

Rather than attempting to be a miniature version of a computer and try to do everything, the iPad was designed to do a subset of things better than your computer can do them. If I can’t do it on my iPad (edit video, write my dissertation, Skype video call…), it’s probably something better done on an actual computer.

While light content creation is possible on the ipad, it is not ideal for making things. It excels, however, at consuming things.

To Do

I plan to continue exploring the iPad’s use as a presentation device when I get the VGA connector. I also plan to download a book or two to determine whether it is a realistic eBook reader. There are also a couple tips and tricks I want to explore, including how to get my own content into the iBooks app.

So What?

My Twitter friends (and my mom) have continued to ask me if they should get an iPad. What’s so great about it?

It’s sort of like when I got my original iPhone. It’s hard to explain to anyone exactly why the iPhone is awesome. It just is. My stepmom spent 15 minutes using my iPad before cruising to the Apple store online and buying herself one. Is it “magical?” I don’t know. If you don’t think you have a need for one, then don’t get it.

However, if you’ve got an iPad-shaped hole in your digital life, I can’t imagine you’d regret picking one up if it’s within your budget.

Install-Worthy

Still Waiting For

*Miscellany: While I typed this post on my iPad, final editing (including adding URLs was done in TextMate).

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