Useful iPad features—Class 2

I have to admit that I’ve never used an iPad.  Last year our school had one class set and they weren’t properly set up, and to my knowledge, my board has not yet offered iPad professional development.  (I’m not teaching this year, so perhaps these things are happening now.)

 

I appreciated the review of the accessibility options that was presented in class, though it was blurry and the quick tapping and switching among menus and screens was a bit overwhelming for me to follow.  It is great that iPads are portable, especially for science where students might be taking pictures or videos of laboratory investigations.  I also think that Siri and the speaks selection feature would be really helpful for my grade 9 students, especially those with learning disabilities—I like that you don’t need to “train” Siri to recognize your voice as was necessary with some software from the past, and I like that you can change the speed and sound of the voice reading to you.  iPads would definitely make these students more independent because they wouldn’t need an EA or scribe or additional meeting time with the teacher or peer support, all of which I have employed to help students succeed with reading and writing challenges.  These accessibility options would also mean the LD students wouldn’t need to move from the instructional setting to complete their work, so the general rule for adaptations, “only as different as is necessary”, would be much easier to apply.  I appreciated the colour inversion feature as well.  I have heard that printing handouts onto coloured paper is helpful for some students, so I think this must be the more technological version of that.