Sunday, July 15, 2012

iPad Possibiliites

In addition to planning for Gen Con in Indianapolis and Dragon Con here in Atlanta, the new school year will soon be here! This year my class will have a full set of iPads, one for each student. I received a class set in the middle of last school year, but this year we'll be able to implement their use much better. Earlier this week I attended iSummit 2012, where I learned about all sorts of apps and uses of iPads. The possibilities are exciting, especially having a platform for each of my students to access these opportunities.

Among the exciting ideas is to move my classroom simulations to a paperless format, providing all of the materials through each student's iPad. The original document comes to almost nine hundred pages, much of which is simply printed. This includes the six or seven pages of each character's background and a set of rules and other guides. This is easy to convert.

The tricky part is that each character has a set of cards, which students use and trade to accomplish many of their goals and machinations. These virtual cards would need to be unalterable but destructible, for when a player uses one. It would also be helpful if I could annotate them, but they should not be able to do so. I'm tech savvy enough to have a basic blog, and I've been able to do the troubleshooting for my students' iPads last spring, but I'm not sure how to make this work. I'll be planning with the school's tech people in the coming weeks. If anyone has any ideas, I'd appreciate hearing about them.

If you're going to be at any of the same conventions mentioned above, let me know. It would be fun to see you.

Have fun!