Teaching with iPad - Back to School Series

Teaching with iPad

One thing that I believe makes the iPad so good for learning is how personal the user experience can be. The first thing I do as a teacher when I am handed my iPad for the new school year is to start to make the device personal to me. From re-arranging apps, to setting custom home screens and customising my widgets, but these are just the beginning. During our Back to School session, Julia Parker and I shared some of our top tips for teaching with iPad, to best to suit each individual user. These small and seemingly minor changes to the device have the ability to increase productivity, keep you more organised, streamline your teaching process and improve your overall digital and physical wellbeing.

Here is a short summary of our session.

iPad Layout and Widgets

Layout and Widgets are super important and can really increase your productivity and overall organisation. I also love seeing how others set up their home screen. For me, I arrange my widgets on the top, and them my most commonly used apps follow along. I also customise my dock to place those apps I use all day everyday, things like Mail, Reminders and Notes are some of my go to's and customising the dock then allows you to more easily multitask with split screen.

A couple favourite widgets of mine are, the shortcuts folder which I use multiple times per day. Another one is the calendar widget which helps me keep track of my day, where I am meant to be and what's coming up, this is always helpful in the busy day at school.

Adding Widgets - Apple Support or Adding Widgets on Mac on Apple YouTube

Moving Apps and Widgets on iPad

Reminders

As teachers we alway have a million things going through our brain at any one time; call that parent, print that form, do my planning, create that keynote template... well you get the idea....

Reminders is a great way to keep all these things out of you brain and reduce some of your cognitive load. Another great tip is to create lists within Reminders to categorise lists, you can even share these with family and friends, which is super helpful for shared events or even shopping lists 😉

Using Reminders - Apple Support

Using Reminders - Apple YouTube

Safari Profiles

Something we've been waiting for is profiles in safari! You can finally seperate your personal life with school. This will save all things like bookmarks, favourites, passwords etc. which is awesome to keep all those things seperate!

Creating profiles in Safari on iPad - Apple Support

Creating profiles in Safari on Mac - Apple YouTube

Multi-tasking and Lift

Oh I love Multitasking on iPad, all too often I am surprised how many teachers don't know how this works, but the students have already found this new cool feature. Split screen is so good, I also have a shortcut set up to split screen a few more common apps I use in split screen such as Safari and Notes. This shortcut can be found in the Shortcuts Gallery too 😉