The recent release of iOS5 has introduced some changes to how we use the iPads within school. The most fundamental change has been iCloud. It offers the potential to make image sharing easier.
iCloud promises an easy way to move documents and photos around your iOS devices, and it works well. I can take an image on my iPhone, and it's then waiting for me on my MacBook at home. With the iPads [finally] updated to iOS5, I was looking forward to making use of this in school.
Today we had the chance. As part of our Anti-Bullying week work my class were making photo stories using comic life on the iPad. To begin with we talked about what kind of bullying might take place INSIDE the classroom, and what kind we might encounter OUTSIDE of the classroom.
The children worked really well together and came up with two great ideas. We then chose some children to 'act' out the scenes and 'freeze framed' key moments during which other pupils used my iPhone to take a photo. Once all the pictures were taken, we switched on the iPads and loaded Comic Life. Whilst the children began to add the text to the boxes for their photostories I began to transfer the photos from my iPhone to a school iPad using the 'Photoshare' app (I had to use this because as my own iPhone is not linked to the school machines it will not allow iCloud features between them).
With the pictures copied across to an iPad, the iPad then automatically sent a copy of the images to all the iPads being used by the pupils, and they could see them in their "photostream". Everything was going well :o)
The children completed their work, and then saved their creation as an image in the photo gallery. As before, but in reverse, their work was sent to the school iCloud account and I could see it on the iPad I had. It was at this point though that iWish kicked in.
I opened the school Macbook, opened Safari and began to write a post for the school website, and then came to adding images. I opened iPhoto, and looked for the Photostream option. There was no Photostream. I have it at home in iPhoto, so where was it? Then I realised. The school Macbook runs Snow Leopard, not Lion, and iPhoto (although up to date) is not the latest version that Lion runs. And guess what - Photostream is not on it. Oh how iWish Photostream worked with the version we had.
This meant that I had to quickly sync an iPad, and import the images into iPhoto before I could add them.
And so at the end of the lesson I had mixed feelings about iOS5 and iCloud. Yes, it allowed the images to be quickly and easily dispered to all devices that the children were using, and yes it meant I could receive the completed work quickly and easily, but putting those images onto the Internet became a tad frustrating because we weren't running the very latest version of the Macbook OS. A shame, as it spoilt what had been a technically wonderfully simple lesson.
If you want to view it properly, then the work the children did can be viewed in a post on the school website here
