Tablets, tablets and more tablets

It's hard to believe how the market has changed over the past few years as it relates to tablets. I took a quick glance at a couple of technology web sites and felt compelled to at least give a mention to quite a few tablet devices that are either on the market or coming soon. This isn't meant to endorse or criticize any product, but I do hope that you'll do your best to encourage users to answer some critical questions (such as what they want to do with the device) as you are asked about which one is the best one, etc.

iPad2 - Apple's offering, which is clearly the market leader and has the most acclaim. Runs their iOS, has a 9.7" screen, front- and rear-facing cameras and has the iTunes store and their apps behind it. Touts a 10-hour battery life. $499 price point for the 16GB WiFi model.

Galaxy Tab - Samsung's offering, which gets some good reviews and runs the Android OS. Android = Flash, which is important to some. Has a USB connection kit to give you access to a thumb drive. 10.1" screen, two cameras, apps via Android Market. $499 price point for 16GB WiFi model. I couldn't find much on battery life, though I read one review that guessed at the 6-7 hour range.

Xoom - Motorola's offering. It runs Android and says it's now upgradeable to 3.1 version. 10.1" display. Front and rear cameras. USB port. They tout a battery life of approximately 10 hours. $599 price point for 32GB WiFi.

Iconia Tab A500 - An Acer offering. 10.1" display, runs Android 3.0, has both cameras and a USB port. "Up to 8 hours" on battery life. $449 price point for 16GB WiFi.

TouchPad - An HP offering. Not on the market yet, but you can pre-order. Runs webOS, which I'll link their description to because I admittedly don't know that much about it. I've read that it 'refines' multitasking and a few reviews say it's very intuitive. 9.7" screen. Front-facing camera. USB port. $499 price point for 16GB WiFi. Pair it with the right HP phone and you can answer calls from it.

Blackberry Playbook - RIM's offering. It's running the Blackberry Tablet OS. 7" screen, up to 10 hours of battery life. Connect wirelessly to your Blackberry phone and access its email, calendar, etc. Dual video cameras. $499 price point for 16GB WiFi.

How exhausting! There are others like the HTC Flyer and the Toshiba Thrive, but you get the idea. They're everywhere and there's much more to it than simply picking one off the shelf and forking out some cash. There are subtle differences covered here and in the general look and feel, ease of use, etc. Please... ask yourself what you want to accomplish before choosing the device that's best for you.

Can you successfully share an iPad?

My parents have a vicious Dachshund that will chew appendages off of toy geese with embedded squeakers. This has nothing to do with this blog post, but this should be noted nonetheless.

I thought I'd put an item on the blog that I've been passing around via email this morning with several other leaders in the K-12 tech community, including Marty, John and John David. There has been much discussion about the adoption of the iPad recently and it presents challenges for the K12 technology leader. For all of the wonders of the touch interface, cameras in each direction and the amazing applications that developers are creating every day, the fact remains that this device is less enterprise-friendly than it is consumer-friendly. I'll paste in one portion of an email I shared today. It details one challenge that several districts are dealing with. I welcome any input into the best way to work through this dilemma:

Here’s the issue on my mind at the moment... If the iPad isn’t dedicated to one particular student (e.g. cart-based environment), how will the student best be able to transfer created content to the teacher? Here are a few things that have been suggested, along with the challenges:

• Dropbox – This could work well in a dedicated environment, but I’ve been told that you can’t easily (if at all) log out of Dropbox once the app connection is established. If you can’t log in and log out, that hinders the creation of a student-specific Dropbox and you’ll face issues with shared boxes that could lead to unauthorized viewing, creation or deletion of student work.

• Email via profile – This is another option in a dedicated environment, but will be a challenge if different students have the iPad from one period to the next. Continually deleting and recreating a mail profile doesn’t seem like a good option.

• Email via OWA – Multiple people have told me that you cannot send attachment via OWA if connected from the iPad Safari browser.

Are there other ways to do this? I’ll share one suggestion I received from our Naperville contact and one potential option that I was reading about yesterday.

• Email via ‘generic’ account – You could set up a generic account for the iPad and use it to email assignments to the student’s account and/or the teacher’s account. There are some instructional hurdles here as well, but it’s an option that @JDSCIO said they had been trying recently. Could a student access another student’s work via the ‘sent items’ in that email profile? Could that account be used to send objectionable emails? Perhaps in each case, but it is at least an option worth considering.

• Moodle and/or mBook app – I haven’t yet checked to see if this solution would allow for better logging in and out. I haven’t tested the mBook app for its feature set. I simply wanted to point out that there is a $3.99 app called mBook that is supposed to bring Moodle features to the iPad. Of course, if you aren’t using Moodle, that means that there’s an entire course management system to get installed and implemented. Moodle’s course structure might be a good way to transfer assignments, though, and that could become a standard that would be used whether or not iPads were the device of choice.

We've had some great follow-up on this topic, with Marty noting the fact that we really need to avoid the concept of "files" needing to be transferred at all. If teachers are after the students' ideas and content, are there web-based ways of capturing that? Comments on blog entries, online forms, course management systems and similar technologies are available.

It's an interesting topic and a challenge for all of us, so feel free to offer input and I'll try to follow up as solutions are attempted and evaluated.

Change: Inevitable (and fast, it seems!)

I guess anyone can be a prophet if they predict the obvious and wait for it to happen. In a previous post, I had discussed the increasing pressure to implement personal devices in the K-12 environment. Of course, I was only writing based on what I was seeing and reading elsewhere. Fast forward a few months and it seems that the pressure is increasing... and quickly.

I've talked to at least three school districts in the past week that are all getting pressure to implement some type of new device into the environment. For districts that think it's only happening to them or that it's only in our area or state, this isn't true. It's across the country and across various enterprises. Take a look at this Gartner blog post. I'm not as concerned about the market share of a particular company, but note the initial comments about consumerization affecting the enterprise and the "...increasing number of Macs being brought into the enterprise." These are the conversations I've been having, so I suppose I simply wanted to get a few thoughts down to state to the K-12 CIO that "you're not alone."

It feels that way for some, though. Administrators see these new devices (the iPad being the most common example) and demand that their IT staff get these in the classroom. I've seen some of the applications that are out there and I can certainly see the educational benefit. For the things they can do, devices like this have been built for ease of use, fast response and crisp audio/video output. Their cry is "why not?"

The local IT staff has been conditioned to look out for the district. They know that they are most likely the ones that will field the calls when things don't work as well as first imagined. Do you want to print? Does this need to hook to a projector? Do you want to use Flash-based applications? Do you want these apps to go to the web through our required proxy solution? Who's handling the iTunes synchronization? Are these being signed out and in? How are we keeping these charged? If we're in an Active Directory environment, are these devices supposed to communicate with local servers?

You get the idea. By the way, some of these hurdles can be overcome. Right now, though, this seems to be the latest example of one segment of administration pushing for implementation while the IT staff begs for time and resources to better understand and account for the business requirements. As an IT leader, you're right to ask these questions. However, be aware that there are times where the situation dictates that you implement or be viewed as a roadblock to progress.

A quick search will reveals countless articles about consumer devices entering the enterprise and the need for our security models to change. This is one blog entry discussing this trend and it's easy to find others. Without dragging out the crystal ball again, I'll simply state that we're probably all facing major change in the way we've thought about our networks and securing them. For now, take some solace - limited though it may be - in the fact that it isn't "just you". It's all of us. As that blog entry indicates, it could be more about the data than the device moving forward.

The thought of data driving it all made me think of the Web 2.0 video "The Machine is Us/ing Us".