PDFs and photos on the iPads

We held our second training session on the iPads this week. It was a pretty unstructured session with everyone bringing up questions and just generally sharing information. We talked about a number of Ipad capabilities that we had all explored in the last week.

WiFi
Karen had success establishing a WiFi hotspot via mobile phone. This works on some smartphones at least .

Downloading and organising photos

Julia had done this via email. You just tap the photo in your received email and it then prompts you to copy or save.

Downloading and organising PDFs
Lutie showed us some different ways of downloading and reading PDFs. We explored downloading the ECU Referencing Guide PDF and  looked into Good Reader and we discussed the benefits of Good Reader over other ways of displaying PDFs: iBooks. We looked at iBooks and setting up folders in iBooks. iBooks will separate out PDF documents and books, but you can create another via the Edit function.Stanza is another ebook app we have not yet looked at.




Camera
We looked at the iPad camera, photos and how to organise photos into albums. You can take a photo of your dog and use it as wallpaper!

Other things covered where:  Settings
Sound and how to mute the sound or make adjustments through Settings.
Storage and how to check how much has been used also through Settings.

What learning activities with students are planned? It is still too early as most of us are getting used to the new devices, however some possible activities are to conduct a session with a small group of students, going through the library’s Pilot program.

Also, all learning advisors are already using the iPads to make contact with students via ECU email.

Potential risks? the slow and patchy WiFi are the Mt Lawley campus in particular. Some of the older buildings have poor coverage.


Looking good
Some staff have also swapped their iPads covers at the Apple store to get their preferred colour cover. It’s good to know that was done smoothly, provided the packet had not been opened!