Using the iPad at a conference

I attended the Intelligent Information Symposium in Sydney last week and took my iPad. We were presenting, so I decided to leave my laptop behind and just rely on the iPad. Constance, my co-presenter, placed the presentation PowerPoints on Dropbox and we both put our conference presentation notes and PowerPoints on our iPads using the iPad app, Good Reader. I also used the iPad app, Pages for taking notes during the presentations.

Advantages:

• Using Good Reader meant I had all the associated conference PDFs, documents and PowerPoints at hand
• Using Pages you can take your conference notes instead of toes on paper that have to be transcribed later, or notes on a laptop that need to be lugged around.
• The iPad is much lighter than a laptop.
• For some of the papers I used Twitter as my notes update method.
• Using the conference WiFi you can keep up with email, Twitter etc

Disadvantages:

• Where to stash it when you are having tea, coffee or lunch? It is too big to fit in your handbag, so you need to carry another sac, or backpack.