There were a couple times today that I really wanted to cry from frustration.  I didn’t, of course, but I thought about it.  The iPads and Google Docs were at the heart of it. 

My students are required to take a district writing assessment this week.  Since my students do so much writing using the computers and the iPads, I asked if we could use them for this test.  It was decided that my class would do the assessment using technology, and the other 4th grade would use pencil and paper.  It will be interesting to see if this has any effect on the assessment outcome.

For those students using laptops, it really wasn’t a problem, because there are lots of options for word processing and print capabilities.  The iPads are more challenging.  My first thought was to use the Pages app on the iPads, but I wasn’t able to send the document as an e-mail, because there was no e-mail account associated with the iPads.  Instead I decided to use Google Docs. 

First let me explain the situation with these iPads.  Our building has ten iPads and they are all synced to the Principal’s computer, so I don’t have any capability of adding apps myself.  While they spend most of the time in my room, others in the building use them.  At one time I had set some of them up with my personal g-mail account, until I realized this gave access to my personal e-mail to anyone who used the iPads.

During my planning this morning, I created a Google Doc for each child on an iPad, with a shortcut to the document out on the desktop.  The Google Docs were all on my own personal account.  I did this for each of the ten iPads and the six laptops.  There was no problem with the laptops, but when the students began the assessment, the ones with the iPads could not access the document, and when I went to my laptop, I could see that the Google Docs did not appear.  So is it true that you can edit a Google Doc on the iPad, but you can’t create it on the iPad?

Students were to have forty-five minutes to write.  This meant I had to recreate the Google Docs, and get them set up on the iPads, before students could begin writing.  We also had several incidents of students losing the connection to the Google Doc.  This may have been because of my district’s internet and the snow storm that was going on.

When all was said and done, everyone completed their writing assessment, and I was able to print them all, but there’s got to be a better way to do things than the way I’m doing them.  So this is not a blog post about what I know, it’s about what I need to know.  If you have some ideas about a more effective way to make student writing on the iPad accessible and printable, please give me advice. 

By the way, 24 more iPads arrived in our building today.  Yippee!