My first post from my iPad

Note: My students will be blogging throughout the fall term, and I’ll be blogging as well on our course blog. Here’s my first post that I wrote earlier today. I was testing the iPad app BlogPress to see if I could post successfully from there to the Movable Type blog on Penn State’s server. Success:

This is my first post from my iPad for this blog. I’ve owned an iPad since April or May 2010, but I’m constantly learning what I can do with it and how I can interact with it as a work environment. It’s a wonderful toy, as almost every reviewer will comment, but teachers, writers, and information workers are still considering how this device might be useful as a work environment. Throughout this term, we’ll be exploring the possibilities and limitations of the device for technical writing work.

How has this device been integrated into my work so far? Well, it’s been fun trying to figure out what I can accomplish, and how to accomplish it, on the iPad. For instance, I used Pages to revise the syllabus for this course. While some of this work was fairly easy to do, I ran into certain problems: tables imported from Microsoft Word documents don’t seem to sit as nicely in the document as I’d like, tables created in Pages might move when I export it as a .doc file, and fonts aren’t embedded nicely when the file is exported as a .pdf file. (In fact, I’ve found that some Helvetica can’t be read at all in Adobe Acrobat Reader.)

Here’s my iPad, my coffee, and a print copy of our textbook as I worked on the schedule. Formatting tables got difficult, and now, as I’m finalizing the syllabus, I’m wondering if tables was a poor decision, as they might not export nicely. I’m going to keep playing with this to see what I can do.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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