Lesson Learned

If you read my last post, you know my students were in the middle of a cool app-smashing project involving Desmos, Skitch, and Showbie. At the end of class, they saved their work to the camera roll to finish up the next day.

In our building, we have three iPad carts with 30 iPads each. The iPads are numbered in the settings, and at one time they had numbers on the lock screen and home screen. Unfortunately, many students feel the need to change the photos on the screens, making it difficult to quickly and easily identify the iPad. Also, when students are done using the iPads, they don't get returned to the correct slot in the cart either, so it's like finding a needle in a hay stack to find the exact iPad you need. I always remind my students to check the number in settings and record it on the sign out sheet in case we need to use the same one the next day (as in this case). Some did, others didn't. 

Our wonderful technology teacher Ruth Davis just happened to be in my classroom at the start of class because she was bringing the iPad cart to me. She and I spent a good 10 to 15 minutes going through all the iPads trying to find the iPad that each student had saved their work on the day before. It was a disaster! I finally gave up and scrapped the idea of finishing the project.

Lesson learned: don't save work to the device, save it to the cloud!

The project was supposed to include the student saving their completed project to Showbie. I had lost track of time towards the end of class and in my haste, I told them to just save it to the camera roll instead of signing into Showbie and adding it to today's assignment folder. I will never do that again. Showbie is such a great app, and every project we have ever done could be saved to Showbie for safe keeping. Then it wouldn't matter which iPad, or which cart for that matter, the student ended up with the next day -- they would always have access to their work. Lesson learned.