iPad favorites for improving student “workflow”

I’ve been messing with a ton of Apple and iPad stuff in the last few weeks. Some of it interesting. Some of it frustrating. All of it fun.

Part of what we’ve been working with has been trying to find useful ways to deal with what Apple and educators are calling “workflow.” Put simply, workflow is the process of getting student stuff off the iPad into the hands of the teacher.

And it’s harder than it looks. Maybe Apple’s new iCloud will help solve some of these issues. Until then, we’re living by the seat of our pants. But there are some apps that seem like they can help us.

PaperHelper

This handy app splits your iPad screen in half providing you with a Internet Browser and a Document writer. Kids doing research can easily copy and paste content into a text editor. But what I really like about PaperHelper is that it has a feature that allows kids to save their final copies to a web site with a unique URL. The teacher heads to the web site, types in the specific code and downloads the student work.

The even cooler thing is that the download process works on both “regular” computer browsers and browsers on an iPad. Pretty slick.

Mover+

Mover+ is a lot like Bump, the app that let you easily slide contact info between phones. The difference is that Mover+ lets iPads (or iPods / iPhones) on the same WiFi share more file types than just contact info.

So kids can send teachers images or video taken with the iPad camera, any image created in Sonic Pics or Comic Life or any app that stores stuff in the Camera Roll or copied text from any text creation app. The larger the file, the longer the “sliding” takes but it’s even slicker than PaperHelper.

Printopia
Okay . . . this isn’t really a mobile app. And it works just on Macs. (I searched near and far for something like this for Windows and found nothing. Though your version of near and far is probably different than mine so there’s probably something out there.)  Printopia is a piece of software you install on your computer that is actually designed to take advantage of the iPad’s AirPrint feature. But it also allows content to be sent directly to your computer rather than a printer.

Kids create a document on their iPad, select the Print option and, if the iPad and your computer are on the same WiFi, they’ll see a list of “printing” options. One of the options is Send to Mac. The kid selects that option, clicks Print and a PDF version of their document slides onto your screen. Super slick.

So if you’re still trying to find solutions to the student / teacher workflow using Apple mobile devices, these might just be what you’ve looking for.