Setting up and Testing
Today I’ve been testing the iPads to see how easy it is to get them setup correctly for our investigation. Our first consideration is the number of devices we need to use. We are aiming for around 9-12 ipads as the student groups are of 18 and so we are planning to let half the group use a device on alternative weeks. We also want a couple for backup.
To get started I popped into town this morning and bought 2 gift cards. Having done a little research it appears the maximum number of devices we can have linked to one itunes account is 10 so we need two accounts hence two separate cards. By going down this route we don’t have to register any credit cards to the accounts which could potentially lead to all sorts of problems. This is indeed a bigger issue within education as managing a number of these devices isn’t particularly easy.
Once this was sorted I then logged into iTunes and redeemed a card for each account. 2 copies of Brushes were purchased at a cost of £4.79 each – one for each account. We then looked at setting up the iPads. It’s at this point I should really acknowledge the help Mark Lyndon of the University Technology Enhanced Learning team. He manages their iPads along with other members of their team and has helped us with many discussions and ideas as well as on this occasion helping me speed up the task of setting up a large number of devices.
Setting Up iPads
I have to setup the following on each iPad
- wi-fi (using a university email account, also linked to an itunes account)
- sign into itunes
- download a copy of brushes (already purchased)
- setup email account (using our second email account – on gmail) This is needed to send the brushes files off each device
So far it all seemed to work nicely which is good. I may look to see if we are able to create or save an iPad as a image which we could restore iPads too quickly and easily in future.
I’ll post more soon about how we plan to run the session and how I plan to manage the tech side of things.