Here's a guest post from my colleague Marla Johnston. She's one of the new faculty members in the Department of Psychology and she is a delight! I hope you enjoy her  blog post about her use of the iPad in her Psychology courses. 

For a long time, my experiences of iPads were twofold: 1) it kept my children quiet on long car rides (I love you, Angry Birds!), and 2) it was great for surfing Pinterest or Facebook on a lazy Sunday morning.  But this semester, I decided to toss my old way of lecturing, embrace technology more fully, and make my iPad mini my new classroom best friend.  The results have been a blast!

All of my class presentations are done in Keynote for Apple.  It’s like PowerPoint only for the “cool kids.”  I come in the classroom, hook up my iPad mini to the podium and I’m good to go.  I have every lecture presentation there in front of me with the touch of a finger.  I’ve discovered all sorts of fun tricks in Keynote like embedding videos and using the tools of the program to make my presentations visually more interesting.  One of the things I love about presenting off my iPad is that I can switch from Keynote and have access to fantastic Apps in class.  For example, there is an amazing App called “Brain 3d”.  It allows you to view different parts of the brain from all angles and it even has an information toolbar you can open on the side that gives details about the function of a particular brain location.  Being able to show Apps like this allows my students to have a more hands on experience of the lecture and it allows me to more fully share my enthusiasm for a particular topic.

In addition to course material related Apps, there are also Apps for attendance and grading.  One of my favorite Apps is “Groovy Grader”.  If I use a non-scantron test and score it, “Groovy Grader” tells me at a glance what the grade is when you get 34 right out of 45.  My iPad is the keeper of grades, lectures, attendance, and even notes about my students if need be.  For years I taught the old fashioned way.  Overheads and the document camera were my old stand bys and they definitely worked.  But now that I’ve made the change, there is no turning back.  The ipad is intuitive, elegant, and really allows for a level of sophisticated presentations that newer generations of students have come to expect.  I’m excited by what I’ve learned so far and even more excited to learn what else I can do with this fantastic classroom tool!