iPad and Online Services In Education

I have a bargain first generation iPad on the way (I will discuss why so close to the iPad2 coming out that I did this in another post).
Now I work in the education sector these days and one of the things I have wanted to do since starting the job was have an iPad to use in my everyday work.
I can see how the iPad (or tablets in general) can be used by teachers/lecturers and students a like in the classroom. They cry out as the ultimate device teaching aid.
But before the iPad arrives there are one or two services/apps that we all could be using that are also dam useful for tablet devices and dam useful if you don't have one.

Evernote is a great service. It allows basically you to make notes and store them. Sounds simple and nothing revolutionary. But it is, with the plugin installed you are able to clip web pages, or snippets from the web page. You can save tweets, email in photos well you get the idea. The apps on the PC and Mac are excellent, and there are also great apps for smartphones. So this is a really great note keeping site.

in the past (in this job) I have had a USB stick fail on me, and I have lost work. But there is a solution or an alternative to the USB stick for transfer documents from home and work. That alternative is Dropbox. Dropbox offer for FREE! 2 GB of online storage that syncs files up between PC's,Macs, iPhones, iPads and Android devices, plus it can be accessed through a web browser as well. So now I use Dropbox as my main place to save work files. These get synced to all my computers that I have the Dropbox app installed on, and once I get to work I can log in via a browser and download copies of the work I need for the lesson. This a great service and a great alternative to using a USB stick.

I am an Apple Fanboy, and I use a 2 year old Macbook all the time, and my preference for writing my slides etc is to use iworks. iworks is the Apple equivalent to Microsoft Office, and in my opinion is better than office. Now the problem I have is that sometimes I produce slides in Keynote that don't translate to Powerpoint. So if I want to use a slideshow with the way I intended I have to be able to play the Keynote presentation somehow at work. iworks.com is the answer. From within Keynote or any of the iworks apps I can upload my document and share it, or more importantly in the case of my keynote slides display them through the web browser (safari or Chrome, despite iworks.com saying I require safari, it will work with Chrome). The only draw back is that the web browser based viewer does not work with the remote clicker that I have for moving slides on. So I have to remain near to the PC and a mouse to move the presentation on.

So with these services in place a tablet of any description just becomes another way to access and update the information you have and use everyday. And while I am talking about using these in an educational setting these services can be used anywhere.