Using an iPad for Biology Courses

Using an iPad for Biology Courses

Thanks, Office of Innovations, for the opportunity to try out an iPad!

It was an excellent experience for me and my students. It was extremely useful for office work as well as classroom explorations and presentations. It was also a highly useful production tool. I was able to use my iPad to make posters, to send letters, to do emails, and write documents.

One of my favorite tools was News360, an app that is free to download. With this tool I was able to share daily news breakthroughs and releases in the popular science arena, as well as get direct links to peer reviewed articles in nature conservation biology. It was easy to use and fun for the students to follow along with me and easily links to our classroom technologies. Here are a few screenshots...

Along with all this I was also able to use iPad to make PowerPoint presentations. To do this I downloaded an app called Keynote, that is part of a suite of apps including Numbers and Pages. These three apps are the equivalent of PowerPoint, Excel, and Word, and I would highly recommend purchasing and downloading these as soon as possible. They are extremely powerful. Here is an example of a poster that I made using iPad for a scientific presentation that I gave at the Denver Botanic Garden for the Society of Ethnobiology Annual Conference:

These iPads would greatly benefit every professor, and I hope we can all get them someday.

Thanks again Office of Innovations and CMC!
 
Shawn Sigstedt
Associate Professor of Biology
Alpine Campus