cokeicee wrote:
how do you figure its inadequate for a college student? Are you talking about viewing files or making them? Because I have never been asked to do any crazy things with a presentation or word document. Im in my second year of law school too. *+_I just dont see why a college student would need more functionality in a word processor that what notepad can do_+*. For power points I havent done any crazy things, most are simple templates ive used. So since your a teacher I would like your view on this.
I am pretty surprised at this statement. College students prepare pretty complex documents, at least at my school.
As a law school student, I am sure you are familiar with endnotes and footnotes. iPad's Pages does not import those.
I think most students in most universities will, at the very least, have a need to read documents with endnotes/footnotes, tables, different fonts. Many others will need to read documents with equations, graphs, objects, figures, diagrams and tables of contents. Quite often these documents will be prepared in Word and downloaded or received by the student via email. iPad's iWork strips out most of the above items. If someone sends you a file and you open it in iPad, you are never quite sure of what all you have lost.
As for presentations, academics (students and professors) have more complex presentations than simple bullet points. Embedding pdfs, grouped objects, tables, presenter notes, etc. in a Keynote document (which many college students will have a need to use, even students in law school), then importing that document to iPad will result in the loss of all of said things. Even if you have simple presentation slides (just text and bullets), you won't be able to see your slides (or the presenter notes) on the iPad while presenting. Which means nervous students will keep looking at the projector screen with their backs to the audience.
For all these reasons there is a howl of protest from academics, in this forum and elsewhere. We make several presentations almost every workday, we read, receive and send quite a few documents each day. We had looked forward to using iPad to do some of those things. Mind you, we weren't necessarily thinking of
preparing the documents and presentations on the iPad, only of reading existing iWork documents.
Yes, I think the iPad is a grossly inadequate device for reading documents and making presentations for most students in most colleges/universities. If it works for you, and if all you need is Notepad functionality in grad school documents, I am happy for you.
Message was edited by: ns
Message was edited by: ns
