Let's Go Learn Knowledge Base
Question
What are the issues when considering the use of iPads for educational testing and learning?
  
Answer

As schools adopt new devices to use with their students, iPads are often a popular choice.  Here are some factors to consider. 

First of all, we overall do not recommend the use of iPads for testing and/or educational instructional use for these systemic reasons:

  • High price of iPads
  • Inconsistent wifi: iPads are known to lose connection.  Similar to how your phone's wifi needs to be toggled on and off, this happens to iPads.  
  • Increasingly busy wifi frequencies means iPads have more networks to navigate and receive interference from them.
  • Apple is a private company that wants to push users toward their App store which makes them money.  For this reason Apple does not follow standard HTML and thus they actively interfere with HTML based music, streaming audio, and other rich media sites.  Unfortunately this can cause issues at times with educational programs like our assessments and our LGL Edge series.
  • All browsers lead to Safari.  Apple has purposefully handicaped Chrome and Firefox browsers on iPads.  These browsers install but they have to use the sound and media handlers of Safarfi which have been designed to limit interactivity.
  • Constant changes in how rich media is handled on the iPad makes it hard for developers to catch problems. 

If you are already committed to the iPad, there are things you can do. We understand that sometimes you want younger students to use iPads since they are easier to use than Chromebooks.  Follow our Knowledge Base articles to have the best results.  

Recommendations

  • Android tablets are 1/4 to 1/2 the costs of iPads.
  • Android does not have an inherent conflict of interest with their App store and thus they do not limit their HTML from working normally
  • Chrome, Firefox and other browser work as designed.
  • Management software exists to control and maintain Android tablets remotely.
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When you bring additional fields into a conversion, Quickbase often finds inconsistencies. For example, say you're converting your Companies column into its own table. One company, Acme Corporation, has offices in New York, Dallas and Portland. So, when you add the City column to the conversion, Quickbase finds three different locations for Acme. A single value in the column you're converting can only match one value in any additional field. Quickbase needs you to clean up the extra cities before it can create your new table. To do so, you have one of two choices:

  • If you want to create three separate Acme records (Acme-New York, Acme-Dallas and Acme-Portland) click the Conform link at the top of the column.
  • If the dissimilar entries are mistakes (say Acme only has one office in New York and the other locations are data-entry errors) go back into your table and correct the inconsistenciesin this case, changing all locations to New York. Then try the conversion again.

Read more about converting a column into a table.