Learning technology along with my students

Today was another learning experience with the iPads. Every day it seems there is something that I want to do but cannot do quite the way I want. Sometimes, it is because the features on the iPad are different than on a computer, sometimes it is because of the decisions made by people in the technology department.

Learning about email: because the Pages app and the Keynote app are linked to the mail program, the mail program needed to be installed in order for my students to be able to email me their presentations or documents.

This was not immediately obvious--especially to those in the tech department who are not thinking about the iPads as a creation tool or as a multi-user tool. After some discussion, it was decided that they would create one account for all the ipads to use from the cart. This worked great in theory, and horrible in practice. Google did not like that there were multiple devices with the same email address, and so kept saying that the email address was invalid or the password was incorrect. Both of which were not true. This led to my students not being able to send an email to me even though I had spent hours over the past couple days putting in the email addresses to each iPad.

When I went to tell them about it in technology, they said, "Well, yeah! That would be a problem!"
Hmm. Maybe you might have taken the time to think this all the way through before giving me the one email address for 40 devices.

So, now I need to have new email addresses made and install them on each iPad. Again.

What really frustrates me is the fact that the tech department makes decisions about things that seem to make things harder for me and my students. For example, with the Google apps for education, there are many free things we should be able to access, but they decide to not activate something arbitrarily without checking to see if any teachers would be using it.

The first instance of this was with the blogger function. I had to ask to have my students access this. They didn't see why teachers would use it! Then, today, I wanted my students to be able to comment on each others' blogs, but that function had been disabled. I feel exhausted having to run to technology ever other day to ask for something especially something that is free and should be available.