Wallpaper Paste.

If you've been following my Twitter feed (@techinteaching) you know that the iPad lab has finally arrived.  We unveiled it to the teachers on Monday and they seem pretty excited.  I noticed that some of them also seem pretty unsure, which is an indication that I have a lot of work to do. 


I thought I would write a couple of blog posts about getting the iPads and prepping them for student use.  One of the things that have made the iPad management easier is numbering them, but as a number of people have expressed...who wants to write all over the front of an iPad with a marker?  Not this lady.  So, I got an awesome idea from another techie friend (@fmigdal) to use Photoshop to take a creative commons Flickr image and add the school's contact info.  Genius!  

I love that I can add a little sassiness to the iPads with the different images and make them a little more exciting than they already are (if that's possible).  I think it will definitely help us manage them, and I know the students will enjoy them too.  These are all of the images I used on our 27 iPads: 

There are some pretty amazing images on Flickr.

I used Flickr to find photographs of numbers, but limited my search to only images that the artists have allowed use of through creative commons.  Additionally, I used Photoshop to add a copyright of the artists' Flickr username (it's good practice for the students to see, anyway).

This image (along with #6) was one of my favorites.

I imported the images into Photoshop, added our school's contact information and saved them as individual images.  The creation of the wallpaper was actually pretty quick.


After I finished creating the wallpaper, I realized that I didn't want to sync all of the different wallpapers onto all of the iPads (I only wanted #15 wallpaper on iPad 15), so I made a folder called iPad, then made a subfolder for each iPad as well as a folder called iPad Images.  Each wallpaper was dropped into the appropriate folder and synced.  I added the iPad Images folder so that if a teacher is doing work with images (like a flower for diagramming), I can drop it into the images folder and then quickly sync it to all of the iPads.  


Overall, I'm pleased with how it turned out.  I saved all of the wallpapers as Photoshop files, too- so I can go back and change some of the numbers if I get tired of them or for holidays or something.  I did have a master plan of having each classroom create a number and pose with it and I would take their photo and make that the wallpaper.  The logistics of it proved to be a little much for this time of year, but it's still a possibility.


Once I order cases (which is on my Outlook Calender, with reminder, for today), I'm going to print stickers with the same photo number to stick onto the case.  Nothing like getting a little Martha Stewart-esque technology design going on.


How are you numbering/managing your iPads?