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One of the astonishing results of our iPad 1:1 deployment has been the dramatic decline in the use of the Mac. Within less than two years, I am the only teacher still using the Mac on a regular basis. This was never part of the plan and I didn't expect that it would happen so soon. I thought it might happen eventually - perhaps in 3-4 years, certainly after one more refresh of our Mac setup. Today, it quite seriously looks like we won't buy more than a handful of Macs again. We’re not cutting our teaching to fit what the iPad can do either - we have never done more with ICT, with better outcomes and deeper learning than we are doing now with iPads in everyone's hands.

The details of this chart are less important than the process of creating it. After playing with the iPad, reading/watching how others use it in the classroom, and trying it out with your own students, get together with a few other educators and fill out your own chart. Here's a blank chart we give out as a part of a Think-Pair-Share. You might want to divide it into sections and consider the affordances and constraints by user (teacher/student/special needs student/administrator), use (reading/word processing/movie making/note taking/etc.), subject, or taxonomy (Bloom/SAMR/etc.). Hopefully you'll revise the chart as you use the tool in a wider variety of ways. This can definitely be combined with ideas of balancing technology, content and pedagogy. (Check out this podcast on TPaCK and SAMR.)

Perhaps a better question is what would I do with them that I could not do with other tools that are available and cheaper?

And the greatest drawback to this method: it’s one-way. If you make any changes to a reference within Mendeley, those changes will not be reflected in Zotero. This drawback is most apparent to me when I read PDFs. Let’s say I have a reference with an attached PDF in Zotero and I want to read it on my iPad (the Mendeley App has a native PDF reader, but you can also open PDFs in external apps, like iAnnotate). If I’m using the Zotero→Mendeley Desktop→Mendeley iPad app method, and I open that PDF on my iPad, any annotations I make on the PDF will not show up in Zotero.