Getting out of the teaching rut!

With any job it’s easy to eventually find oneself in a rut, doing things the same way over and over. I know back when I was teaching, sometimes the pressures of grading, paperwork, and the real world meant that I didn’t try to teach a lesson differently or try something new with my students. Maybe I blamed it on the fact that I had four class preps, but no matter what the reason, it was always very rewarding to take time to try a new innovative lesson and see it work very well in the classroom.

 

As we start a new school year, there is no better time for teachers to investigate something new. And whether it is something truly transformative to teaching, or maybe just a tool to make teaching a little more efficient, any improvement is a step in the right direction.

 

Maybe a simple tool to motivate good student behavior is what is needed; then try ClassDojo. Or maybe increasing communication with students and parents is a pressing need. Tools like Remind or Class Messenger will help improve communication.

 

Want students to be more involved in class? Then give Socrative or ExitTicket a try. Is it time to find a new way to curate and synthesize web content for students or for students to do so as they learn? Then head on over and try super simple Blendspace or LessonPaths.

 

Sometimes it’s much easier to take baby steps to get out of the rut, rather than trying to climb the ladder and change everything at once. So make a new school year resolution for you or your staff to take a baby step or two on your path of improvement. For more info on these tools, view my blog entry and presentation about them.

                This blog entry is cross posted with the great folks at SchoolCIO

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Taming the password beast

What is my password for Google Apps? What is my username for Schoology?  

We all live with the pain of trying to remember usernames and passwords every day and the problem is getting exponentially worse. Schools are adopting applications for staff and students at a record pace, and with every adopted application the username and password pain train grows worse. 

The Clever Login Screen

Now picture our youngest learners, who increasingly have to sign in to access educational resources. For them, remembering user credentials and typing them in correctly can be a time consuming exercise in aggravating frustration. Now multiply this times a classroom full of students, and it’s enough to drive a teacher insane. The amount of instructional time wasted on logging in is immense and there seems to be no end in sight. 

Schools need solutions to the login mess, so they can focus on learning, rather than flushing expensive classroom time down the drain, as students try to get logged in to applications. The fastest moving new entrant to the K-12 market is Clever, which is rapidly expanding their portal based SSO to be the front-end solution for districts to simplify username and password management. Other more complex and versatile systems, like Stoneware webNetwork, can also help schools tame the password beast and get students and staff focused on what really matters. I’m sure we’ll see more of these solutions unveiled at next week’s ISTE conference!

 This blog entry is cross posted with the great folks at SchoolCIO

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The mobile app imperative

It's not news that mobile device adoption continues to surge.  Smart phones and tablets are everywhere and the price barriers to adoption have collapsed. Many schools have embraced mobile devices and have adopted tablets or allowed BYOD, or both.  

One area schools are lagging behind in is putting their web content in a format that consumers prefer on those devices.  A visit to most school web sites still shows that the sites themselves are not mobile friendly.

But before jumping off the deep end and telling everyone to make a mobile friendly web site, a close look at some recent statistics is in order.  Techcrunch had 2014 as the year total desktop web users were first outnumbered by mobile web users.  And in K-12 we are already seeing more families where their only Internet access is via a mobile device. But before making your site mobile, consider this key metric from Flurry Analytics.   Their recent data shows that in just once year, mobile device users spend 86 percent of their time in mobile apps daily, versus just 14% on the mobile web. Mobile web use fell 6% in just one year.  

So while appeasing the voracious mobile beast, K-12 districts need to look at their strategy closely. Is a mobile web site good enough? The data says otherwise.  Districts are going to need to seriously look at creating a mobile app, paying a company to do it, or subscribing to one of the increasing number of K-12 mobile app providers.

This blog entry is cross posted with the great folks at SchoolCIO

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From zero to working server in ten minutes – Trying out managed hosting

In an earlier blog I mentioned my requirements for a great help desk for our organization.   After a lengthy search, trial, and selection process, a winner was picked.  As it turned out, while the help desk used standard software that we support, it used a database version that we did not yet have running in our organization.  We were not able to upgrade our current databases, because other vendors’ systems required older database versions.

We talked about options such as starting another database server, and our help desk vendor mentioned that they had a lot of customers starting to run their software in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.  Like many districts, while we have had many cloud based software applications, we had never tried managed hosting, which has gained a huge amount of traction in recent years, with a huge number of players , now increasingly dominated by heavyweights such as Rackspace, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Verizon, and IBM. 

Managed hosting is akin to renting a server, rather than buying it.  The customer gets to choose the operating system and the software stack that goes on top.  The customer typically will pay based on the software chosen, the size of the hardware needed and more.  Other charges may include additional charges for bandwidth, storage, monitoring, support, and security services.  Much like a rental of anything else, the customer has control over how long they want it, from minutes to years.  It is truly a pay as you consume commodity.  The servers are housed in the managed hosting provider’s data center, so the customer never has to worry about the plethora of mundane non-mission critical tasks that have been traditionally associated with the acquisition, installation, maintenance, and decommissioning of servers.

The traditional procurement and setup of servers in schools districts and other institutions can traditionally takes weeks, if not months.  All of the following are tasks that can be eliminated with managed hosting, so time to server spin up can be slashed:

1.       Quoting of hardware.

2.       High up front capital costs.

3.       Data center space.

4.       Air-conditioning.

5.       Power.

6.       UPS and generators.

7.       Racks.

8.       Purchase orders.

9.       Receiving and inventory of equipment.

10.   Physical setup of equipment.

11.   Operating system and software installation.

12.   Switch ports.

13.   SAN space.

I am sure there are many things I left of the list, but the point is we saved a large amount of upfront costs and saved time for our already overburdened staff.

In our case our help desk vendor had an image for us to spin up our server off of in the AWS cloud. We literally went from no server to running application server in about ten minutes.  It was incredible and makes me inclined to think that we will be running many more servers this way in the coming years.  The huge capital costs and efforts required to maintain data centers may not be sustainable when our money could be better spent on projects that benefit student learning.  While our need for servers is not likely to lessen, the cheaper and faster bandwidth becomes, the motivation for districts to move to managed hosting will increase.

This blog entry is cross posted with the great folks at SchoolCIO

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Do you have a new year's resolution to stay organized? Try my favorite productivity tool, Evernote

Sometimes, I feel like am very organized, then other days I feel as if I am anything but organized.  But generally I feel I do a good job utilizing task lists, to do lists, documenting ideas, mileage, meeting notes, instructions, web pages, tips, etc.  Over the years I have used many techniques to record this info, from paper, 3M sticky notes, to notes in Outlook.  But hands down, the best tool I have ever used for this is Evernote -  http://evernote.com/evernote/ .  As busy leaders, a tool like Evernote can prove indispensable to maintaining organized information in a hectic work world of information overload.

Evernote is a free productivity tool that I feel basically acts as my second brain many days, allowing me to easily find chunks of information that I probably would have otherwise forgotten or lost.  Evernote is available on the following platforms: 

• iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
• Android
• Windows Phone
• Blackberry
• WebOS (via App Catalog)
• Mac OS X
• Windows Desktop
• Windows 8 (Touch)

And even without a software or app install, Evernote is always available just through a web browser.  So as long as you carry a smart device, you will have Evernote at your side, ready to record info you do not want to forget.  

There are a million ways to user Evernote, or maybe more, judging from all the blogs post and list of uses you will find from a quick perusal of Google search results, from a query such as this: https://www.google.com/search?q=way+to+use+evernote .

I keep all sorts of information in Evernote, which allows you to store related information in notebooks, which are pretty much what they sound like.  You could have one giant notebook, or organize notes into a notebook for every subject.  I am not a big filer – I use about five main notebooks for a majority of what I file.  Much like my email filing technique, where I stopped being an email filer several years back and now I rely on search queries to find information, saving me the countless hours of filing emails, or in this case notes.  I keep the following notebooks in Evernote: Systems, Work, Personal, Recipes to Try, and Best Recipes.  A way I find useful that allows you to further make notes searchable, and findable, is by adding tags to notes in Evernote. As many tags can be added to a note as you want, allowing you to quickly find the note at a later time, but if you don’t tag notes, Evernote still has a robust search system built in to help you find your notes.

And this is where Evernote really shines and ends up being what I call my second brain.  I have Evernote on at least three computers, three tablets, and my phone.  What is great is that all of these devices keep their notes in sync, such that I can save a note on my phone during the busy work day, then fire up my tablet in the evening, to find the note waiting for me.  So I may clip a web page in my web browser, using the Evernote Web Clipper Extension - http://evernote.com/webclipper/ , which I can then later access on any of my devices when I need it. The web page is fully indexed, so I can search for a word or subject that was on the page, without having to remember what web site I had found the info on.

I also file lots of emails into Evernote.  If I receive an email that has information I need to keep, then I forward it to an email address that Evernote has attached to my account.  I think this is one of Evernote’s most powerful and often overlooked features.  To find out the email address to send notes to for your account, in the software, go to the Tools menu and choose Account Info.  On a mobile device or tablet, click on your name to see Account Info.  You will see an address to email notes to, which will then be automatically placed into your notebook.  This is fabulous and makes retaining a few really important emails all the easier.  I often send receipts, software licenses, and other things I need to keep to my Evernote email address so I can find them easily later.

If you have not joined the Evernote revolution, and you are looking to start the New Year out better organized, then I highly recommend you try out Evernote and see how it works for you.  Do you have an Evernote super tip?  Then feel free to leave a comment and share it with the world at http://ctotechnotes.blogspot.com/

This blog entry is cross posted with the great folks at SchoolCIO

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An inspiring story that says a lot about education

November 2013 Issue of Wired magazine

If you have not picked up the November 2013 issue of Wired magazine and read the cover story, “The Next Steve Jobs”, then you missed out on a truly inspiring story of a teacher, struggling to get by with little to no resources in the drug war ravaged Mexican border region.  While the star of the article is an impoverished young girl, 12-year-old Paloma Noyola Bueno, who responds to her teacher’s radical change in teaching methodology and becomes one of the best students in all of Mexico, the real story is about the teacher, Sergio Juárez Correa.

Correa struggled to reach his students and meet state testing standards (sound familiar?)  He knew that with virtually infinite access to information online (which his students did not have access to), the days of him being the bearer of knowledge for his students were numbered, and it was not producing results for his students.  So as Correa struggled to learn about how teachers are changing their instruction and having tremendous success, he decided to make a change in his classroom. So he told his students that they do have it extremely difficult and have none of the modern advantages, such as laptops and high speed internet, which students across the river in Brownsville, Texas have.  But he knew his students had potential to learn and to love doing it, which often seems to be lost on students and teachers neck deep in state and national mandates.

The methodology employed by Correa was at least partially modeled on the pioneering and increasingly cited work of TED darling Sugata Mitra.  But rather than leaving students unattended, Correa changed his role and now took a back seat in the classroom, as his students became investigators, cooperatively working on problems and debating answers in order to find solutions.  He largely did this without the use of technology, and had amazing results.

Would technology have hurt or enhanced what was done is his classroom?  I think it certainly could have assisted in enhancing a great teaching and learning environment, but I would also argue that if Correa had unleashed his students to lookup facts using Google, his results would not have been the same.  The power was in asking the students to think about problems and work cooperatively on solving them.

Teaching and leadership make a huge difference in student learning – clearly shown in this story, but they also too often stifle it: sadly, the article the quotes the chief of the Regional Center of Educational Development in Matamoros as saying “The teaching method makes little difference.” 

This blog entry is cross posted with the great folks at SchoolCIO

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Education has yet to experience digital transformation

Gartner Symposium 2013

This past week thousands of IT leaders descended on Orlando for Gartner Symposium.  This was not a conference about the nuts and bolts of IT, as much as it was about trends, strategies, and the new reality of the impact of everything and everyone becoming digitally connected. While the conference was not focused on education, it was abundantly clear that K-12 education is lagging behind many industries in transformational uses of technology.  Gartner Senior Vice President Peter Sondergaard's keynote termed what is happening globally as "digitalization", saying "Every budget is an IT budget. Every company is an IT company. Every business leader is becoming a digital leader..."  The message was that all industries are being dramatically altered and technology is the common thread behind massive transformation. Sondergaard insisted that industries and leaders need to understand and harness the innovative power that technology.   

While technology in education has been a key ingredient in innovative classrooms as demonstrated in numerous classrooms, schools, districts, and the Project Red study, there are many examples poorly implemented technology in schools.  For schools to be truly transformed by digitalization, they will need to leverage technology to educate every student with customized learning content and feedback supplemented and supported by well-trained educators.  The learning model itself at some point probably needs to change, lest many schools will continue to be only marginally impacted by technology.  What are your thoughts?  Have we truly transformed education through technology, or do we have a long way to go?  What are you doing to start your transformation?   Your comments are welcome at http://ctotechnotes.blogspot.com/

This blog entry is cross posted with the great folks at SchoolCIO

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My requirements list for a solid IT help desk

After looking for a while at many help desk systems available, I have been refining a requirements list for a new system for our IT department.  This list is not complete, but I have the feeling that if an affordable help desk system can meet these requirements, we will be very likely to take a serious look at the system and give it a thorough test drive.

1. System should offer robust API access, ODBC access to data, OR direct access to SQL tables.
2. System should offer possibility to manage IT equipment orders with associated tickets needed for setup, installation, etc.
3. System should have Active Directory integration to handle user data and authentication.
4. System should be browser based and works in all modern browsers.
5. It should also should work on mobile phones, tablets, etc.
6. System should allow option to utilize SSL security.
7. System interface must be simple and intuitive.
8. System should feature a Quick ticket for phone support - ie one screen problem and resolution recording for phone support.
9. System should feature end user ticket creation through web, email.
10. Help desk staff should be able to update tickets through email.
11. System should feature automated email notification of user on tickets creation, updates, and closure.
12. System should intermediate all email between help desk agents and end users - and keep all communication fenced within the ticketing system.
13. System should offer comprehensive/customizable customer satisfaction survey at the closure of every ticket.
    1. Satisfaction data should be exposed through the API.
14. System should feature a method for recording of how the ticket was created (web, email, phone).
15. System should allow creation of FAQs/Knowledgebase - this should be categorized and searchable
    1. Should allow tickets to be converted to FAQs.
16. System must allow for unlimited end user web access (no licensing or limits for end users.)
17. System must allow for concurrent agent licensing - OR preferably unlimited  agents.
18. System should allow linking of individual help desk tickets to global issue, allowing resolution of global issue to update/close all linked tickets and send corresponding email notification(s).
19. System should feature a Global Notification Banner or method to inform users of issues or outages.
20. System should have ticket categories.
21. System should have configurable, rule based SLAs.
    1. They Should be able to be tied to ticket categories.
    2. SLAs should adhere to business hours, holidays.
    3. SLAs should allow to for certain statuses to not affect SLA(ie awaiting parts.)
    4. Should readily show technician which ticket(s) are in danger of not meeting the SLA.
22. System should support custom work-flows based on categories and for approvals as needed.
23. System should allow for multiple service/help desk projects to provide functionally separate service/help desks – i.e. one for Human Resources and another for Technology Support.  These should have separate queues, but allow for tickets to be reassigned across queues.
24. System must offer robust customizable reporting capabilities in both text and graphical formats to track trends, call volumes, technician totals, category totals, average service times by category, average service times by technician, SLAs met, etc.  
    1. Reporting data should be exposed to the API.
25. System should support automatic rule based escalation - this may be tied to SLA rules.
26. System should have configurable tickets statuses.
    1. Statuses should allow for creation of statuses that do not count against tickets resolution time.  
27. System should allow for file attachment to ticket by users and/or agent.
28. Add multiple users to a ticket.
    1. Any ticket email notifications should go to all users on ticket, once added.
29. System should allow for two way email communications within the system - no end user ticket replies should ever be sent to the agent's personal email - they should go directly into the system.
30. When looking up users with identical names, we should be able to see distinguishing data from Active Directory (title, location, etc.)
31. System should support configurable locations that can be part of a ticket.
    1. Reporting should report on location.
32. System should have ticket agent collision detection.
33. Allow tickets to be emailed by agent.
34. System should track a parts inventory with pricing information.
    1. Parts should be able to be added to tickets and provide a cost on the ticket.
35. System should allow for ticket escalation based on time.

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Staffing for the back to school tidal wave

Very few if any school technology departments are staffed to the levels seen in most companies of similar size.  By most measures, school technician staffing is at levels unheard of in the private sector.  Numbers like one technician per 500 or 1000 computers are rampant in K-12 institutions.  Other measures that look at how many FTEs (full time equivalents) the average technician supports are equally skewed; one technician often serves many hundreds of employees.  And these numbers don’t even take into account the huge students populations and enormous device count supported in districts. 

These numbers point to vastly overworked technical staffs at most K-12 institutions.  I would argue that many of these departments are slim staffed during the best of times, such as November and December, when typical K-12 workloads are about as light as they ever get during the crazy cyclical K-12 calendar.

When August hits, most school technical staffs are stretched beyond belief.  In what other industry do IT staffs face thousands of returning users in a just a couple of weeks.  Staffs have to cope with many routine items, such as disconnected equipment, accounts, forgotten credentials and the like.  These are often compounded by roll-outs of new technology and systems over the summer, much of which is guaranteed to result in more help desk calls and/or technician visits.

There are many strategies that can be implemented to at least help with some of the back to school crush, and many of us keep asking for more support staff to cope with the workload, but this often does not meld well with economic realities.  So after losing technical staff to budget cuts, while servicing an ever expanding student and device population, this year we decided to try a different strategy, often used in the business world, during cyclical peak periods. 

This year we budgeted for and are hiring multiple temporary technicians to service back to school work orders and to assist with the always ringing help desk phones.  And to further save funds to allow more technicians to be hired, my staff went the extra mile to hire their own temps, rather than rely on an outside agency.  This strategy will allows us to increase our technicians by at least 60% for up to three months, at about 55% of the cost of one FTE.  While we have yet to see how this will work out, we think this strategy will be much more economically palatable, while allowing us to offer up much quicker turnaround time to our customers.

We know there are dangers.  Our biggest fear is that these techs will lack the institutional knowledge of common issues and normal procedures.  We are hopeful that we can hire ones with good personalities that will keep our very high standards of customer service, but we will have to watch this very carefully for sure.

This blog entry is cross posted with the great folks at SchoolCIO

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The Technology Quick Fix

After the marathon season of conferences and presentations, I have succumbed to an unexpected mid-summer illness.  Maybe this was a random occurrence or my body’s way of letting me know you have been pushing too hard too fast for a while.

All the presentations I have given and the conferences, meetings, and seminars I have attended speak to my need to learn and share with others, as well as the need for those of us in the technology world to try to get some feeling that we are somehow keeping up with the monumental shifts that technology is bringing to education and elsewhere.  I have learned a lot and then again I have learned that there are a host of great tools and technologies out there, and they are getting better every day.  But I have also never been so clearly a believer that, as these technologies improve, they will somehow transform an under-performing school or teacher into the best of their breed. 

The more I see great presentations on new technologies, systems, and devices, the more I worry that these are often bought as a quick fix for low performance, bad leadership, or other struggles that school systems and teachers face.

Yes many of these incredible technologies have great promise – but as school IT leaders we must always be willing to have some tough conversations with those we work with about making sure that these technologies are brought in not as a fix for bad teaching or leadership, but as a way to make great teachers and even better teacher.  This is really that only way that these technologies can really help schools excel in the long term.

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Schools and districts should not ignore the mobile app tidal wave

How many smart phone users consume their favorite social media sites like Facebook, Linked In, or Twitter via a mobile web browser?   The answer is very few and usually they only do so if forced to use the browser by clicking a link that opens it.  Why is this?  Why do consumers want to avoid surfing web sites on their mobile devices’ browsers?  The answer is that most standard web sites, when looked via mobile phone’s browser, are hard to see, hard to navigate, and often don’t support mobile browsers well.  The end user experience in these browsers is about as pleasant as a trip to your local Department of Motor Vehicles to renew your license.

Social media providers have long figured this out and built apps for major phone and tablet platforms.  Stores are increasingly figuring this out and following the likes of Amazon with building mobile shopping apps. Banks are all over this bandwagon.  But schools and districts have not figured this out.

Schools typically still only provide a normal web site to mobile devices.  Sure, some provide a parsed down mobile version, but even these are somewhat hard to find.  Are schools’ customers different than retail or social media customers?  Heck no – they are the same people with the same preference for consuming web through mobile apps.  Most school customers are still getting Y2K versions of web sites built for Netscape Navigator delivered to their smart phones.

School CIOs need to address this shortcoming and get mobile apps built with easy to navigate user interfaces.  And to have a successful app, it will need to be for both Android and iOS.  Additionally, it must have data that is personally important to parents and students.  That means grade and attendance data is a critically important inclusion.  Other high value content such as menus, athletic schedules, athletic scores, and assorted news are welcome additions. 

There are many roads to getting this done. Some are expensive, such as hiring a third party to build custom apps or hiring personnel with app development skill, but this may be a fine fit for a large district.  Sometimes more limited apps are included with a student information system (SIS) and are probably the best fit for small districts and schools.  Consider including this as a requirement when adopting a new SIS.  There are also low cost or free ways to get an app.  At Judson ISD we built an award winning app for a low cost without personnel dedicated to app programming, using the low cost web-based Conduit mobile platform.  A full presentation of our app and experience is available on Slideshare.

Or you may use a simple free service such as iSchoolBox, which may be a great way to test the waters and get your school into a mobile app (one app the hosts many schools’ mobile sites).  At the end of the day, the consumer demand is there and as CIOs and technology leaders, we need to stop delivering craptastic web sites to phones and tablets when our customers’ preferences have evolved well beyond this.

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Making 1 to 1 Programs Actually Succeed

There are many schools that have either piloted or implemented one to one student to computer initiatives.  These are nothing new.  The success of these programs, much like other education initiatives, has varied.  Most technology and curriculum leaders now recognize that there is much more to student and school success, than just putting a computer in the hands of a student and getting instant miracle results.   Just as a new hammer will not help a bad carpenter build a better house, a computer in the hands of a student will not turn the tide in the midst of bad teaching or ineffective school leadership.  But there is now fairly convincing evidence that properly implemented one to one computing is a contributing factor to school success, as evidenced in the rather convincing results from the Project Red study.  ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) has published a book about this report called Revolutionizing Education through Technology. A free electronic edition of the book is available at ISTE site.  I highly recommend that any superintendents, curriculum leaders, instructional technology directors or anyone else seriously looking at 1:1 programs read this books and consider all that it takes beyond a device to make one to one really succeed.

This blog was a Tech & Learning Newsletter Intro and is also on the Project Red site at: http://www.projectred.org/latest-news/173-t-l-advisor-guest-post—steve-young,-cto-of-judson-isd,-tx.html 

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The human side of IT management - Go ahead and hug your IT team today

There are so many times in technology where our teams are under immense pressure; there is the start of school with what seems to be an insurmountable mountain of work orders, the stress of a system failure, or the worries for a smooth system implementation. All of this takes its toll on our employees, and sometimes I wonder if as IT leaders we do not spend enough time doing simple things to make our staff’s work lives a little bit better.  

 

This is my cutest blog post ever.....

IT staff often have incredibly difficult jobs, but sometimes we need to be IT coaches and let our team members know that they did a good job and give them a pat on the back. It’s the little statements that we make that can show our human side and help make our employees feel valued. Maybe school's IT departments can’t offer free employer-provided meals, ping pong tables, and break rooms with TVs and sofas, but we can show our human side now and then.

 

Employees need encouragement and praise when things are done well. Don’t forget the value of a simple good morning, a thoughtful hello, or a chance to laugh with our coworkers. Sure, I wish I had some of the flexibility for rewarding my staff that my colleagues in the private sector have, but we do have things we can offer too. As school leaders we can often offer better work hours, a generous set of vacation and days off, and what can arguably amount to a better work/life balance than the private sector. 

 

In the end I know that I always need to work on letting my employees and coworkers know that we are on a team, that I value them, and that I am here to work with them and for them. This is not an easy task, nor is it one that ever ends. So this coming year, hopefully all of us can strive to show our fantastic IT staff how much they mean to us by being just a bit more human and taking a moment to show we care.

This blog is cross posted at SchoolCIO - at http://www.schoolcio.com/Default.aspx?tabid=136&entryid=5164 

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What? My iPad can do more than email and Web? iPad productivity apps (cross post with SchoolCIO)

There is one device that follows me around all the time at work, when going to meetings, while traveling—and it also goes home with me each night. It is my iPad. It is my ultimate productivity tool. I see many tech directors, CIOs, principals, and superintendents carrying theirs around as well. But what often surprises me is how many leaders just use their iPad for email and Web browsing, not exploring many of the fantastic iPad productivity apps that really can make this device shine. Many great iPad productivity apps can help leaders become more organized and effective.

 

So I want to share many of the apps that I find very useful below in my productivity app list. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it ought to really help you get a great start on using your iPad for more than email and Web browsing.

 

Note: All prices are accurate as of 10/28/2012.

  

Stock iPad Apps
Safari	Web Browser	Included with iPad
Contacts	Syncs with Exchange (Outlook) and Google	Included with iPad
Email	Syncs with Exchange (Outlook) and Google	Included with iPad
Calendar	Syncs with Exchange (Outlook) and Google	Included with iPad
Camera	Takes pictures and video.	Included with iPad
Photos	Access, email, and share your photos.	Included with iPad
FaceTime	Real time video conference with other iOS users.	Included with iPad

Notetaking Apps
Evernote	The e-filing note cabinet of choice – use as your memory.  Stores emails, text notes & audio.  Syncs across many devices and web.  You can easily share notes.  Includes a great search feature!	Free
Notability	Any easy to use simple text, written, audio and photo note app – email or PDF notes.	$0.99
GoodReader	PDF annotation and reader software – a bit complex but very powerful, with Google Drive and Box support amongst many others.	$4.99
PDF Expert	Simple PDF annotation with WiFi transfer and Box support.	$9.99
Audio Memos Free	Voice recorder, email up to 3mb files, WiFi download.	Free
Dragon Dictation	Voice to text transcriptions.	Free

Office Apps
Pages, Numbers, and Keynote	Apple’s GREAT office apps for Word Processing, spreadsheet, and presentations.  These are the apps to use if using iPad for content creation.	$9.99 each
QuickOffice Pro HD	All in one office suite – edits Microsoft Office docs and syncs with Box.net and WiFi file transfer. This more affordable suite is geared towards just editing.	$19.99
CloudOn	Cloud-Based MS Office with Box synchronization	Free
Digits Calculator	Great desktop calc with editable, comment-able eTape that can be emailed.	$1.99
Dictionary.com	Great dictionary and thesaurus.	Free

Book  Apps
iBooks, Nook & Kindle	eBooks from the big three.	Free

News Apps
Pulse	Incredible customizable news aggregator.	Free
FlipBoard	Another great customizable news aggregator.	Free
News360	Great news aggregator with excellent social media integration.	Free

Other Useful Apps
Box	Box is a great secure corporate level file sharing service. Use this app to synchronize files to the cloud and web browser.  Can sync files between computer and iPad.	Free
Twitter	Great social networking tool to expand your PLN.	Free
iThoughtsHD	Easy mind mapping with Image & PDF export, Box, and WiFi sync.	$9.99
Skitch	Simple annotation app – take a photo and mark up ideas and notes (syncs to Evernote).	Free
Explain Everything	Annotate and narrate on screen then export video – great way to narrate presentations then share.	$2.99
VDI and Remote Desktop Clients (I use Citrix)	There are many virtual desktop clients that you can often use to access work from remote locations or which you can use at work to get a full Windows desktop on your iPad.	Vary

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