Jon_Torbitt

Just got a Brookstone bluetooth wireless keyboard / leather case / stand all in one as a gift for ipad2 and it's pretty impressive, only downside is it needs to come with a mouse so have to carry my magic mouse with me too! Perhaps using onboard cameras as some sort of eye-tracking tool might be useful??

As an iPad owner and IT teacher I try to balance the benefits of all manufacturers / developers. For instance, I could plug ipads all day long as there are some fanastic apps for education out there but we are a Microsoft-fitted school and don't offer any Mac support. One of our feeder schools bought a load of Macs so the kids are used to them and don't use some of the software you may have in mind. I honestly agree as a Windows user all the way back to 3.1/95/NT that Windows used to have a lot of potential. My first smartphone was a Windows mobile with 3G, wifi and GPS and that was over 5 years ago! Sadly now I wouldn't touch any of them with a bargepole. I take my MBP to school rather than use our Windows desktops as I can work just as well on my machine that runs (or appears to) orders of magnitude more quickly as it doesn't need a mammoth Win7 disk image. My ipad has instant on, the iphone is a great remote for the laptop for presentations and with desktop sharing/broadcasting coming up i'm more than happy. I can also d/l RDP apps that let me remote into the school network and access my work, that and Sharepoint admin apps to help manage the learning platform. Microsoft should have cleaned up in tablets years ago, but missed the boat. I hear what you're saying on the bloatware - it's borderline criminal some of the useless junk 3rd parties load on new windows machines. Yes there are apps that Macs can't run, but if you want education apps that will run on anything, make web apps that don't need Flash. The flash video format is inefficient, drains battery power from any machine and is incompatible with many mobile handsets. Am a bit bored of the flash argument now, move onto HTML5 / ogg / H264 / etc and let's innovate and make some decent new apps that can be run on multiple platforms! Who's with me??? (ps. here endeth the rant oh and wasn't intended to sound like a rant, just fed up with sub-standard software and equipment because it's education!)

You could do this by getting wordpress template from a decent reseller. If you don't know much about web design then (no offence) it will take a long time to get your head round the implications of building a website that will handle articles and sort-of dynamic page content. If you're still stuck let me know and could find some time to give you a hand once the summer holidays are here?

It sounds like you may need to go for a custom solution using Sharepoint to be honest. I am doing some informal research into a similar issue and it may be that a custom build using a sharepoint web parts is what you need but this does incur significant effort and cost, either that or you hire/get someone to run it almost full time. What's your schedule for getting it running?

Might sound daft but you're not accessing it through Remote Desktop from a mac? Does it on mine sometimes but only when i press the cmd or alt keys accidentally - rectified by pressing the alt key again