Seton Hill University students are using their iPads in many different ways. The iPad is changing the way students live, study, work and socialize.

“The technology at Seton Hill is like a lifeline for me,” said Jenn Black, freshman biology major.

“When I found out I had to take a language class, I decided to take American Sign Language. I instantly looked through the App Store. I found one that was 3D and showed me the proper way to hold my hand and even allowed me to rotate the hand on my iPad so I could see what it needed to look like from all angles,” said Amanda Mientus, sophomore marketing major.

“I had some of those applications like the mini-piano on my iPod, but upon further exploration of the App Store, I found many other applications for music, such as the fingering charts, music theory trainers, a metronome and a tuner,” said Alvin Simpson, senior music major. “Also as a Resident Assistant we do our weekly reports through an application on our iPad.”

“Because of the webcam in the MacBook, I was able to get Skype to talk to my family back in California. I haven't been home since the beginning of July, so getting to see their faces every once in awhile has been really nice,” said Adam Narlock, sophomore communication major. “Also, the college FaceBook app for the iPad is really handy for keeping up with scores during my Saturday class.”

“Probably the biggest surprise came from the fact that most of the software we had available to use was freely available online. In EL405, we started the class using Scratch, a free game and story creator that had numerous tutorials online. Next we had the interactive fiction unit where we used the free program Inform 7 to create and test out our text-based game. Finally, our last unit focused on HTML and CSS,” said Matthew Takacs, sophomore computer science major. “We used FileZilla, a free FTP client to put our handmade webpages online and I used a source code editor to actually make the pages called Notepad++ which was also free.”

“The 2D and 3D graphing is amazing. When the professor mentions a parabola, you know what that looks like, but harder equations are difficult to visualize. The iPad allows you to graph equations - even to graph two equations and compare, see all sides, maybe this one goes to infinity, this one settles down to zero, so you can understand it right away,” said Samira Parrilla, sophomore math major. “Also, my mother in Puerto Rico likes to stay in touch with me. Since the iPad is so small, I take it with me everywhere and can respond quickly when she e-mails.”