How iPad Pro Helps a College Student in the Classroom

Karan Varindani, a computer science student at Boston University, has written in an interesting article at Medium about how the new iPad Pro is playing a vital role in his college studies, helping him consolidate his textbooks, notes and much more into a portable, digital workflow (via MacStories).

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Varindani says that when he started college in 2013, he picked up an iPad Air for class and a 15” MacBook Pro with Retina Display for working at home. “And, since I wanted to go completely digital in college, I bought a generic stylus for the iPad”, he writes. He tried handwriting all his notes in Notability at first but that ended up being a terrible idea. He decided to buy PDF Expert 5 by Readdle on both Mac and iOS, and moved all his course documents to it. “This gave me the ability to highlight and underline text, and to fill in text boxes, in addition to the freehand writing tools available in Notability”.

Earlier this month, Varindani picked up a Space Grey, 128gb iPad Pro with Cellular connectivity from the Apple Store. Here’s an excerpt from Varindani lengthy writeup:

I saved writing about my experience doing Linear Algebra homework for last because it is, by far, my favorite anecdote about the iPad Pro. I usually have the assignment sheet open on my Mac in front of me, the textbook open on my iPad to my left, and sheets of A4 paper scattered everywhere else on my desk. I first go through the assignment, making lots of mistakes along the way, then rewrite everything again neatly on the second run. Next, I scan the 10–15 pages to my Mac, merge them into a single PDF document, and upload them to the course server. The entire process takes about 3–4 hours depending on the number of questions assigned and leaves me with a pulsing wrist every time. Last week, I did the entire assignment on the iPad Pro. I had both Notability and PDF Expert open in Split View; the former was a blank canvas where I wrote down my answers and the latter had both the assignment and textbook open in tabs. I was able to erase mistakes as I made them and I didn’t have to scan anything afterwards, both of which saved me a tremendous amount of time. I uploaded the document in Safari using iCloud Drive when I was done.

Almost immediately after I got the confirmation email, I decided that I wasn’t going to be returning the iPad Pro.

To read the article in its entirety, click here.

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