Cleaning Up Your iPad

With the Quality Instruction expectation to video your lessons this year, you may want to use your iPad to accomplish this. Video storage can be problematic on a classroom issued iPad because it takes up a lot of space on the device. When an iPad doesn't have enough room, it can stop recording at any moment, or not be able to record a video at all. The fuller you iPad is, the slower it will process, especially if you have an iPad Mini.  This blog post is intended to help you clean up your iPad to give yourself plenty of video space.

The first thing you should do is know the capacity of the free space on your device. In order to determine how much space you have, complete the following steps:

1. Touch the SETTINGS icon
2. Scroll down and touch the GENERAL tab
3. Tap ABOUT at the top.

You should look at the AVAILABLE number underneath the CAPACITY. This is the number or gigabytes or megabytes that you have left on your device. An hour of video is approximately 13 gigabytes. So, if you have a 15 minute focused lesson or a 30 minutes of substantive conversation videos, you would need 3-7 GB of space for that lesson video submission.

The easiest solution to cleaning up your iPad, or freeing up additional space, is to look at your photos and videos already on the iPad. The more pictures and videos that you can delete or send to the trash, the better. REMEMBER THOUGH just because you send videos and photos to the trash, they WILL NOT be removed automatically from your device until you delete your RECENTLY DELETED folder. You can access this by completing the following steps:

1. Open the photo app
2. Select ALBUMS on the bottom
3. Touch RECENTLY DELETED
4. Touch the SELECT in the upper righthand corner
5. Select DELETE ALL
6. Delete the photos

If you have limited space, and very few photos or videos on your device, you may have some storage eating apps on your iPad. In order to assess what apps are taking up the most room, complete the following steps:

1. Touch the SETTINGS icon
2. Scroll down and touch the GENERAL tab
3. Tap STORAGE & iCLOUD USEAGE
4. Select MANAGE STORAGE

This will give you a snapshot of what apps are the largest on your device. You may need to assess which apps are taking up a lot of space and determine how you can clean them up. For instance, if you have a lot of iBooks in your iBooks app, you could remove some of the books to free up more space. If there is a game that is taking up a lot of space, you could temporarily delete the app. ***PLEASE NOTE: IF you delete an app that a teacher librarian or an IT department placed on your iPad, it would be problematic to put this app back on your device. For instance, if you have apps purchased by the school that are on your machine, I would caution deleting those just to free up space, UNLESS this is an app that you no longer use. If you plan on using it again, don't delete it just to free up space.