As a student, I tried to use a tablet with ebooks exclusively for a few of my university classes, and it was fairly dreadful. Not because having a tablet is distracting, but because it's not the best way to organize reference information. When I was trying to do homework, I wanted - the questions from page 251, the table of equations from 190, and to be able to flip through and find similar examples. Obviously e-books fail miserably if you need quick access to multiple pages.<p>As a test-taking tool, an iPad is not terribly effective either. The maths teacher shows that she can quickly aggregate the solutions, but there's no good way for the students to express their thought process. I'm pretty sure by their age, if I had simply written the answer on the paper I wouldn't have been given full marks. It's important to teach students good mathematical form from an early age, and this definitely undermines that. Consider maths is one of the easiest classes to write tests for, I wonder how science, english etc. are getting on - likely a lot of terribly simple multiple choice.<p>Lastly, everyone seems so smug. The school's administration thinks they've taken this gigantic problem of how to do learning electronically and they've just knocked it out of the park. I know it's a sort of fluff piece, but it'd be better to see a longer video about problems they solved, lessons they learned, etc. As it stands, it looks like a lot of off-the-shelf software cobbled together by a local Apple rep, which is hardly ground-breaking. They've just thrown a lot of money at it. The administrator featured doesn't seem to be overly technical, and the teacher seems more interested in the fact that now she doesn't have to go home and mark things in her spare time ( but, of course, she's 'dedicated', as she says herself ).
Maybe it's generational (I'm 33) and maybe it's personal preference, but I much prefer a physical book over reading on a tablet. I remember reading an article somewhere saying that our brains do a better job of organizing material if it's a physical book because part of the organization process is remembering where in the book the remembered material was. I get no sense of "place" when reading an e-book. I even print out important material because that makes it easier for me to read.
My kids' high school (<a href="http://knoxcountystemac.knoxschools.org/" rel="nofollow">http://knoxcountystemac.knoxschools.org/</a>) has done this as well. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.<p>On the one hand, the kids aren't hauling 30 pounds of books to and from school everyday, school lockers are pretty much superfluous, and the iPad is a great tool. On the other hand, it's very hard for me as their parent to tell (at a glance) whether or not the kids are actually doing school work or just screwing around and it's very easy for the kids to get distracted if they aren't having a good concentration day.<p>Like everything else, it's a bit of a mixed bag.
Meanwhile, here's another 'iPads in the classroom' story from last week, focussing on how fast the kids destroy them:<p><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255546/School-spent-500-000-giving-pupils-iPads-admits-HALF-broken.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255546/School-spent...</a>
Using backlit tablets for extended periods gives me really bad eye strain. I tried reading on my (high-res) iPad when I first got it, and after an hour my eyes were hurting too bad to continue.<p>AFAIK this is caused by eyes drying due to reduced blink rate. All backlit tablets will have this problem.<p>Therefore, I still buy old-school books and print out material when I need to read it in-depth.<p>Does no-one else think this is a concern when giving young children tablets as a replacement for non-backlit books?<p>RS
£65k saved off photocopying is <i>huge</i>. I've seen copier bills so I know what they can be like, but that's crazy savings from introducing it. Wonder if they're just emailing everything out now, which makes significantly more sense.<p>I'm in favour of iPads in school. I've ran through a few of the educational programs on the iPad (including iTunes and Udemy as well as textbooks), it's a great resource and helps to consolidate everything I need in one place. When I was at Uni I was one of the few people who used a laptop to take notes in lectures as I found it easier to split my focus.<p>I can't watch the video but I'm guessing that they've got all the iPads through the enterprise system that most big companies are (or should be anyway) using, which gives them a bit more granularity on what's going on, pushing updates and some additional restrictions. I'm sure teachers are smart enough to realise that kids with fully unlocked iPads are going to spend their time mucking about.
This could be great, but I doubt maths-heavy subjects can be studied effectively with an iPad.<p>This is kind of sad, because maths-heavy textbooks could be vastly improved if they were properly implemented for tablets.<p>Man, if I had the time, I'd love to work on a comprehensive solution for this: e.g. an app for studying maths-heavy material by letting you leverage the power of the device while making user interaction at least as good as ordinary paper - and maybe better.
Say, you have a maths or physics textbook to study, and you're about to work on exercises. The solutions to these could then be immediately accessible (no need to enter page numbers), along with an editable list of relevant theorems/quantitative relations or wordy definitions. Wolfram Alpha integration would probably work well for many kinds of problems (e.g. calculus, or more basic algebra), to provide checks to solutions, or even to find solutions that the author didn't provide. I bet this sort of stuff can accelerate learning, and it's just the tip of the iceberg.<p>If this could be done, then you can imagine a physics student graduating with 4 years' worth of textbooks, in-class notes and each and every exercise he/she worked on <i>all properly accessible on one iPad and preserved for the future</i>. (Currently, lots and lots of instructive exercises and worked examples just get chucked out once the course is done.)<p>Maths-heavy subjects obviously introduce many formatting issues, and there's always the added layer of difficulty due to the constant need for exercises and solutions. As far as I can see though, many of these problems have already been solved in other contexts (e.g. LaTeX) - so maybe they 'just' need to be cleverly wired together and coated with an innovative UI.<p>Just a thought.
So good that kids get to learn of the Orwellian world of 1984 as early as possible. They get to learn that computers are <i>sealed shut</i> before they even get to use their imagination about what's should be doable.<p>Good good good. Can't have it based on something open, something which can bring things back to the public. That would be counter-productive.<p>Wasn't the UK supposed to be a frontier country on open data and open data-systems in the public sector or am I mixing things up?
The extraordinary overhead of printing, purchasing and distributing education texts alone would seem to make this a no brainer.<p>The cost of supplying 840 pupils with iPads and covers, even at consumer rates, would only be around £350K. From the stated numbers, this would be recouped in saved photocopying bills alone in around five years. Clearly there will be significant software and operations costs, but I would speculate that the less obvious time and material savings (e.g. updating a hand-out from a previous class to reflect new teaching best practices) would more than offset these costs. Centralising resources is a natural side effect of digital distribution, and encourages resource sharing at all levels of the organisation.<p>It's easy to think up other small but significant wins enabled by this approach. We've probably all had the experience of watching a stand-in teacher struggle to fill the lesson time because the regular guy has become suddenly indisposed. With good systems in place it's easy to imagine this being a non-problem.
This project has been going on for some time - very interesting. Recently I've been hearing about (planned / just started) similar projects in the UK and the US with K12 and higher education.<p>TMK its iPads as frontends, Meru Wireless Networks to connect the about 2000 iPads, MS Server 2008 with AD and MS Exchange at the backend.<p>for more info see:
<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/the-school-where-every-teacher-has-an-ipad-and-every-student-has-an-ipod-7578167.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/t...</a>
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13FO_A0Sokw" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13FO_A0Sokw</a>
(plus an Apple UK profile on ESSA) <a href="http://www.apple.com/uk/education/profiles/essa/" rel="nofollow">http://www.apple.com/uk/education/profiles/essa/</a>
Someone close to me works at a very good public high school in Massachusetts. The district is in the middle of the enormous task of planning/budgeting/funding a new school building. At one point they showed some preliminary plans to various interested parties, and the teachers were immediately prompted to ask where the bookshelves were, or where freestanding ones could even be placed. The answer from the superintendent was that this school was to have no physical books whatsoever, so they're not bothering with shelves.
The school did a presentation at an Apple event I went to, the pupils were there too. Apple was pushing 1 to 1 deployment, everyone sets up their own accounts. There's loads of licencing and control issues though ("apps are only $1, just buy a new licence for every new pupil"). Fine for university level, but still a lot of compromises for schools.
<i>Personally</i> I found tablets AND laptops lagging a plain old paper notebook when it came to reviewing notes before the test.<p>Distraction is another thing (sit on the back and watch to get an idea) but I presume that iPads can eventually be modified to access only coursework.