Ask HN: What are your thoughts on students replacing their notebooks with iPads?

Students need a computer to write papers with, and notebooks to write notes with. iPad + Pencil just happens to be one lightweight device that combines the functionality of all the heavy stuff that they usually have to carry, but I don’t think that effective studying and note-taking techniques have fundamentally changed.

One of the most helpful things for me was having a group of classmates who I joined a Google Doc with. It was the class I did best in that semester and it was a hard science class. It wasn't something that would work for every class, but it's something that wouldn't be possible without technology.

High schools and middle schools have started giving out a laptop to every student in my district. The teachers use google classroom. I don't know if a $1500 device will be better than a $800 device for grades, but even a $600 used device will be much better than going pen and paper only. There is group pressure to get an apple product, but that also depends on the major. In bio or psychology classes there was some elitism when I was the only one who pulled out a thinkpad, some classmates associated thick to business to slow and old. After I switched to CS the topic didn't come up again.

Every single one of my classes in college provided power points, even math and cs. I didn't need to worry about copying down the PPT while the teacher was lecturing. I took one class with a teacher who refused to provide a copy early and I meaningfully struggled more to learn the material. I switched sections/teachers in order to make sure that never happened to me again.

Depending on the comfort student, 2 in 1s have gotten good enough to where they could replace paper and pencil completely. The only time they would need to write on paper is for exams. I personally think iPads are a bad investment regardless of the student and their major. The software just isn't there, regardless of the model.

I have way too many old notebooks (school and work) that I have had to discard over the years. Or maybe some of them are still in a box somewhere, I have no idea.

If I had all my notes on an iPad, organized an searchable, and uploadable to the cloud or transferred to a desktop machine, that would be a much better situation.

That said, it isn't anything close to $2K. Students have access to good discounts through various retailers, but even the base iPad with a $329 full retail price works well enough for taking notes along with the $99 Pencil. It would easily last four years of college for note-taking.

The key is to disable all other apps (including iMessage) so it's a distraction-free device.

I think they should use pen and pencils unless they absolutley must research on the internet.

Whenever I sit in the back of a lecture where students are using laptops to take notes, I notice a significant number of devices being used for extracurricular purposes: messaging apps, web browsing, etc.. The most hilarious (perhaps egregious, if you are instructor) examples were watching Netflix during a lecture, though youtube is also pretty common. The most depressing were gambling sites. Phones are usually set to messaging/youtube/twitter/etc.. Mobile games seemed rare, surprisingly. An interesting bit is that email seems much less popular than messaging apps.

In professional or academic conference sessions, most laptops seem to have an email app open. I expect professionals and researchers rely more on email.

I think someone once suggested that you could automatically monitor and rank conference session engagement by measuring wi-fi usage.

In any case, I can understand why some lecturers might advocate blocking wi-fi and cellular service during lectures. Though I sat in on one course where every student had a web app where they could follow along with the lecture and examples and also provide immediate feedback (e.g. solving short problems or answering questions addressed to the class) to the instructor.