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UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

bbc.co.uk

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Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#3

Post by alanctgardner2 »

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.

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.

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 ).

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#5

Post by OGinparadise »

Personally I found tablets AND laptops lagging a plain old paper notebook when it came to reviewing notes before the test.

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.

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#6

Post by obtino »

kitsune_ wrote: post #4

Of course, of all tablets, it had to be an iPad!

TBH, it's hard to get the same level of user-experience from an Android tablet. There are very few apps on Android which offer the same level of experience as those found on the iPad.

Also, in a school setting, how do you expect students and teachers to deal with different versions of operating systems and device specifications?

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#7

Post by fpp »

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.

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.

for more info see: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/t... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13FO_A0Sokw (plus an Apple UK profile on ESSA) http://www.apple.com/uk/education/profiles/essa/

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#8

Post by steverb »

My kids' high school (http://knoxcountystemac.knoxschools.org/) has done this as well. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

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.

Like everything else, it's a bit of a mixed bag.

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#10

Post by objclxt »

kitsune_ wrote: post #4

Of course, of all tablets, it had to be an iPad!

There is something to be said for service continuity. After-market support from Android manufacturers can be variable, whereas it's something of a known quantity with Apple. There's also the software issue: there is simply a better and more wide reaching range of tablet optimised educational software on iOS than Android.

Also, on a more practical level, trying to procure a thousand Nexus 10s is no easy task. I don't think one platform is inherently better than the other in the education market, but it should be pretty self-evident that Apple is better set-up to currently sell into the sector.

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