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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

#31

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

robmcm wrote: post #11
steverb wrote: post #8

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…

Can you not restrict them so they can't install games etc? [EDIT] The iPads, not the kids!

With enterprise tools for iPad you have complete and total control over how the device is used.

You can restrict installing apps, uninstalling apps, using the camera, loading the App Store, talking with Siri, altering settings, etc. See this list for some of the things you can do:

http://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/1.2/#cadbf9e41d

Yet more:

http://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/1.2/#cad5370d089

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#32

Post by cantlin »

The extraordinary overhead of printing, purchasing and distributing education texts alone would seem to make this a no brainer.

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.

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.

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#33

Post by josteink »

So good that kids get to learn of the Orwellian world of 1984 as early as possible. They get to learn that computers are sealed shut before they even get to use their imagination about what's should be doable.

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.

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?

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#34

Post by crusso »

alanctgardner2 wrote: post #3

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-book…

Keep in mind that you were self-experimenting with a tablet in limited ways vs the holistic approach this school is taking. Problems that you encountered trying to use a tablet in a book-oriented environment could be solved by curriculum changes, technology improvements, UI changes, etc.

While improvements to a tablet approach can resolve all of the problems you're mentioning, a regular book will never be regex searchable. A regular piece of paper will never let the teacher know your scores immediately so she can help you past problems and provide instant feedback. A regular set of class books will never decrease the need to linearly increase the number of pieces of paper needed for the amount of materials you want the students to have.

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#35

Post by crusso »

josteink wrote: post #33

So good that kids get to learn of the Orwellian world of 1984 as early as possible. They get to learn that computers are sealed shut before they even get to use their imagination about what's should be doable. 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. Wasn't the UK supposed to be a frontier country on open data and ope…

You're polemically trying to start a political argument when this school is trying to solve academic challenges.

The fact is that the iPad is (or at least was) the best tablet available for them to use, so they used it rather than get trapped in the morass of trying to create hardware or use hardware that wasn't as far along.

In reality, they're validating a model that would make it easier for open source alternatives to flourish down the road.

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#36

Post by nodata »

cantlin wrote: post #32

The extraordinary overhead of printing, purchasing and distributing education texts alone would seem to make this a no brainer. 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 spe…

An iPad will never last five years: if they don't become laughably obsolete, they will be broken.

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#37

Post by simonh »

alanctgardner2 wrote: post #3

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-book…

It's true that current software has limitations, but I'm confident these will be improved and I've found loads of workarounds. I run pan & paper RPGs and have a lot of reference material in different PDFs, many of which are compilations of pages I've put together myself with PDFtk[1].

One trick is to screenshot the pages you need to refer to frequently into a photo album. You can also photo pages from paper books for quick reference this way. I also use this trick with map screenshots for journeys where I won't have online access. I used that for a trip to the Lake District.

Another trick is to have each PDF file you need to switch between open in a separate app, then four-finger swipe between them. When you learn that trick it's amazing how well it works. Many of the PDFs I keep in iBooks are also in Dropbox and Google Drive and my most used ones are pinned/starred for local storage so I can easily move back and forth between three different files. This method probably won't work as well for ebooks though. Far from ideal, sure, but I've found it a very practical and usable solution.

[1] http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#38

Post by randomsearch »

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.

AFAIK this is caused by eyes drying due to reduced blink rate. All backlit tablets will have this problem.

Therefore, I still buy old-school books and print out material when I need to read it in-depth.

Does no-one else think this is a concern when giving young children tablets as a replacement for non-backlit books?

RS

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#39

Post by crusso »

jstalin wrote: post #12

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…

I'm 10 years older than you, but when I'm doing development, I hardly use physical materials at all anymore. Development problems melt like butter when confronted with Chrome->Google->stackexchange. The last thing I want to start doing is searching around for the right book, look through the index, thumb from indexed page to indexed page, look back at the index because I forgot the 4th page number I saw that looked like it might apply, wonder if the latest version of the framework I'm using fixed the problem I'm seeing, etc.

My kids live on their tablets and computers.

They will have even less problems adapting to that mode of working than we do - and the solutions they have to reproduce useful paper techniques like highlighting and note taking will completely change the picture in high-tech's favor.

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#40

Post by ceejayoz »

josteink wrote: post #33

So good that kids get to learn of the Orwellian world of 1984 as early as possible. They get to learn that computers are sealed shut before they even get to use their imagination about what's should be doable. 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. Wasn't the UK supposed to be a frontier country on open data and ope…

> They get to learn that computers are sealed shut before they even get to use their imagination about what's should be doable.

They weren't able to modify their textbooks, either.

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