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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

#41

Post by betterunix »

crusso wrote: post #35
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 alternative…

"academic challenges"

Which challenges the school chooses to address is a political issue in and of itself. If the goal of the school is to educate students so that they can become outstanding citizens, then it is probably not a good idea to train them that Apple's approach -- with its restrictions and censorship -- is how things should be, which is precisely what they are doing by giving everyone iPads.

Words of wisdom: "The medium is the message."

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

There is nothing about the iPad that helps open source. It is a computer that is built from the ground up to fight against any sort of hacking, tinkering, or user programming. In what world does open source mesh well with "pay us to be able to distribute your programs" or "you are only allowed to program the computer in the languages that we choose?"

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#42

Post by stinos »

simonh wrote: post #37
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…

all these tricks are nice and useful, but in my experience they cost more time and are less effective than just lying out all needed paper material in front of you, on your desk, so switching between them is merely a matter of moving your eyes. Of which the electronic equivalent is having lots of screen space like 3 monitors.

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#43

Post by revelation »

objclxt wrote: post #13
mpclark wrote: post #9

Meanwhile, here's another 'iPads in the classroom' story from last week, focussing on how fast the kids destroy them: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255546/School-spent...

...it's a terribly misleading story (which doesn't come as a surprise to me, it's the Daily Mail after all), because it conveniently omits breakage rates of one-to-one laptop deployments. It may not come as a surprise to many people to learn that laptops break almost as often as tablets when deployed one-on-one in schools. A quick Google led me to one study from 2004 in Maine, where over an 18 month period 50% of lap…

I don't understand. There are schools (the majority of them!) that do neither tablet nor laptop "1-to-1 deployments", for maybe this very reason.

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#45

Post by mikevm »

alanctgardner2 wrote: post #23
cryptoz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those problems have very simple solutions in software features. > 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. The solution to this could be implemented in under a week, for sure. Add a little UI for temporary bookm…

Except for the loading times. If you've ever used a graphics-heavy textbook, especially on a high-res device like the iPad 3, rendering pages takes forever. It's not just a UI problem, it's an issue of effectively caching the bookmarked pages, and for a large book that might be a big problem.

I read some scanned PDF files (over 150MB) and they work fine in GoodReader on my iPad 2. I'm sure that graphics heavy vector PDF files would work even faster.

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#46

Post by meaty »

UK education 'graduate' here. I have three children. I both love and find this development abhorrent.

Positive things:

The amount of textbooks I had to carry around was immense whilst at school. I actually physically injured myself carting crap around all day.

There was always a shortage of books in the library. This allows side channels to be used (I.e. Stealing eBooks) as well.

It allows offline communication between students and teachers. Getting time is hard.

The information is interactive.

Bad points:

EVery back end for these things (particularly LGFL Fronter is a fucking huge piece of shit with absolutely no consistency or information architecture. This is the killer.

This will be a substitute of actually taking notes which is an extremely important part of assimilating information and understanding.

They will get broken in two seconds flat. Back in my day we had BBC Micros. These and TI-81 calculators are the only thing to survive. If its not left after a nuclear war with the cockroaches, then its not going to survive a UK school.

Apple. No way should a closed platform be used in a school. The government have fucked that up since the introduction of RM PLC in 1992. The predecessor Acorn was so open it was unbelievable. We'd regularly hack something up in class for data collection or calculation or control from scratch.

I have seen the quality of work from a UK secondary school. The children need to learn to write and be creative with real tactile things before they get abstracted away with technology.

The inflexibility will dumb down education to only answers that can be machine marked.

It will contract out most common skills to a machine on demand. Children, much as some of the more stupid adults today are pretty much google regurgitation machines. I see other children's homework which is basically cut and pasted bits of web sites.

Oh the shelf life of IOS devices isn't good as well. 3 years per unit before it either has a useless battery life or the unit is no longer updated and the app store won't push new apps to it.

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#47

Post by mikevm »

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…

I'm a student that uses an iPad with ebooks exclusively, and I much prefer the experience to a physical book. As others have said, you complain about software problems, and not inherent problems in the hardware device. In fact, GoodReader lets you set up bookmarks so you can flip back and forth. It also lets you open books in multiple tabs, so you can work with a few books simultaneously.

Don't forget another important feature of eBooks - you can search the whole book. You can also annotate without ruining the physical copy ;-).

The only problem is books that aren't well made, for example, PDFs without hyperlinks (like "Equation 2.6.1" is not clickable so you have to flip back).

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#48

Post by hdivider »

This could be great, but I doubt maths-heavy subjects can be studied effectively with an iPad.

This is kind of sad, because maths-heavy textbooks could be vastly improved if they were properly implemented for tablets.

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.

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 all properly accessible on one iPad and preserved for the future. (Currently, lots and lots of instructive exercises and worked examples just get chucked out once the course is done.)

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.

Just a thought.

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#49

Post by meaty »

ceejayoz wrote: post #40
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.

Yes we were. We covered them, scribbled on them, wrote errata in, copied pages for people, ripped out pages, occasionally watched nitric acid dissolve them, accidentally set them on fire, sold them and swapped them for other things and occasionally clunted someone round the head with them.

Re: UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

#50

Post by jimzvz »

randomsearch wrote: post #38

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…

I agree completely, I would have hated to have to read my text books on a backlit screen.
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