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Australian Schools Go iPad-Crazy
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like it's not just Apple fanboys that are going wild for the iPad: in Australia, virtually every state education department is trialling the tablet in schools — and some schools are even trialling it without the official support of their department. One university in Adelaide has even abolished textbooks for first year science students and is allocating free iPads to first year students instead. It will be interesting to see what happens when the inevitable wave of Android tablets hits over the next six months."
It's just some adults having fun and burning money in the process. If it's about text books, why not give them Kindles which cost a lot less? Oh, because they're not as sexy and cool as an iPad.
So ... will the iBooks be free? Will they be available second hand?
I'm pretty sure the book publishers will see this as a way to make a money-grab.
No sig today...
I'm sure an interactive tablet might be helpful, but when I was young and CD-ROMs were the new rage, my parents bought me a similar type of interactive science software with all sorts of interactive animations and stuff. One or two animations is fine, but you'll be surprised how much time watching an animation or interactive applet will take up while learning. You're dependent on the content creator's pace to learn when you use animations and interactive applets, whereas if you just read the thing, you're dependent on your own.
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I was thinking more to use multitouch as a way to let student have a degree of input. If it was responsive (quick) and was robust enough for more than just a few pre-programmed 'movies' then it might help students who wanted to explore knowledge. Imagine three fingers used to describe the vertices of a triangle. And then moving one point and watching the angles and sin cos and tan change. (That is what I was thinking)
Or dragging an H2O molecule into a Fe surface and watch the reaction.
I can dream right? The pessimist in me says it will probably be a way for a lazy/distracted/addicted to Internet teacher to not have to work. And the laggards will play and the driven students will program games or such.
Meanwhile school administrators and your wife's employer are delighted at the restrictiveness of the device.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
What to do when the battery dies?
Well, I'm not a Doctor, but I assume you'd just plug it in. Considering the ubiquity of laptops in college these days a lot of classrooms have power outlets built into the desks themselves, and I've never heard a student complain they couldn't do their work because their laptop didn't have power. That and how often do you really use a textbook in class anyways? Usually class is lecture time and the textbook is used back at the dorm at night with reading/problems assigned.
I've read this more than once and I still can not understand your point.
From what I can surmise is that you are comparing "I put up the infrastructure and you people may rent it" to "I control what products and services you can use" and concluding that since one worked the other does too.
Monopolies are always bad for the consumer - the problem is this:
"but are forced to rent the bandwith to competitors"
That is the breaking point of your argument. They are forced NOT to have a monopoly in the area. This is the total OPPOSITE of the Appstore - you have a monopoly and they don't need to rent it to anyone, they can choose to disallow stuff at a whim, they can add their own rules (No VMs!).
Now I don't understand what you mean by 'market is fragmented'. I have a symbian myself. I use the Nokia OVI store. I also downloaded some applications from sourceforge, and an e-reader from another website. That's called freedom, and that helps the consumers.
If the email is actually true, I'm with Jobs. The sense of entitlement in her email just pisses me off:
"I was incredibly surprised to find Apple's Media Relations Department to be absolutely unresponsive to my questions, which (as I had repeatedly told them in voicemail after voicemail) are vital to my academic grade as a student journalist."
Why should they be held hostage over her grade? It's also a ridiculous argument. The professor is going to downgrade her because Apple didn't respond to her question?
I don't agree with you at all.
The iPad was supposed to be the death of netbooks. And yet a netbook can do everything an Ipad can do - and far more.
Lets face it, the only reason anyone buys it because it looks cool. I admit that the idea of touching stuff to get it to work appeals to be - but there is absolutely no other way that an iPad (or any tablet) is better than a netbook
Meanwhile school administrators and your wife's employer are delighted at the restrictiveness of the device.
I think at least half of them are just excited at being able to be trendy. I've worked in education and a friend's school did this when the buzz was, I forget, not laptops, PSPs or something. Anyway, as an actual teacher rather than someone who got to go to local conferences and talk about being "innovative", his impression of a kid with a new gadget was... rather memorable. In University's, I've heard some right nonsense talked about "mobile learning". Mainly by managers who got to apply for grants on the back of it and go to conferences to talk crap about it to other people who then talked about new educational paradigms. (Sorry, you get lynched if you use out of date buzzwords in Academia. I think they're new pedagogical models or something now).
It's like technology. First you it doesn't exist so you can't use it. Then it exists and the muppets start using it everywhere like a fucking kid that's just learnt a "naughty word". Then people denounce it as not the radical wonder-fixall it was "supposed" to be. Then people settle down and start using it when it's appropriate. We're not at the last phase yet, we're in the muppet stage. There's a lot of good potential in electronic devices in school. A school is unlikely to get Richard Dawkins to give a lecture to a class. But a hundred schools, watching and asking questions electronically, can. There's a lot you can do with interactive quizzes, seeing at a glance which kids are struggling or excelling in real-time, or group work with such devices that's worthwhile. But what they ain't, is a drop-in replacement for manageable class sizes, actual teaching and knowledgable teachers.
Also, the choice of iPad's is a bad idea which goes right back to the real motivation of a lot of these schemes which is for people not doing the actual work to pat themselves on the back and be trendy. If they had any sense, they'd hold off a little and use one of the open platforms as they become available. Aside from saving money (always helpful in schools), they'd be able to have an open platform. If Apple get any kind of lock-in in Education, it will be bad, same as it's bad when any group gets a lock in. Find me one teacher in the UK that you can put a polygraph on who can say the the name "Capita" without their pulse hitting 150, and I'll show you a headmaster who hasn't done any real work in a decade.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I'd hate to be going to the school that gets open source Android tablets instead of an iPad. Can you imagine how much you would get picked on. Android is like the K-Mart of tablets.
If by that you mean that it is capable of doing all of the same things at half the price but without the iBrand, then I would be happy to shop at K-Mart. That's actually where I do shop for office supplies and low end household electrics. The products work just fine at a fraction of the price.
I would be happy to send my kid to school with an Android tablet. At least then he might get a chance to learn something about how to make his software running on his device do what he wants it to do. That's better than having Apple tell kids what apps are suited for their iEducation.