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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 will be interesting to see what happens when the inevitable wave of Android tablets hits over the next six months."
No.. Not really.
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.
When the price of [used] textbooks at Uni bookstore for two semesters/quarters equal the price of a tablet computer [which does considerably more than the textbooks], can you really blame them?
Graduates from 2010-11 will be the year for employers to avoid.
All click, and no content. Spend the year playing games in the back of the class.
Whether it be ipad or an Android tablet, I would love to see a interactive tablet for students that shows g or f=ma or the basis of trig in animated form. i.e. an animated triangle that shows what sin cos and tan really are... Oh, and chemical reactions. Those could be awesome for someone interested.
Also a way to read to young children where they see the word as they hear it. Although parent(s) reading to their kids would be better in my mind...
Hopefully this doesn't turn into a distracting of students or virtual experiments that don't react like in real life.
"Looks like it's not just Apple fanboys that are going wild for the iPad: in Australia, virtually every state education department"
Well, maybe those departments are indeed filled with Apple fanboys, specially when the money doesn't come from their pockets.
The summary says "One university in Adelaide has even abolished textbooks for first year science students and is allocating free iPads to first year students instead." yet the article says "The University of Adelaide jumped into the handheld computer revolution headfirst last week when it was announced last week that students who enroll in science degrees will receive a free iPads." Getting free iPads is completely different than abolishing textbooks. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I hope the students never need any help from Apple.
http://gawker.com/5641211/steve-jobs-in-email-pissing-match-with-college-journalism-student
Meanwhile school administrators and your wife's employer are delighted at the restrictiveness of the device.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Seriously, I go to Adelaide Uni, and I have friends at UniSA and Flinders, and I haven't heard of anyone trailing it or banning physical textbooks. This would be fucking awesome, and I've been championing this for years. If I could get all of my textbooks on some eReader (iPad or elsewise), especially if it was an open standard, I could actually carry my books with me everywhere, and it would be a lot easier to study with. As it stands, textbooks are heavy, cumbersome, bad to navigate/search, and extremely expensive. I'd be willing to spend a lot of money on a fixed cost (eReader) to reduce my variable costs (textbooks). As it stands I spend 1,200 AUD a year on textbooks, and some of my textbooks are fucking written by the lecturers... who I'm already paying about 1,000 AUD (though admittedly on a government loan).
Anyhow, this would be great tech, and especially with my more abstract math, some visualizations and interactivity could help. The graphs are a good start, but sometimes you need to visualize the graphs changing, and that can be tricky.
I'm sure slow old Adelaide will take 20-30 years to implement anything like this, which means I'll totally miss out on any of this sort of stuff. Fie for shame.
It would also give me a rationalization to buy an eReader.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
whilst "interactive" may be an "awesome" teacher, interactING is an even better one.
the reasons why OLPC are good apply just as well in the first world as they do to the third, but teachers and governments got snotty about the shit colour and features of the XO-1.
you wouldn't think it, given the price of the ippad, but the cost of hardware is dropping like a stone and is far less than the cost of text books which can be out-of-date immediately.
showing someone f=ma on a graph is all very well, but who's going to write the graph program?
i demonstrated kepler's laws and the laws of physics and gravitation to myself by writing an orbital space game on a BBC micro in 1985.
putting a shit ippad or an anduroyyd tablet in front of kids is about as good as slapping a TV in front of them and saying "there! isn't technology great!"
you can hear the sigh of relief a million miles away from the teacher as they think "thank christ for that - now i don't actually have to think how to keep this little fuckers occupied".
so... mmmm, yeah. i'm really impressed with putting proprietary hardware/software in front of kids (that's remote-controlled by apple who might decide to "censor" certain types of "teaching" material) especially the kind of hardware/software that requires reverse-engineering to get the crap off it and regain control of it.
I'm much freer on Apple DRM iphone4 than I ever was on the open Nokia I had.
I have come to the conclution freedom has to be governed, otherwice freedom will close it self up. Perfect exaple of this is the mobile market in USA. The American way is the liberal way, however, my mobile is much freer in Finland an many other countries due to the fact that there are governing laws on how competition is allowed to act.
In my homecountry Finland, GMS and NMT mobiles where never allowed to be sold with a carrier plan. Result was that carriers didn't have huge stocks of phones in their shops. Yes they had some phones, but most people piced up their phone at a regular store or electronics store. Then they opted for their carrier.
The law was reviwed to boost 3G development, now the carriers are allowed to sell phones with contract and even lock the phone to it. However, no carrier is allowed to build their own antennas in an area where there allready exists an antenna. Eeach carrier can compete on bringing the anntenna first to an area, but are forced to rent the bandwith to competitors. And that is freedom for everyone. The consumer and the carrier.
A reslut of that is that new carriers have turned up, who have no network them selves but rent from the bigger carriers. And yes they are competitive. No maintenance costs, and can bargine high network trafic prices with the network owners. It's again a win win situation.
But the market is not free as in free beer ala American market. And I've seen the same with the iOS products, yes they close me to Appstore, but infact that has been a positive thing for me as an consumer. And I argue that it generally has been a positive thing for developers, though there are exeptions.
But Nokia OVI sucks because the market is fragmented, and that is true for Androids also I experienced last week.
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.
Whenever stories like this crop up (notebooks in, paper out; turn everything into a game), the future of the next generation looks to be dumber, fatter, lazier, more demanding, less-attentive, and more commodity-like; loath-able yet not by their own fault. Basically: less fit to survive.
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.
I work at multiple schools in Australia as the IT Guy and there are two major differences.
One of my schools has purchased one and is genuinely looking to use it for a worthy purpose but then our statewide firewall has a proxy so anything besides Safari isn't compatible with it.
My other school suffers from shiny object syndrome/Apple fanboy syndrome and we seem to be buying them with every cent we have available. It also doesn't help that the Principal is saying that flash is coming to the iPad, and that we will be using all our online flash educational websites using the iPad in the future and that we will no longer have to buy regular computers. I do try to educate them but its like telling them there is no santa and they are in denial. I also frequently walk in on classes full of students playing racing and shooting games when they are meant to be learning on them.
The only time I've seen iPads do something decent is at Special Schools where the special apps and the touch pad work very well. Besides that I think people are generally wasting their money.
I think there is a proper space in schools for something more open like an Android tablet, the iPad is just annoying and is just a constant "Can we do X task that we do on our PC's on the iPad because its cool and hip"
Just give the students Netbooks. They cost less, are more open, and you can type faster on them.
Nice to know that the Australian government is wealthy enough to afford overpriced hardware and makes its purchasing decisions based on marketing and not, say, system specifications.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
On average, yes, but that's because there are so many basic applications in Apple's store. I'd like to know how exhaustive your study of the respective app stores was.
As far as I was aware, the Samsung Galaxy Tab is the first serious Android-based contender to the iPad, and it's not due out until next month. And it won't come with an OS designed for a tablet form factor. I'd categorise it as a very risky investment right now. In contrast, the iPad market has had a little more time to mature.
The big difference between the US and other countries is the strict enforcement of GSM as a standard. Competition is limited in the USA because carriers have developed their own versions of standards, which limit portability.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
But it's the only choice.
All the android pads are utter and complete crap.
Honestly, give me a Android pad that has plain old android on it not your locked down shit, or your stupid ereader on it. PLAIN ANDROID, LATEST RELEASE...
These devices makers are not interested in making something that sells. all that make is crash prone underpowered crap like the Archos products.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What to do when the battery dies?
You obviously haven't used an iPad. The odds of a student using the entire charge of one without having a convenient opportunity to recharge it are somewhere between none and fat chance in hell. Seriously, the battery life on the iPad, even under heavy use, is considerable and more than adequate for a student's needs. They will be back home and able to charge the device before it runs out of power.
What to do when you forgot your iPad?
Probably the same thing that people do when they forget their notebooks. And, let's be serious - it's far _LESS_ likely that a student will forget an iPad, which is light and cool and fun compared to them forgetting a collection of notebooks which are heavy and boring and dull.
Any other hypotheticals you'd care to throw out there?
As someone who supports devices like these in AU Schools, they're a PIA. Unless content is coming out as apps with discrete logins, the lack of the ability to log a user onto the unit (and accordingly logoff) makes them a pain when they're being used as a shared device (eg a trolley full of ipad's wheeled into a classroom for a lesson). It really seems to be the possibility of what this might achieve as opposed to anything it's actually doing today that's driving these purchases. Give it a year or so when the content is available and the device is properly integrated into the curriculum then I might have a different opinion, until then, they're still toys. Great for home, not good for school.
Nice to know that the Australian government is wealthy enough to afford overpriced hardware and makes its purchasing decisions based on marketing and not, say, system specifications.
I had a friend who derided my decision to buy an iPhone because it was, according to him, way overpriced for the specs. He bought some phone that had better specs than the iPhone but then was forced to run windows mobile on it which he hated. Oh he could install android on it, but then the phone was unable to _make phonecalls_.
Hardware specs are worth absolutely nothing without good software.
After all, Australia needs more sheep, doesn't it?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Except this doesn't seem to be about "tablets" at all but rather about book readers.
As a book reader, the iPad is rediculously overpriced.
At the very least, these schools should be evaluating other book readers.
It's like the Lemming Second Wave.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
This is a shoot-from-the-hip effort. Abolishing textbooks for Kindle books would be great; abolishing textbooks to move to Kindle today would be a disaster due to lack of content. We're not prepared for the iPad to be worthless; they'll all find that electronic devices (not iPad, ALL electronic devices) are worthless by this attempt, and go back to just books. There's no consideration of content availability etc and maturity of the platform, much less consideration of what platform or what goals you have. This is mainly an "OOH SHINY" reaction.
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Somebody needs to make ebook readers so cheap, that only rich people will read dead trees.
I have dreamed for years about how rich a learning experience could be if textbooks had motion and video. For example, imagine how easy it would be to explain the difference between frequency and phase if you could have a couple of sine waves on a graph that change as one drags a slider back and forth? How would you even do that on a Kindle?
Then there's the whole app thing, where you can build applications that target specific learning needs.
Kindle is really great as a replacement for printed novels, but it just doesn't cut it for the education market.
They've got to compete with New Zealand somehow.
which is totally what she said
I can see why an employer would want the device to be restrictive as it pertains to getting these in the hands of users. I deal with that at work all the time. If you don't like your local school district policies you should lobby to change them. After all you'll have a far better chance of implementing change at that level than you ever will in Washington.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
I have enough trouble getting my kids to put their lunchbox in the kitchen rather than leaving it in their backpack overnight. I seriously doubt that kids can be counted on to recharge the iPad daily. Thus, having textbooks with a battery IS a major issue. Only if you told me that it would hold up to over a week's worth of use would I believe that it is "good enough." That's about 5 hours a day for 6 days, so 30 hours of use (display on, mostly showing static text) per charge, to ensure that most students "only" don't have their textbook once a week.
Historically, Apple has done a good job of getting their products in schools. I still remember how annoyed I was at having to learn MS-DOS after using nothing but Apples in school during the late 80's. My attitude then was, and still is to a lesser extent, why teach me on this device when the people doing actual work and making money are much more likely to be using something else?
Your kids go to university?
Is the school supposed to create men or sheep? We know the answer, I'm afraid.
That is a parents job. School systems should not exist for that purpose. It's like relying on the federal government to represent everyone's best interest while your congressman in taking money from large corporations to do their bidding. The system should work but we all know that it doesn't. Sorry I better go put my tinfoil hat back on.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
> You obviously haven't used an iPad. The odds of a student using
> the entire charge of one without having a convenient opportunity
> to recharge it are somewhere between none and fat chance in hell.
I have. Although some of my difficulties arose from being in another country. On the other hand, you will have students by the score having these issues.
Suddenly the infastructure that seems to work well for a single person in a single house won't pan out as well as you think.
These are the sorts of little details that non-technical people prone to being distracted by shiny things tend to forget.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I really don't see what the "reistrictiveness" is. If you're already comfortable with an iPhone, an iPad is no different. I actually find it a wonderful tool in my job in support. Nothing like walking around the building with all your documentation you need and full web access. I can't count the amount of times it's saved me a trip back to my desk to get information due to the firewall restricting sites for general users but not support.
Sure, it could be more open, but to be honest, I don't see any competition at the moment.
Meanwhile people like me that live and breath code somehow manage to do just about everything with the iPad. It's hardly the devices fault if someone can't figure out the App Store. I know that search box and browse by category thing is totally new still after all these years of using the web. And given I've seen six month old children successfully navigate between apps, play games, etc it must be very difficult for some adults.
If you want to get into how Apple doesn't encourange much innovation by hardware developers I can agree. You might have some sort of point that until it gets iOS 4 it lacks multitasking, printing, etc it probably should have shipped with. But claiming you can't do real things with it means you didn't try.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Book publisher money grabs are not new. I remember having to buy the same calculus book 3 times in college - Why?
The publisher moved around the chapters and slightly altered some of the problems. Never mind that calculus hasn't changed in hundreds of years.
These "new editions" instantly made the old books worth zero. If you took a chance on an old used textbook, you ran the risk of not being able to do the assigned work.
Book publishers are money grabbing scum, and they don't give a damn if poor students go broke trying to get an education.
The iPad is just another tool in their toolbox.
-ted
Yup. They are restricted to 80 different types of fart apps.
Steve, I didn't know you were on Slashdot. I'm a Real Fan - can I have a turtleneck along with my iPad?
You are obviously not a RealFan--I wear a mock turtleneck.
Steve
Sent from my iPad
Set your phasers on "funky"!
As other posters have stated, one of the many other tablets that are a fraction of the price using Android OS seem like a much better choice.
Why do they seem like a much better choice? Most of the reviews of those tablets show them to be mostly junk. The Galaxy S tablet is the only thing in the league of the iPad and going to be just as much if not more than the iPad is.
Well, odds are high that the Australian university giving iPads to their students, attending university, in Australia, will make sure that the students are given chargers that work in - you guessed it - Australia. I don't see this being a significant hurdle that requires any sort of specialized thought and is probably well within the mental processing capabilities of non-technical sorts.
The law was reviwed to boost 3G development, now the carriers are allowed to sell phones with contract and even lock the phone to it. However, no carrier is allowed to build their own antennas in an area where there allready exists an antenna. Eeach carrier can compete on bringing the anntenna first to an area, but are forced to rent the bandwith to competitors. And that is freedom for everyone. The consumer and the carrier.
Stop spreading misinformation. There is absolutely no obligation to rent the mobile network infrastructure to your competitors in Finland. And yes, I work for a major finnish operator. There IS an obligation to provide your copper (and only copper, this doesnt apply to fiber) networks for rent to other operators who want to sell ADSL over it, but this has nothing to do with mobile service whatsoever.
The readers are already wicked cheap. And for the existing libraries of free books they are wonderful. What fails is the content delivery system, where the cost of new e-books is not significantly less than the cost of new paper books. $140 for a Kindle is what I consider to be dirt cheap. Even cheaper readers are on the horizon. But I'm not going to do that if I have to pay $6.99 for a e-book when I could just buy the paperback for $7.99.
The tech is there. The content delivery model is not quite ready yet.
Doctors are starting to use them as well. With Citrix extensions available now for the iPad and iPhone and wireless available all over hospitals, it's possible for them to do almost everything they'd need a cart in the room for, or to go out to a kiosk or back to their office. One I saw even had a special lab coat made with a pocket sized just right for the iPad.
How are you going to make tablet that's cheaper than a paperback book?
What to do when the battery dies?
You obviously haven't used an iPad. The odds of a student using the entire charge of one without having a convenient opportunity to recharge it are somewhere between none and fat chance in hell. Seriously, the battery life on the iPad, even under heavy use, is considerable and more than adequate for a student's needs. They will be back home and able to charge the device before it runs out of power.
What to do when you forgot your iPad?
Probably the same thing that people do when they forget their notebooks. And, let's be serious - it's far _LESS_ likely that a student will forget an iPad, which is light and cool and fun compared to them forgetting a collection of notebooks which are heavy and boring and dull.
Any other hypotheticals you'd care to throw out there?
You obviously have never met humans. It's a lot easier to remember a giant heavy thing that a light fun thing. Oops, I left my iPad next to my bed last night instead of putting it in my backpack. Too bad the backpack felt exactly the same with and without it. Oops, I forgot to charge my iPad last night. Seriously, have you met any kids in the last 10 years? At any given time, a quarter of the cell phone toting kids in high school have either forgotten their phone somewhere or forgotten to charge it. The iPad's going to be worse, because it's used for learning, not exciting socializing.
The iPad's battery life is terribly short. If a kid needs to use it in most classes throughout the day and then for homework at night (which will already be pushing its single charge limits on a busy 16 hour school + study day), they only get one chance to remember to charge it.
Also, while the iPad is good for quickly flipping through pages, it's nowhere near as good as a textbook. Most everyone in advanced science or math classes (and I'm probably foolishly discriminating against history, psychology, etc. here) spends a lot of time with several (>2) pages bookmarked and accessed several times a minute while sorting out new concepts in challenging problem sets. This is mostly a software problem, but as of now the available reader software is going to make this more painful than it is with a textbook. Furthermore, the low resolution of the iPad screen just can't compete with the 300 dpi printing on an 11" tall textbook, so the information that took 3 textbook pages flips will now take several more pages of on the iPad.
For that matter, students drop things all the time. Textbooks get bent a bit. iPads shatter.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I'm taking a couple of online class this fall towards a Masters degree. I just bought a Kindle and decided that it would be a cool experiment to buy the Kindle version of the text books. That way I could have them with me all the time without having to lug 150lbs of textbooks. Plus it would let me do some reading during down-times at work (the classes are work sponsored).
However, after only a week I found that the inability to see a whole page at a time and the inability to flip through the pages to find something quickly within the chapters that are part of the reading assignment for the week makes it much harder to learn. I've taught myself how to scan and read pages and paragraphs. I've also taught myself how to scan through pages to find relevent material. You just can't do that with an e-reader. As a result, I have ordered the physical text books. I'll still use the digital editions when I go on vacation later this fall, but my primary reading material will be in book form.
That being said, it's quite possible that someone starting out with an e-reader in school and continuing on through College would almost do as well as I do with text books. I still think that e-readers (Kindle or iPad) have a long way to go. To finally be usefull, you need to be able to copy and paste, search within a chapter range, etc.
David
I worked at a university, in a department that required students to purchase a laptop and a DVD with their books on it. It was a medical school, so you know those books aren't cheap. There was a $3000 annual fee for the DVD license, and it was taken right from their tuition. Students could no longer purchase used books to save a few bucks. On the other hand, it is very nice to be able to search a volume for a specific word or phrase...
I can see why an employer would want the device to be restrictive as it pertains to getting these in the hands of users. I deal with that at work all the time. If you don't like your local school district policies you should lobby to change them. After all you'll have a far better chance of implementing change at that level than you ever will in Washington.
And for those folks in Australia, effecting change in Washington isn't really a high priority, I'm sure :)
antipaucity
Take it to an Apple store, pay the price of a new battery, Apple hands you a new iPad.
The battery exchange program has ben running since the iPod came out. If you don't have an Apple store nearby, you can send it away and have another one delivered.
It used to be the case that you could specify that you got back exactly the one you sent in (if you didn;t want a new one, if you had the engraving or some other specific reason) - I am not sure if this applies to iPads.
I call bullshit. This either never happened, or your girlfriend was simply parroting your commentary on the iPad in an attempt to please you.
Nobody with a corporate-issued device (managed by any IT department worth its salt) has a reasonable expectation of "freedom to do whatever I want with my corporate device." Corporate laptops, cell phones, desktops, servers, and networks are just as locked down as that iPad, for security reasons. Please explain to us what the "freedomz" were that she was complaining about her company "taking away".
Having worked in places where the user can't install any applications, change any preferences, or otherwise use a computer as anything other than a terminal to specific company-controlled services, lots of workplace computers are "just a gadget." Entire industries (and swaths of Slashdot readers) are devoted to ensuring the restrictiveness of computers at work.
The ______ Agenda
As a place to store a spare tire, cars are ridiculously overpriced. But then, cars do a lot more than store a spare tire in the trunk, don't they? Perhaps that additional functionality justifies the price.
Until you realize that textbooks can benefit (if well-constructed) from the addition of color, sound, video, notetaking and highlighting features, a handy web browser / internet connection for free-form research, etc. etc.
And then you realize that adding even a few of those features eliminates most of the present generation of "book readers" from the competition due to display limitations, or processing power.
Which is why "book readers" are cheaper than general purpose iPads.
This looks to me to be the best Tablet OS alternative to an iPad. I will wait for a few models to be released and get some time in before making a decision. Hopefully there will be some good hardware options.
The odds of a student using the entire charge of one without having a convenient opportunity to recharge it are somewhere between none and fat chance in hell.
That's true in the first year, assuming of course Little Jimmy didn't intentionally forget to charge his iPad so he'd have an excuse to get out of mean old Mr. Johnson's boring history class. There is one advantage of a paper book - if the student forgets his/hers, you can pull a spare off the stack and hand it to them so they can attend class, and give them a demerit for forgetting class materials so they have an incentive not to do it again unless they happen to enjoy detention. With a laptop, you could keep a few spare charged batteries at the school in case a student runs out of charge with the same demerit system.
I doubt there are going to be spare iPads hanging about with the proper books loaded up, though I suppose if the units do over-the-air backups during the day you could image a new iPod to be just like Little Jimmy's during homeroom so he's ready for his day when the first class bell rings. The same could be true of units damaged overnight, of course.
I suppose there could be an uncomfortable dunce chair in the corner with the ever-so-stylish cap and a charging cable next to it. :)
Having said that, the actual battery life is certainly not an issue in the first year, probably not in the second, possibly not in the third, but how about when the device starts to age? If you're going to drop $600-800 per student on these things, they damned well better be useful for at least 5 years. Apple is very good at solid quality builds, and I'm sure you'll only lose a percentage of them in 5 years to student abuse, but Li-Ion battery tech just isn't up to the job for a long run like that.
I have a 5-year-old laptop that came with a 5-hour battery, I've babied that battery and treated it pretty well, and it's down to 25 minutes now. Fortunately, being a laptop, I can drop $29.98 (with shipping) on buy.com if I needed to and get a factory-fresh battery and get my 5 hours back. Yank old battery, pop in new one, charge it up, and I'm done.
My newer iPod Touch (8GB, second generation) would cost $106 ($99 plus a $7 "processing fee" to accept my order) plus shipping for a battery replacement, I'd get a wiped refurbished unit (not my own unit with a new battery), and I'd lose access to it for at least a week. At the moment, the iPad replacement seems to be the same price, but as Apple's devices get older the cost of battery replacement seems to go up (original iPod battery replacement is up to $250 now). If the school is smart, they'll have an "IT Guy" who can open them up and swap the batteries and save a few bucks (and not lose access to the hardware), but it's a far more complex operation than "unlock old battery, pull out old battery, push in new battery, lock
Within 5 years, the schools will have to start putting electrical outlets at the student's desks, or start paying for replacement batteries every few years for all the iPads that don't get destroyed by abuse. Schools can't afford for these to be "use it for a year and dispose of it" devices, so the batteries should be considered consumables for such a device.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Pop quiz, Hotshot. There's a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes 50 miles an hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below 50, it blows up. What do you do?
WHAT DO YOU DO?
How's your iPad going to help you in that scenario, huh? Huh?!
So, when we try something it is a trial and when we do a trial we are trialling? Got it. This has possibilities:
"I am trialling on a new hat."
"The trialling of the accused starts tomorrow."
"Trial this cookie, you'll like it."
"I am trialling to open a bank account."
Parallel example: One who administers is an administrator. What does an administrator do? He administrates.
So what do you do when your kids don't put their lunchbox in the kitchen? I'm guessing you remind them, rather than let them go to school with nothing to eat?
Here's a suggestion: Table by the front door, with a charging station, one for each iPad, clearly labeled "Jimmy," "Johnny," and "June." At bedtime, you take a quick look at that table, and say, "Hmm... no ipads. Hey Kids, before bed, why don't you do the RIGHT THING and put your iPad on its charger?!"
Kids say, "Gee dad, that's GREAT! Thanks for reminding me! I luvs ya!"
You go to bed secure in the knowledge that you're a great parent, the kids have a fully charged iPad in the morning. When they're leaving to go catch the bus to school, say "HEY KIDS, Don't forget your iPads!"
In short, taking responsibility for ensuring your kids are prepared for school, as their parent. I know this is may be an outlandish concept, but for primary-school-aged children, you do it already - instead of saying "Do you have your lunch and all your books & homework?" You can say, "Do you have your lunch and your iPad?"
Given that it cites Western Australia's "Department of Education and Training," a name that went away after the last change of government, I have my doubts.
One advantage that the iPad has over most other E-Readers is the ability to handle Color. If you're ereader/ebook use E-Ink, then you're screwed because they don't do color as yet. The only issue I have with the iPad in this setting is the lack of robustness and I wonder how many of them are going to end up with busted screens. Having a lack of moving parts is going to help but the screens are way to fragile and kids will throw/drop/sit and hit each other, meaning lots of busted screens.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Naw. Fascism is music-hall uniforms and screaming ideologs and seek to organize nations according to a corporati... OMG!!!
I drank what? -- Socrates
"Suddenly the infastructure that seems to work well for a single person in a single house won't pan out as well as you think."
A student in Adelaide would need to take a 6 hour international flight to find a household socket that was something other than the standard Aussie 3 pin, 240v. Many young Aussies would not even realise that other countries have something different.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Being an old retired Electric Engineer dude of 62, I find I am just not jumping up and down salivating over the latest gadgets. The iPad is just the latest thing I don't need. Why is this better than a laptop? Weren't touch screens tried on HP terminals many years ago and failed because the screen gets full of fingerprints etc.? (I have >10 PCs/laptops in my home so I am no Luddite.) Texting is mostly useless since I can't type on a tiny keyboard and it costs 15cents a shot. Yesterday a girl on the news said she had sent 10000 text messages in one month. I don't have that much to say. Facebook is a big time waster and Farmville is like digital valium. I would rather blow up teenagers on Unreal or QuakeLive. I am supposed to watch movies on my tiny cell phone screen. Why would I do this when there are big TVs? Oh, I forgot about the "coolness" factor. I am supposed to surf the web on my small phone. I already pay for RoadRunner (with recent price increase to $55/mo), why would I pay $100 for a cell data plan for the same data? So when I hear that iPad$ will replace books, I am mystified. I guess I am no longer part of the "target demographic". Sniff. Wait, am I now off topic? Sometimes I get confused. PS: I have had PCs since 1983 ($200 to replace a floppy drive!), and so far Windows 7 works wonderfully well, much better than Windows 1.0.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Yes, the iPad can be left behind. Yes, the battery may drain. Pretty soon you learn to not do that, and prepare Plan Bs. It's part of coming to grips with reality, where whining doesn't solve the problem - planning and coping does. The charger and cord are small, so carry them everywhere (I do); universities are outfitting ever more desks with power outlets. Those who don't learn to prepare will fail, just like the real world. This isn't high school, nobody will hold your hand thru the day any more.
Yes, the iPad isn't as convenient as a textbook for page flipping or resolution. It's getting there though, with much faster response than Kindle et al, and ability to pinch/zoom for fast scaling. It is more convenient for sheer data volume, where another book doesn't add another gram to device weight. There are tradeoffs between speed/resolution vs. weight/volume - just like the real world.
Nothing is perfect, there are always tradeoffs. The iPad is resolving many issues more than any other high technology has before - not perfect yet, and always some limitations, but may remaining issues are passing. Resolution will soon be a non-issue with the onset of "retina display"; page-flipping will improve with processor speed and better GUIs. Cloud computing deprecates the importance of having a particular device in-hand, reducing replacement (from loss or breakage) to little more than device cost(!). In the meantime, it brings advancement of rapid updates, interaction, video, etc. which processed dead tree carcasses lack.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I hate to point this out on a site like Slashdot, but the openness of a platform is not always the most important thing when buying a product like an iPad. And trendiness isn't why the ipad is so popular, either.
I'm getting more than 10 hours per charge out of my iPad, which seems to be the norm. If you think that's "terribly short" perhaps you haven't been using these things we call laptops, which typically get between 3 and 5 hours per charge.
If you actually used an iPad, you would know that setting a bookmark is a single tap, and getting to the list of bookmarks is 2 taps. Hardly a problem. As a matter of fact this feature is one of the things that makes the iPad so much more useful than other readers available today.
To my knowledge, my 2 teenagers (one is 19) have never left the house without their phones, nor have I ever been unable to reach them because their batteries are dead. They have, however, forgotten books and lunches. While I'm sure that there's a nonzero occurrence of these things (depending on the child's responsibility), I think you're overstating the problem.
I've used roughly 1024x768 resolution (or less) all day, every day, for decades. You're telling me that a 1024x768 iPad screen -- which can be zoomed if needed with a simple gesture -- has noticably less resolution than a textbook? It actually has an almost unlimited practical resolution limited only by zoom levels and the resolution of the original content. I've yet to see any limitation for high-res content on an iPad.
The iPad is iBad for your freedoms.
My freedoms have nothing to do with software. Software is not the centre of my universe despite the fact that I work as a software developer on the windows platform. I can choose to write software for multiple platforms and I find it laughable that the FSF keeps on talking about freedom when the GPL is full of restrictions and requirements. BSD is true freedom because freedom applies to "PEOPLE" and gives people the right to do whatever the hell they want with the code. Inanimate things like software and code only exist because some person created them. Code does not have rights, people do.
If someone wants to bring up Android as an example of openness, I would quickly point out that it is only open to the carriers and that hackers rooting android phones are doing nothing that they could not do with a jailbroken iOS device. The end user on most Android phones is restricted in what he/she can do on it without rooting the device which is basically the same as jailbreaking an iPhone.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
How so? The power adapter for the iPad is small, universal, and feeds the iPad via USB. Even a low power USB port will still charge the iPad if you don't use it at the same time.
how is this insightful? bad slashdot, bad. How does being open fit into your equation? If Apple ever had a monopoly in schools? are you kidding? Where did you go to school? When i was growing up they had what I would call a monopoly in the schooling system, it never hurt anyone. They eventually put new PC's in the school just because of cost decisions. In this case though, every linux and android tablet costs more. More. They have less dev's and have contracts. That's what we want to give our kids, right? Yeah "harmony" they def should have spent $700 each on android tablets that won't support android market place, where the only apps your going to get with the correct screen resolution are the ones that came from your hardware manufacturer. Clearly that's better.
Depending on the cost of the e-books, the iPad/tablet/whatever solution may actually be less expensive over the course of 4 years than just textbooks. 6 to 8 books a year, at 40 to 100 dollars each (college books are freaking insane) is a cost of anywhere from about $1000 to $3000 over the course of a 4-year education. At that level, it doesn't take too much of a discount on e-books to cover the cost of a tablet device. Also, as much as I dislike Apple's stone grip on their devices (being a software dev, I like to have options and hate being told I can't build something), the iPad is a better real-world fit because of it's restrictions. Less work for IT when you have technology that won't let you do anything "cool" enough to screw it up. As for it's use in general as a replacement for paper books, I still prefer the physical book for many things, but the possibilities for the device in this context are very interesting.
I would look at how often they charge or don't their MP3 players or cell phones. As well worse come to worst, you can plug the iPad in at school. If every student has one, it should be easy to find a charger.
Such as? Which android tablets, specifically, are a fraction of the price, and seem like a better choice? If there are "many others" you should be able to name a few, right?
So if iPads are no good for anything but as an ebook reader, why would you then suggest that an Android tablet is a "much better choice"? They're not going to be fundamentally any different in functionality than an iPad... so why replace one thing you claim is only an expensive ebook reader with another thing that, by definition, is just another expensive ebook reader?
Meanwhile people like me that live and breath code somehow manage to do just about everything with the iPad. It's hardly the devices fault if someone can't figure out the App Store. I know that search box and browse by category thing is totally new still after all these years of using the web. And given I've seen six month old children successfully navigate between apps, play games, etc it must be very difficult for some adults.
While it is true that it is easy to install apps from the app store you are either clearly missing the point of this discussion or are totally blinded by Steve's reality distortion field.
Apple does not allow software to be installed from someplace other than the app store. They restrict the languages that the software can be developed in. They restrict the machines that the code can be developed on. Sure you can do some "real things" with it, but there's a lot of stuff you can not do as well.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
It seems to me that the first real step to moving to electronic books would be coming up with a cross-platform framework that is easy, intuitive and powerful for interacting with a text book. Once you have that, then it should be made to work well with whatever platform you're running. It seems really stupid to simply design something to work with an iPad, when nearly everyone already has a laptop of some kind. And other than the touch screen, what benefit does an iPad have anyway? A well designed system could accept mouse gestures to work as well as finger gestures, without getting your monitor all greasy in the process.
life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think
There are a few specialty areas I can think of where a tablet is a superior device. Document reading would be one of them, when you are just looking at information and browsing through it, a keyboard just gets in the way. However you are right in that most things people want to do with them, a Netbook does better. E-mail is a great example. One of our students is a Mac fanboy and he has an iPad of course., I watch him peck out personal e-mails on it and it works fine, but not near as well as when he uses his work desktop to send an e-mail. A real keyboard is just better.
I would compare it to a toaster oven vs a real oven. There are some things a toaster oven is particularly well suited to. However an oven can also perform all the same tasks, and can also perform more tasks. So while you might choose to get a toaster oven, you aren't going to toss your primary oven for it.
Same shit with a tablet and a computer. Tablets have a few functions they excel at, some more that they can do ok, and others they aren't suited for at all. So they may make a nice toy in addition to your computer, but they aren't a replacement for it.
Please, put some videos of these supposed children on YouTube. Or have their parents offer them up for scientific study. A 6 month old isn't even putting together coherent word sounds yet. Just a goo-goo ga-ga babble. They don't walk, many don't even crawl. They will sit only if propped up. They primarily explore objects around their immediate vicinity by putting them in their mouths.
They are certainly not fucking "navigating between apps, playing games" on the jesusDevices.
1) Tuition will go up.
2) Criminals will target schools.
3) Tablets and iPads and Laptops, etc... will be stolen.
4) Students will be required to have them and be forced to buy more.
5) Repeat steps 1-4 several million times.
6) Parents will try and sue school.
7) School will say tough bananas, you should have kept your dorm room locked.
8) Repeat steps 6-7 several thousand times.
9) In the end Professors will ban them in their classrooms anyway, as all the students will be playing video games, on facebook, or doing something/anything but paying attention to what the professor is teaching.
[Acadia University]
i guess mikeFM was counting on /.ers' lack of personal experience w/children;-)
otoh, i was babysitting a friend's 1 y.o. granddaughter, and she grabbed my remote, pointed it @ the tv & started pushing buttons...when that didn't work, she just found the big on button right on the front panel;-)
Well okay but at high school we had Apple ][s which had games written in BASIC. A lot of us patched the games for our own purposes and wrote our own games from scratch. Development tools are, of course, banned from the app store.
Now I suppose somebody could port a development environment to the ipad and install locally but you are limited in the number of ipads you can do that to, and not being able to use the app store would probably make the idea unworkable.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
My school district is trialing them in Middle School Algebra...
Yeah, there is a lot of hype to break through before there can be any real gains in terms of teaching and learning. There is a WHOLE BUNCH of learning design that needs to happen if any mobile device is to be used for effective learning, and I really hope these schools and universities are considering those factors beyond the tech and hype. :p http://mlearning.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/university-of-adelaides-faculty-of-science-going-mobile/
If it's about learning how to program, then there are more than enough languages for web dev. You don't need native iPad apps for learning and seeing the potential in software development.
and a kid is going to be stuck going through eight semesters, its no wonder that everybody's trying to reduce the load.
If students can just get the approved text book through a fast, inexpensive download, instead of screwing around trying NOT to have to buy a textbook made of inert dead trees attached to some textbook publisher's website anyway, they are more likely to do so rather that trying to do without.
One iPad can replace all of those books (1/2/3 books per course [6/12/18 books per semester {24/48/72 books before graduation}]) with just ONE easy to carry piece of plastic and metal.
No wonder EVERYBODY is for them, students, faculty and staff...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I hate to point this out on a site like Slashdot, but the openness of a platform is not always the most important thing when buying a product like an iPad.
But it is an important thing. Openness results in: greater learning potential due to being able to tweak and study how what you're using works, enforces an open market meaning the barriers to entry are low and anyone with a good idea can get stuck in more easily, prevents price hiking due to competition. Now you can order the importance of those however you like, but they're all good reasons why open is better. "Openness not always the most important thing"? Well that's a statement that's true, but not useful. The question is does openness have important advantages over closed and the answer is yes. :)
And trendiness isn't why the ipad is so popular, either.
In schools? I think trendiness is indeed a reason for their being handed out to pupils. Having worked with people in education who make decisions like this purely on the grounds that something is trendy and because it allows them to go around talking about how radical and innovative they are, I have great confidence in saying that trendiness is a part of roll outs in schools. If you're just shifting the discussion to the general issue of the iPad's popularity rather than these school programs, then that's a different discussion and we should be clear to separate the two.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The question is does openness have important advantages over closed and the answer is yes.
Another question is: does closed have important advantages over openness? The answer is also yes.
Another question is: does closed have important advantages over openness? The answer is also yes.
Well you see, I said Open had important advantages over Closed and went on to list them. You say that Closed has important advantages over Open and... ?
I would be interested to hear reasons why Closed is better for the School community than Open. Reasons that apply to Closed, but not to Open, logically.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I think Apple has shown the advantage of a closed system; it makes it easier to produce a polished product. Yes, this is an advantage more from the perspective of the people making the product rather than directly to the consumer, but the consumer can still benefit from it.
I think Apple has shown the advantage of a closed system; it makes it easier to produce a polished product. Yes, this is an advantage more from the perspective of the people making the product rather than directly to the consumer, but the consumer can still benefit from it.
I don't agree that having a closed system makes it easier to produce a more polished product. I'm interested in why you feel that would be the case.
/. argument where two parties attempt to throw ideological dogma at each other. I'm attempting to engage in what you're saying. Also, nice bug photos.
I have a feeling that you're talking about Apple's role as a guardian of quality and putting forward that the closed nature of the iPad is what allows them this role. I.e. that they are able to filter out bad software.
The thing is, having an imposed guardian of quality (a) has some down sides, but (b), more relevantly to this discussion, only offers advantages when there is no other "guardian of quality". Here we are considering everything in the context of technology provided by the Australian school system. There you have a number of bodies ready to step forward and create the "approved list" of products. And we're talking about commercial software. The Australian school system doesn't need protecting against accidentally purchasing an app that isn't suitable or has a misleading description or contains ad-ware. The Australian school system would be asking a company for a demo of their software and then purchasing licences if it met their needs.
If you're not talking about Closed platforms keeping out unpolished products, then apologies. The other meaning I can think of is that you suggest that the limited nature of a closed system, provides a more stable and predictable platform for software then an open one. For example, Mac OS X is pretty slick. One reason for that (not wishing to detract from the great amount of thought that went into it), is that it only has to run on a very limited range of hardware and can be adjusted accordingly. Linux, though I like it greatly and certainly don't consider myself a novice with it, keeps running afoul of each new graphics card / wireless card / motherboard APCI setting or whatever. Similarly Windows backed by the commercial might of Microsoft and hardware manufacturer's supportive development, gets a lot more hardware cover, but still suffers from everyone installing every 2-bit badly written bit of code on it. But neither of these apply greatly to the scenario we're discussing - professional educational software decided on by the educational community as a whole or an educational body, and rolled out on a limited set of OS's and hardware.
Anyway, I hope this is different to a normal
Regards,
H.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
It is not which is better, it is which one is in and has gained the market. The market winner will have the majority of software developed for it.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
oops, she was just under 2 yrs old, but not talking yet...
But it is an important thing. Openness results in: greater learning potential due to being able to tweak and study how what you're using works,
The way my car works internally is of no importance to me. In a similar fashion, the divice I use to make phone calls I just expect to work. If I need to know how it works, then something is horribly wrong with it.
I can see developers themselves being interested in finding out how the device work, but ranting about it is as bad as prospect doctors complaining they cant go left and right cutting people open to see how they work. Albeit Apple only provides Mac Tools, there do are free tools you can download to do your learning, if learning is all you want to do.
enforces an open market meaning the barriers to entry are low and anyone with a good idea can get stuck in more easily, prevents price hiking due to competition.
Look at the app store. It's flooded with competition. Software goes for an average of 99c. The fact that a Apple refuses to approve a very small set of things (and that set of things resently got smaller since removed many restrictions recently) seems to not be getting in the way of keeping prices low. Heck, I wish Windows software was as cheap as software in the extremely competitive iOS App Store.
In schools? I think trendiness is indeed a reason for their being handed out to pupils.
Having worked with people administrating education, I bet budget is the first and main reason for the institutions to approve this. Imagining all digital text books remained the same price as the printed ones, they still would save money by giving all students iPads instead of having to buy massive amounts of classic literature that can be downloaded for free from iBooks. I don't doubt trendiness encourage whoever made the proposal to come up the idea, but for the budget to be allocated they had to be smart and actually prove they would save money in the short run.
It all depends on what the goal is. If they are planning for the iPad as a reading device (given some are stopping the purchase of textbooks it sounds like it) you may only care about the device as a book reader. At that point the argument jumps from "why a closed iPad instead of an Android device" to "Why an iPad over a Kindle". That question may easily be answered by the content of the digital bookstores. If both stores offer all books they require, then it comes down to added features (like much smoother web browsing and email capabilities.)
As for a list of benefits of closed systems, in the general context (not just education,) well, it's not just about spyware but overall malicious applications (off which spyware is just a subset). I feel much more comfortable allowing my wife to use my iPad than my computer. I feel i nearly have to reformat my computer every other week when she uses it regularly due to all the accidental software installation that is either malicious or plain out resource hugging. This is not a problem with the iPad.
At the end of the day, though, the iPad is not THAT closed. Any institution that wants to open up their iPads for in-house app development just have to enter the proper Apple Dev Program. Sure, it's $500 a year, but that's nothing. Heck, that's the price of the cheapest iPad, and WAY less than what the institution will pay to the developer that will write their own apps. Pay that fee and you get access to the tools you need to publish your own apps within your institution.
As a lone Joe, I can subscribe to the paid Apple Developer program that goes for $100 a year and I get to set my devices as developer devices where I can test my own apps, maybe even just leave them there for my personal use.
At the end of the day, this program may prevent average Joe from bypassing iTunes as a method of distribution, or some one that want free access to it all, but the means are available.
I may only argue that it may, perhaps, be nice if Apple provided some way for the basement geek to do his own stuff and run it in his own iPhone/iPad at no cost even if it requires registration. I don't consider it a requirement for success or viability, though.
i wish our school got a friggen i-pad......parents were thinking about getting one just for e-books! but i think my dad just wants to get one because he can. meanwhile my older brother is so anti apple, he was going to get an i-phone. i asked him do you hate apple anymore? he replied yes i still hate. so now hes going to get a samsung galaxy s
Unless they find a carrier to give away those Android tablets, no one will much care when the "wave" hits...
Reading anything backlit causes eye strain. If you don't think so, you don't read very much on the computer. This is the whole point of e-readers, they use an Etch-a-sketch style screen, which is easy on the eyes (not to mention energy efficient). Kids staring into what is effectively a bright lamp all day isn't going to make for happy optometrists, and certainly not happy students. But worst of all, backlit displays don't work well under sunlight, so studying in the park is out, or at least when it's nice outside. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_vision_syndrome