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Goodbye Textbooks, Hello iPad
PolygamousRanchKid writes "Students and teachers in grade school through higher education are using the iPad to augment their lessons or to replace textbooks. Jennifer Kohn's third grade class at Millstone Elementary School in Millstone, New Jersey, mastered the iPad with minimal training. For the most part, the students didn't need to be taught how to use their apps, Kohn says. College students are also turning to the iPad to do what they do instinctively well: saving themselves money. Marianne Petit, a New York University staff member, recently began taking credits in pursuit of another certification, and uses her iPad in place of textbooks. 'The price of the iPad pays for itself after a single semester,' Petit said. 'iPad books cost so much less it's a legal alternative for students who are using BitTorent [to pirate books].' Like the PC before it, Kohn noted that the iPad isn't a panacea for educators: It has its appropriate time and place. 'I don't use them with every lesson or even day. It's not always appropriate to lesson or objective of what I'm trying to teach,' Kohn noted."
s/iPad/ANY TABLET/g
I thought the standard book industry line was that the cost of printing is only a few dollars, most of the cost is for authors, editors, copywriters, etc., and that's why e-books are priced very near print books.
That should be doubly so for textbooks because you're not just making up stories and writing them down plus you have to have special content like illustrations, photographs, and quizzes.
There aren't special discounts because the e-book is being sold for the iPad, are there?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Oh good, Apple took a trick from Microsoft on indoctrinating the next generation.
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School must have changed a lot since I went. Back when I was a kid we had to write stuff down, not just read and push buttons on multiple choice questions.
See that round hole, now shove that square peg through it .... just think of the children and it will fit ;)
I think I quit reading after "iPad saves you money".
..It doesn't matter. When you drop an iPad, it's costly to replace. But I'm just preaching to the choir now...
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
Textbooks yanked from students iPads during a semester because of DRM glitch. Thousands of kids are unable to do their book work as teachers scramble to come up with alternatives while the issue gets resolved between the publisher, Apple, and anyone else.
*Whump* It may be old, it may be so yesteryear but a book works fine. Not to mention as a learning tool it also makes a great:
* Blunt object to smack the bully who's harassing you with if he tries to take it from you.
* Something to stand on to reach that higher shelf
* Foot rest when doing something other then Calculus or Physics. God those books weighed a ton!
* Something your kid could poke around in when your older and not have to deal with DRM restrictions that lock the title to you alone. Seriously I found my parents old math books in the attic one day and I was amazed going through them when I was younger.
* It works great when the batteries are dead and you have a candle to read by.
Now that I've ranted I'll get off the lawn before the guy with the stone tablets comes out and yells at me. Don't ask him how he parted the waters in his birdbath. You'll get your ear talked off.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
...and they could have just have easily been using Netbooks or Laptops for this. And the advantage of a laptop is that these starving students would save themselves even that $600 the tablet costs as they need a laptop for real work anyway.
"Jennifer Kohn's third grade class at Millstone Elementary School in Millstone, New Jersey, mastered the iPad with minimal training."
Mastered meaning they learned objective-c and xcode and now have multiple million unit selling apps?
...how this lady chirps for one particular piece of equipment. Who paid her ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
They save lot's of money, right up until you have to replace a smashed one.
I think we've finally seen a more reasonable price point out of the Kindle ($80) would be low enough that a large portion of the parental population wouldn't murder their child after just one being destroyed.
iPads on the other a bit harder to recover from. That and it's a fucking iPad. Are we going out of our way to teach our children to be douche bags?
What a glorious device the iPad must be. Why, it can do everything! I must get one today.
The School District. That's who. In the US at least, School Districts enjoy the right of "in loco parentis," and can make decisions on behalf of your child as if they were the parent.
During my day job, I use a computer for about 8 hours. I then use a computer for my classes for approximately 2 or 3 more hours--and that's on a good day. If I have time before bed, I then use a computer to watch something online as I avoid overpriced cable or satellite charges this way. After all this effort in using a computer, I still have yet to feel like my computer is helping my life out in any way.
Instead?
I'm charged with a pupil's responsibility of sorting through the bullshit "companion documentation" some disillusioned instructor uploaded to his or her Blackboard class just to find something as trivial as a due date, and we all know how easy it can be to siphon through large PDFs, like a 3 MB syllabus. I'm then expected to sort through more damn PDFs just for shit that said instructor thinks is important to circle-jerk to during "blog discussions" or "online reflections." I'm then expected to download yet another PDF to read before some joke class meeting where we pretend to be learning all of this supposed knowledge that's supposedly meant to help us better our lives which we all know won't happen unless we find that supposed magical fairytale job that exists out there in our supposed dream life we're all waiting for. Supposedly...
Thank the lord for unorganized distance education, inaccessible websites that have no semantic structure whatsoever, overpaid professionals who do nothing useful in higher education, unrealistic instruction by nimrod professors who've lost their grip to reality due to everything ranging from red tape to tenure, annoyingly long PDFs covering research statistics and data nobody really gives a rat's ass about... ...and our wonderful hand-held units that we now get to experience this all through.
I'm glad the taxpayers of Millstone, NJ are being forced to pay money they don't have for one brand or another of the most perishable IT technology there is. In five years or so all of those iPads will be in the landfill, and the good, well-meaning but ignorant taxpayers of Millstone can repeat the process. I hope the schools teach those kids some solid Personal Finance; they certainly are not going to learn it from their parents or the School Board, (that jumping off point for nascent political careers).
In high school the books were riddled with sketches of penises, vaginas and pot leafs...how are you supposed to pass this on to the next generation with an iPad?
Nobody is out to steal textbooks, but a $700+ iPad in the hands of a seven year old is probably risky.
Students usually write various remarks inside textbook. Finger is not ideal tool for this (and keyboard is useless for quick equation, graph or schema). So, this will have also downside for students, especially if SW is general "reader", not tailored for this specific use.
839*929
As a parent who's eldest has just started secondary (high) school I say the sooner they move to e-books the better. Its not just about money. I am concerned about the weight of textbooks my 12 year old daughter has to lug around. They have lockers but regularly brings home 10kg or more of books for homework or study. The problem has gotten much worse than when I was a school kid because
a. Schoolbooks are bigger, glossier and consequently heavier and
b. Every subject now has a separate workbook which doubles up the number of books.
So I would welcome the transition to ebooks with open arms but I wonder if the technology is ready yet. On the hardware side battery life is critical. Between school time and homework the kids could be using the tablet for 8 hours a day. With even the best of current tablets that means forgetting to plug in overnight could lose you a whole schoolday. On the software side I am also concerned that the whole e-book industry is still a mess with conflicting standards and restrictive drm: "I am sorry but we won't be covering Lord of the Flies this year because you cannot get it in XYZ format".
iPad books cost so much less it's a legal alternative for students who are using BitTorent [to pirate books].
iTunes singles are 0.99, and still people pirate mass quantities of music.
hulu came out ad-free, and they have been increasing the ad quantities steadily ever since.
iPad books are "so much less" right now, they will increase in price until iPad publishers reach a maximum profit.
New technology will bring also brand new excused not to study and not to do homework.
- I've got a virus
- The memory card got broken
- I ran out of power
- I couldn't get online to download the homework
- The dog ate my tablet
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Just wait for the first student to get caught by their parents looking at porn on their school-suplied iPad. Those things will be locked down so tight after that, Apple could only dream of that kind of control. Probably have web browsing disabled entirely, along with all apps except the book reader, and that set to only open approved school-distributed texts.
with the same set of motor skills you annotate a book...
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But there are requirements to list books and prices! The federal Higher Education Opportunity Act requires colleges and universities to make public lists of books and other materials that will be required for each course by the time of students are expected to enroll in those courses. This was supposed to drive down the cost of textbooks because it will give students more time to find online prices. As a professor, I haven't noticed much of a change since this law took effect in July 2010, the prices in the bookstore are still outrageous.
Creating a reliance on a locked-up platform doesn't make much sense for a school.
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Would this not help open the industry to open source book projects?
Build a tablet that doesn't break if I drop it down a flight of stairs, and has 40 hours+ battery life and I will start caring. I don't even care if the thing is many times heavier than the current ipad models.
Probably have web browsing disabled entirely, along with all apps except the book reader, and that set to only open approved school-distributed texts.
Wouldn't Amazon be able to sue Apple for such a blatant knockoff of the Kindle?
University is for learning. The idea is that you open the textbook on your own to gain a deeper understanding of the topic than you had time to cover in class.
And they can't learn new tricks.
Schools are used to being locked into publishers, or rather, a specific set of a succession/pattern of publishers for sets of X years.
In essence, they are used to and they "go for" a form of vendor lock-in, which ultimately just makes everything worse.
Some sort of paradigm shift away from textbooks may be inevitable, but it will require a drastic revamping of infrastructure; the day that most students are bringing tablets to school is the day that those students are also not charging their book-pads before school.
Quite frankly, unless a specifically long-lasting-battery and rugged tablet model comes onto the market, it just won't be practical. Now, E-Readers? There's an option that might work better, if only the tech was faster.
That seems like exactly what they've been doing for over 30 years.
That's kind of why textbooks have more or less been re-using the same core knowledge yet costing more and more each year. They haven't been improving the way they teach the material as much as the "buy a new book every year" mantra would lead most to believe.
As a solution, and also a 'value-add', they've got a per-student login system to the book publisher for online versions of the books.
It's been a disaster.
Leaving aside that not all kids have unfettered internet access at home - those kids get real books early - it was easily one month into the school year before they got the kids accounts and passwords to read the books. Each kid needs their own login.
Then: you're relying on each 6th grade kid to write down a case-sensitive login and password in class, then try it at home. Since they might not have homework that day for that class, it may be a week before they get around to checking the login. When it doesn't work, you then need to communicate back to the teacher - through your kid - for a better password. The "lost password" link just says "talk to your teacher."
We finally were able to successfully log in to two text books mid-November.
For another class, the teacher provided a 40 character long, case-sensitive URL for the kids to log on and check for homework. WTF?
Yeah, another well placed article strategically placed in the hopes that it will be discussed. This is nothing but a covert advertisement and an attempt to promote yet another place where "tablets are thriving", specifically the iPad. I've heard of and read quite a few stories like this claiming everyone everywhere is using tablets in just about every field for all kinds of work. The reality is I rarely if EVER actually see them being used at all out outside of when someone is commuting or sitting on their couch. They are basically used to occupy and pass time if you in a situation of rest and you don't feel like day dreaming.
I used the APP CourseSmart for my books this semester...
Pro's: I never carry around weight.. Just an ipad.. Books were similarly priced as used books.. Can take notes slowly, read textbook, and use google/wiki/wolfram alpha all in one light form.
Con's: DRM, if you are flipping thru an index, say 30 pages in a row, the APP locks you out with a message about copying the textbook. Easily fixable but highly frustrating.. Also, For say my Calculus II class, when you have to refer to the beginning of the chapter for an example, then back to the problem set. Its slow to flip pages back and forth and cumbersome... DRM for caching the entire book to the ipad is glitchy and you get locket out.. If you don't cache, page flipping is dependent on your connection. High latency.. And in the case of CourseSmart, you can only see the text book for 180 days or so...
The most logical thing to do would be for the US government to commission the creation of free textbooks. Since they buy the books for poor students, they would recover their costs very quickly.
The fact that you have to pay much for any grade school or high school book is silly. A fourth grade math textbook can be written once and once then it just needs to have a few cultural references updated every twenty years. A history or science book will need more updates. But those could mostly be produced for free for students working on their Education doctorates, teachers earning continuing education credits, or other volunteers submitting small changes wiki style.
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Bluetooth keyboards how many can you have in the same room with out have issues with them cross talking over each other?
Why not an ereader likethe kindle or nook? Theyre cheaper and better designed for the role
Around here, all dark soda drinks are "coke".
Then again, it doesn't have to be good, it has to be short. iPad is easier to say than a Samsung Evo Touch G1 Plus Z. Android name courtesy of http://androidphonenamegenerator.com/
I8-D
It's why we use kleenex, not tissues, and down south they drink sprite coke, and why the drug companies sell Tylenol, and Aspiin and not acetaminophen and acetyl salicylic acid (ASA).
Digital restrictions management is the opposite of platform agnostic. If a textbook publisher chooses to strike an exclusive deal with iBooks, and the instructor is already locked into that publisher, tough droppings.
The price of the iPad pays for itself after a single semester,' Petit said. 'iPad books cost so much less it's a legal alternative for students who are using BitTorent [to pirate books].'
Right, and where do you think they're getting those electronic text books from? Since they're broke after buying an IPad, who wants to bet it's Bit Torrent?
Last time I tried to buy textbooks online, they were almost the exact same price, so this wouldn't really save them all that much...
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Bluetooth keyboards how many can you have in the same room with out have issues with them cross talking over each other?
There are 79 usable frequency bands, as Bluetooth uses frequency hopping techniques. So long as you are not attempting to perform the initial pairing operation for all keyboards simultaneously, you should be able to get a few dozen devices working at the same time for normal operations. It will likely wreak havoc on your wifi network though. Additionally, BlueTooth dongles can typically connect to as many as 7 devices at the same time. Hope this helps :)
Please stop advertising for these companies. I hate the mere thought that a company could delete an ebook that I have purchased.
You just wanted an Ipad plain and simple, otherwise the $99 kindle would have been much better at reading books anyway.
For one thing, the Kindle that can display color illustrations is twice that. For another, publishers have every right to deal only with Apple and decline to deal with Amazon.
for the positive sciences most books can be ordered in the special-price Indian editions.
Watch out when the publisher reorders the exercises in the Indian version.
and I don't see this printing press thing working out, either.
Apple has an entire team dedicated to education, they have the entire Maine school district, Los Angeles, Texas, Hawaii and several other states using their hardware so it is only natural that these same customers will move to iPads.
The issue here is textbooks on the iPad are cheap now because of marketing and getting people on the platform, once there the prices rise, one other thing would be 3rd graders using iPads, guess how many are going to get broken and need replacement, plus only a smattering of schools purchased accidental damage coverage from Apple, the rest just got "Apple Care" which only covers manufacturing defects not accidental.
Apple is perfectly positioned to take advantage of the education market, they've been farming it for quite some time and they do it well.
Get over root access, the majority of users shouldn't have anything greater than limited application access to computers much less root access.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
that in my life time I'd see real scary sci fi story come to life, like a generation of kids who don't know what a paper book is.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
“Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.” - Robert Heinlein
With ebooks we no longer have to worry about one State's ability to influence the textbook publishers for the other 49. We do have to worry about certain areas desire to change "history" to reflect their own believes or views. There might be a whole lot of God references in a catholic schools textbook about founding the US for example.
www.moonnext.com
They are better! Old text books in math and science, if they cover the topics are better in my experience. The small collection of monographs is better than any 600pg tome.
So the school will buy one of the most expensive tablets to give to elementary school kids who will more than likely break a bunch of them over time. Unlike books you can tape or rebind a tablet. I think tablets in the school are a great idea but if your using them to simply display entertainment you should get one that runs Android and costs half as much...like any of the Archos tablets. You then need to get a great warranty plan and some industrial cases. Personally you'd be better off spending money on touch screen all-in-one desktops.
This is beyond false. Our school has investigated this and found that in most cases, publishers:
1. Charge MORE for eBooks than paper.
2. Force you to buy BOTH the paper book and eBook.
3. Some publishers licensing requires that you physically store the dead tree version of the book in order for the ebook licensing to remain valid. There are districts all over the USA that have HUGE storage facilities that do nothing else but keep brand new unopened dead tree versions of a book for the purpose of the district being "allowed" to use the ebook.
This is beyond ridiculous. Open source textbooks are the way to go. I'll never purchase another commercial textbook again until this ecological disaster is stopped.
controls the world.
/Bad Idea.
I was born in the US but my family moved to Europe years ago and here's my experience with university textbooks:
I finished my 4-year physics degree just this year and purchased a total of five books, worth around 20-30 euros each as many of them were written by university professors from around the country, though each university has its own publisher. My purchases were made after finding out which books I always ended up consulting, which means I've used them for more than one class. In fact, many of my classmates haven't bought more than a single book (one on mathematical tables and statistics to help solve problems during exams) as most professors write their own notes and if you had any questions or wanted to learn more about a subject then you could consult the bibliography and get what you need from the library. Another option, even though it's technically not allowed, is to print out a full textbook after finding a digital copy (note: I only ended up resorting to this after failing to find the book in the library and discovering that it was worth over a hundred euros on Amazon).
So coupled with the fact that I paid approximately 1200 euros/year on tuition, from a financial standpoint I'm happy I decided to stay in Europe for my degree.... though I will admit that I wouldn't be averse to going to an American university for a PhD, but that's a different story.
that elementary school students are the most appropriate market segment for iPads.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The folks who were education majors when I was in college fell into two categories. The much smaller minority were men who were in Ed for one sole reason: they wanted to be coaches (they were all major sportos). The larger group (young women) only wanted to teach kindergarten or early grades for one sole reason: maternal feelings for the cute kiddies; most of them dreaded the thought of teaching in junior or high school.
These attitudes, combined with immorally low pay for the classroom folk (as opposed to fatcat admins), it is little surprise US primary education is screwed with no chance for improvement. It also doesn't help that the right wing is actively trying to destroy it so as to have ever more easily manipulated ignorant people.
In another classroom, droves of students learned to operate the UI of a dead tree even faster than our iPad control group learned to use it's apps.
So - that looks like something like 40 ipads lost in the last 3 years. 400 dollars each? total 16,000 dollars replacement costs?
How does that compare with how much your education area previously paid in replacing books in a similar time period?
I have to admit though I am very impressed that you've deployed approx 4000 devices and had approx 40 losses, 1% loss over three years, 99% continued use of original devices is very impressive.
Lovely, now explain why all the Silicon Valley tech execs send their kids to schools that do not use technology.
What are you going to use to prop up table legs, coffee tables, and various other things with thick text books after you are done with them! :)
Though honestly if it wasn't for the greed, this would never be a problem. A 200$ book it one thing. A 15th edition of a 200$ book that publishes a new version every year for the sake of sales is another... on a subject that is essentially unchanging.
Time was you could take your 200$ book, and if you bothered to take care of it, you could sell it used, and make a portion of your money back. How are you going to do that with an e-version on your iPad?
Anyway the whole thing is just a con game.
I remember watching ST:TNG and got to say, those iPads seem mighty familiar..... but it is ok, as long as they come out with a tricorder pretty quickly.
Books are a thing of the past, mags are too, newspapers too...why waste the trees when we have digital media now?
Buy a Kindle.
You are correct that many printers deployed in schools are misconfigured not to do any authentication, authorization, or accounting. That doesn't mean they must remain so.
iPad is easier to say than a Samsung Evo Touch G1 Plus Z.
Which is about as long as "Apple iPod touch fourth generation". If you compare just the product name, not the company name or the generation, you get "Eee Pad" to "iPad".
Recent studies have shown that students retain more subject matter and "connect more dots" using physical books versus an electronic copy. This fact relates to the lizard/monkey legacy brain sub-unit that gets jazzed with 3-D texture. Until there is immersive virtual reality stick to a physical book for the heavy lifting and mark it up.
Some historic examples: Frisbee, Hackey Sack, Kleenex, Sawzall, Rolodex, Rollerblade, etc...
The product may change, but the ignorance of the general population remains.
"'The price of the iPad pays for itself after a single semester,' Petit said" No it doesn't - the iPad pays for itself &c. The price doesn't pay for anything - you pay the price for the iPad. This kind of sloppy thinking seems universal now, even among teachers.
It amazes me how people fall for the 'text books should/could be cheap on a tablet' lie.
Sure, electronic distribution and the elimination of paper, printing, storage, shipping, etc. should/could make textbooks a lot cheaper. But, people can't seem to remember that greed trumps logic EVERY single time. Once the tablet format is cemented as the way for text books going forward, people will be "surprised" by the fact that the new electronic text books cost nearly the same as the old paper text books. Profit! Oh, and you sell millions of tablet to boot! PROFIT!
Meanwhile, how has learning been improved? Yea. That's what I knew all along.
Why is a kid "gaming" over 4 HOURS every day?
Because geometry textbooks have 3D rotatable illustrations that use the gaming graphics API, and the textbook's publisher neglected to put in a user-selectable fallback to the old standby of front, side, top, and perspective.