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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
..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
Cave paintings, unless we sort out our various resource crises.
If we do.. well, maybe we'll have smart paper as envisioned in The Diamond Age, or Virtual Retinal Display goggles ("phenomenoscopes", also in Diamond Age), or direct brain interface.
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 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.
You're too optimistic. I have multiple teachers in my family and I watch the news and kids get beaten all the time for losing less money for cheaper textbooks and library books and hats and mittens and such. Think about it, $80 is a lot of crack or malt liquor, the kid just lost your high money, you've got a fist and you remember the pains of going thru withdrawal last time, in some inferior subcultures that kid is in serious physical danger...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Oh good, Apple took a trick from Microsoft on indoctrinating the next generation.
I was amazed recently to see my 15 month old niece playing with an iPad. As I watched my first thought was how lucky she is to be creating those connections in her brain at such a young age, but then I realized we are raising a generation of newly-born children who may very well reach a significant age (say, 8, when I started using computers [in 1980]) before they ever need to touch a real keyboard. Their expectations of a user interface will far exceed ours, and at the same time they may be more a prisoner to the technology because - forget about command line - they'll barely know how to use access a file system using a GUI and a mouse.
At least they will be inside on their computers and not trampling all over my lawn.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
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".
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.
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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Well then, I'm just waiting until the children have to deal with this.
Would this not help open the industry to open source book projects?
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.
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?
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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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
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.
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 :)
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."
Why not a kindle or nook? Because they suck at reading PDFs. Yes, they can technically show a PDF on the screen. But unless that PDF is formatted for a small screen size, the experience is going to be awful. The more expensive devices (iPad, color-screen-glossy nook-kindle-whatever, $400+) have solved this with better multi-touch zoom and pan options, but then you're going to pick the iPad if they're in the same price arena. Just go on youtube and look for "kindle touch pdf reading" and you'll see how awful it is.
For someone trying to study, you need the ability to quickly browse material and annotate, and the cheaper devices don't offer this in any reasonable way.
So why not a netbook? Sure, a netbook can display PDFs quickly. But if your input is limited to mouse and keyboard, you're ten times less likely to annotate. Which is the function you would normally perform on a real paper textbook. So the iPad and other stylus-bearing devices come out on top, due to their size, advanced software, and input methods.
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
controls the world.
/Bad Idea.
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.