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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?
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..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
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.
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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.
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?
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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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.
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