Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates Says Tablets Aren't Much Help In Education
An anonymous reader writes "In a detailed interview on the future of education, Bill Gates was surprisingly down on tablets in education — considering that Microsoft just released Surface. He said low-cost PCs are the thing for students, and he dismissed the idea that simply giving gadgets to students will bring change. Quoting: 'Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input. Students aren't there just to read things. They're actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it's going to be more in the PC realm—it's going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive.'"
I completely agree with his assessment
Preface: I am an apple fanboy ... but ...
iBook for text books has the best damn demo I've ever seen as to why exactly tablets would make freaking AWESOME textbook replacements.
http://www.apple.com/education/
The current flash on that page displays a demo of someone using a textbook. THAT is HOW text books SHOULD BE DONE. It doesn't have to be iBooks or an iPad, but that general concept is freaking awesome and just goes to show how Billy and the Gates foundation in general aren't about helping the world so much as finding another way to rip it off.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I work education IT, and every leadership conference in the last few years have centred around iPads and mobile computing. There are always multiple sessions about how they allow for innovative learning, classroom-less experiences, interactive learning, and a bunch of fancy buzzwords.
Aside from very few cases - autistic kids playing an iPad game show improvement in certain situations is a common example, I haven't seen anything I'd consider an improvement, especially anything that's iPad specific. We've seen many examples of student presentations made with the iPad camera, but they're exactly the same caliber as a regular presentation, or one recorded off any old recording device. They're new and shiny, so people want them. That's generally it.
Worst case, and in general, kids use the new stuff to fuck around. Give a class iPads and laptops, and I'll show you a class of kids watching youtube. At least with the iPad their not playing flash games all day.
We recently had one principal ask how we can support a class set of iPads. We asked what he wanted to use them for, and nobody could give us an answer. There were buzzwords - mobile learning, hands-on learning, etc., but nothing concrete on how they would help the children's education.
Finally I think very few teachers have the skillset required to utilize the new technology in any meaningful way. They don't fit properly with the tried and tested pen and paper methods, and teachers aren't either technologically capable, administratively capable, have the professional development available, or otherwise have the support of their educational system for any meaningful changes. Either they lack the skills, or they lack the support, or iPads just don't fit in an education system.
It's early tech, they're going to get thinner, lighter, they're going to accept touch and pen input,... couple that with the development on technologies like E-Ink and Foldable displays and in some 10 years they'll be ubiquitous, not just in education but pretty much everywhere.
More importantly the work in UX design that companies like Apple, Palm and Google have been doing has allowed users who are not entirely comfortable with the desktop paradign to stop thinking of these devices less as computers and more as standard household items, like TVs or VCRs.
That's what a stylus is for. You know, the input device missing from 99% of "tablets" these days. I had a Tablet PC all the way through college, and I used it for every class. Still have all of my notes, and still reference them in my PhD work, which is easy since they're completely digitized and search able. Can't do that with Pen and paper. Can't do that with iPad either.
Agreed. As a teacher of pre-tertiary Mathematics I am yet to see the benefit of so called one-to-one in my class, either tablet or laptop or pc. Maybe in a few years when I'm retired tech wil catch up (or teaching AND learning will change), but the technology of pen, paper and calculator cannot be beat. Actually what we are using now has stood the test of more than a few decades: pen paper slide rule, pen paper log tables, pen paper calculator - the calculator has changed but the basic tech of being able to transcribe and do you own working quickly, and easily flick back to some previous example or notes is where fully electronic technology loses out imo.