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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
Yeah. His prognostications have been pretty much a joke. People should go back and read "The Road Ahead" and see how good that was.
I've wondered the same thing as I've seen ads that pretty much every major school district in my area are touting iPads for every student next year. I love new shiny tech, but I feel like 'get of my lawn' curmudgeon being skeptical on the benefits of outfitting every kid with a free-to-use tablet. It's especially frustrating when in the same article about the local district offering iPads to everyone (via a technology-specific millage) that same district is still 500k in the hole after cutting $1 million by way of faculty layoffs.
I haven't looked, but is there research showing that giving every student an iPad improves something?
Bill Gates has been at the forefront of preventing innovation in computing and holding on to old ways of doing things for decades. It stands to reason the he wouldn't be able to understand that computing is possible without a keyboard.
That said, he is right that the equipment and the curriculum must work together. You can't just buy a fancy new toy and expect it to change much. But in the case of tablets, they could easily replace textbooks and printed materials with more interactive alternatives, and of course there'd be no benefit in having a keyboard if that's what you're trying to accomplish.
Oh, really? Last I heard, nobody had actually been able to use one for even 15 seconds. Why, even MS executives on stage were not able to demo one for 15 seconds without it locking up.
Seriously though dumbass, learn the difference between "pre-announce" and "release".
Just having access to books when you need it is reason enough to have tablets or netbooks in schools. Instead of talking about Adam Smith, you can just read his books. Instead of handing out 20-30 thousand page books to all the pupils in the class, all you need is have them download a 1-2MB file. Fully searchable. And that's just one example.
A single tablet can fit all books you'll ever need in school instantly accessible at any time.
Even if tablets do absolutely nothing in the way of improving education in any other way, that's reason enough.
10 WAYS THE IPAD WILL FOREVER CHANGE EDUCATION
Every single one of those points, except the point that the iPad has limited multitasking capabilities (and that's somehow a good thing in the classroom), applies to laptops.
SD Unified Purchases 26,000 iPads For District Students:
At 30 kids a classroom, they could have afforded to give 866 teachers a much needed $17k raise with the money they spent on this technology push that will end up abandoned in 3 years. Better yet they could hire new teachers. Watch as those iPads become outdated and can't run the latest OS with the latest and greatest educational apps in 3 years time. Oh, and that's another $260,000 in a couple years to replace the batteries as they go. How often do you have to replace the batteries on a textbook?