South Africa Begins Ambitious Tablets In Schools Pilot Project

An anonymous reader writes "Guateng province — which is home to Johannesburg and Pretoria and is the richest state in sub-Saharan Africa — has just kicked off a pilot project to replace textbooks with tablets in seven government schools. If successful, the project will be extended to all 44 000 schools in the area. It's all been put together in a hurry — the local minister for education announced it in a media interview less than a year ago and details have never been made fully public, but he's hoping it will be an end to 'Irish Coffee' education in which rich white students float to the top." From the article: The classroom of the future being piloted is modelled on the system that’s been in use at Sunward Park High School in Boksburg for the two years. That former “model C” was the first state school in South Africa to go textbook free, and has pioneered the use of tablets in public education here. ... As with Sunward Park, the schools in this new pilot will be using a centralised portal developed by Bramley’s MIB Software for managing tablets and aggregating educational content into a single portal. MIB’s backend pulls in CAPS aligned digital textbooks from the likes of Via Afrika as well as extra resources from around the web. Content from Wikipedia, the BBC, the complete works of Shakespeare and Khan Academy is all cached locally for teachers to reference during lessons and pupils to use for self-directed study and research.

Comments

everytime this is tired

[ganjadude]

it fails. Why do we keep throwing tech at a non tech problem just for the sake of throwing tech at it? Cali is in the process of taking back all the tablets they passed out after major issues. Sometimes real paper books are the answer.

Re:everytime this is tired

[tom229]

California tried to give everyone iPads: very expensive multi-purpose tablets. It was a terrible decision.

Something like this could work but the device would have to be specially designed for the purpose. Something with an e-ink display would be ideal.

Re:everytime this is tired

[Anonymous Coward]

Because tech solutions are pork barrel and non-tech solutions (ex. hiring teachers) are not.

Re:everytime this is tired

[TWX]

It fails in part because the textbook creators are so wrapped up in protecting their intellectual property that using the device to pull up the textbook becomes a nightmare. the only way this can work is for the textbook to be pulled down to the device, like any other e-book, and accessed without any kind of network or wirless connectivity to bounce 'rights' checking against. You're right that these being multipurpose devices usually hurts too, as students can easily procrastinate their actual work by finding an inordinate amount of things to entertain themselves with.

We need real devices that are as durable as the ficticious PADD from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Basically the tablet-equivalent of a Panasonic Toughbook, with software specifically tailored to the needs of students. I'm thinking it should be two devices essentially hinged in the middle, like a traditional book cover, so that more content can be displayed or homework can be done on one side with the content displayed on the other. But that's just me.

Oh, and that requires proper software to be written for it too, and requires those textbook creators to cooperate.

Re:everytime this is tired

[Trailer Trash]

What we need is to develop open text books with a creative commons license. Doesn't work for everything - sure - but let's face it: math, algebra, works of Shakespeare, these are things that never change (and Shakespeare isn't copyrighted, anyway, although I'm sure you can find copies of the works that are "protected"). Basic science changes slowly - talking about stuff that kids learn in school here. Really, there's no reason anybody should be making money from elementary school textbooks at this point in history.

Re:everytime this is tired

[meustrus]

It fails in part because the textbook creators are so wrapped up in protecting their intellectual property that using the device to pull up the textbook becomes a nightmare.

Which is why it's great to see the tablets are filled with so much locally-cached free content.

Re:everytime this is tired

[Tx]

Just because it's been done wrong in the past doesn't mean it can't be done right in the future, although it doesn't bode well that this particular project appears to have been rushed, and significant questions not answered in detail. However there's nothing wrong with the theory; access to textbooks, collaboration and communications tools, monitoring of students progress while they perform activities (and as the article mentions, monitoring of teachers as well), the list of potential benefits to using tablets or laptops as a central educational tool is long. At some point, someone is going to get it right and actually realize many of the potential advantages.

Re:everytime this is tired

[NotDrWho]

Why do we keep throwing tech at a non tech problem just for the sake of throwing tech at it?

In my experience, this sort of thing usually has a lot to do with bribes paid to the school board and/or administrators by some contractor. And by "bribe," I mean whatever euphemism they're going by in any given situation: "Campaign Contribution", "Educational Conference" (in an expensive tropical resort), "Donation", "Gift", etc.

Re:everytime this is tired

[ColdWetDog]

We need real devices that are as durable as the ficticious PADD from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

And while we're at it, let's get the Warp Drive and the Transporter on line. That ought to improve things.

Re:everytime this is tired

[itzly]

Or we just keep paper books. Paper books have done a fine job for the last century helping to educate the best and brightest minds.

Re:everytime this is tired

[ShanghaiBill]

California tried to give everyone iPads: very expensive multi-purpose tablets.

I live in California, and my kids go to school here. California absolutely did not try to "give everyone iPads".

Re:everytime this is tired

[bluefoxlucid]

The correct technology for education is thousands of years old.

The ancients--the greeks and romans--didn't use a lot of writing. It was expensive and bulky. Wax tablets were huge, papyrus was costly. You'd hardly have books; if you saw a scroll or codex, it was probably for the first and last time. If you saw a codex twice, there wasn't an index to reference; you had to know what was in it, flip to a random page, and say, "Oh, no, the material I need to reference is before this", then flip backwards.

Mnemonics techniques were a primary driver in the lives of the ancients. Their lives revolved around what they knew; what they knew revolved around what they could remember. They didn't have the luxury of remembering a topic existed and throwing a keyword into Google; they didn't even have the luxury of expansive libraries in every town. Libraries were places of pilgrimage: There may be one or two copies of a book in the world, and so you had to go to the library of a certain town to read it. The first and most important things the ancients learned was how to remember.

In modern days, we don't even teach study techniques. SQ3R and SQW3R, the most basic techniques, are powerful; so powerful that modern methods are just SQ3R and SQW3R with different names (PQRST is Preview, Question, Read, Self-recite, Test rather than Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review). Teachers incite small students to "take notes" and "study", without explaining what "study" entails; worse, the entire point of studying is to remember, yet memorization is considered a bad strategy in learning. The focus on "understanding" without first "knowing" knee-caps any effort to bring mnemonics into schools.

We're hell-bent on new technology and new methods, on progressive movements over regressive. While Japan turns second-grade students into human calculators with the Soroban--an ancient mechanical computer known as an abacus--the rest of the world feeds us blunt paper mathematics and teaches us to use TI-83 calculators and Excel spreadsheets as soon as we get to Algebra. Educators have not been so bold as to scrub all visual imagery from early education; yet they are resistant to using visualization, song, and rhyme beyond the most early years, and absolutely refuse to teach students to bolster their own memories with such techniques. The ways of the past are thrown by the wayside in favor of new ideas.

What poor, starving children most require, in third-world countries and in the ghettos of developed nations alike, is an education system; we cannot solve the education problem by throwing laptops at bush Africa or gangland America. We don't need specialized education systems, tools, and techniques for the poor or the retarded, either; those highly-beneficial methods which allow even the brain damaged to learn often make learning easier for any student. When such methods are found beneficial in both, the subgroup which is incapable--by class status or by mental development--of learning in the broader classroom atmosphere shrinks, and some of the disadvantaged can place directly in general population; this works wonders for social and psychological development. The last thing they need is expensive hardware and software pretending to help.

I really want to run on the education platform one day.

Re:everytime this is tired

[Archangel Michael]

THIS ^^^^^^

I'll extend that with enough support, there only needs to be ONE textbook for all jurisdictions.

Create a single textbook with all the variations needed for every district/board of education. Configure the "Textbook" software to download the entire book (all versions) and have a management feature that checks off which version to display, and the software formats the book accordingly.

This way, you could have a "progressive left" version and a "Bible Belt" version of the same book, each tailored to suit each constituency, but otherwise is the same information. The end result is that we'll see who the wackos are on both sides, and trend towards the sane balance.

Re:everytime this is tired

[Solandri]

It was the Los Angeles Unified School District which tried to give everyone iPads, not California. And the program was halted before it was completely rolled out because of problems with kids hacking the restrictive software controls (if you can call deleting the user and restarting the device "hacking").

Also, what the LAUSD tried was different from what South Africa is trying. LAUSD was trying to incorporate tablets into the teaching program. There is very little evidence that this has any beneficial effect on how well students learn the material.

It sounds like SA is trying to use tablets to replace textbooks. That actually has merit from the standpoint of portability and accessibility to a wide range of educational material in a tiny amount of space. I would question how cost-effective it is though. A typical textbook costs about $100 and will last 10-20 years. If a typical tablet costs $500, it would have to last 50-100 years to be as cost-effective as books. If you're able to get textbooks which aren't controlled by the textbook publishing cartel, the price drops to a few dollars, and the tablet would have to last thousands of years to be as cost-effective. (OTOH if they're able to use a cheap $50 e-ink reader, then it could succeed.)

Re:everytime this is tired

[rogoshen1]

sad that an AC says this; because it's basically all that needs to be said. =/

Re:everytime this is tired

[meta-monkey]

You could mix and match chapters. A teacher could roll his own text book, the same way we can roll our own Linux distros. I'm pretty sure this is already a thing. If you can collaboratively spawn Wikipedia and Linux, I don't see why collaboratively creating a third grade math book should be that difficult.

Of course, that would only work in a sane country. In the United States, we make our teachers get Master's degrees, whereby they pay thoughtful attention to different learning methods and how to make things click for different students who exhibit different types of understanding. Then we take those freshly minted grads, passionate about reaching young minds, and hand them Common Core and every other state-mandated curriculum and force them to recite from the book like robots. Any deviation from the script is punished, your students are data points measured entirely by what they score on standardized tests. All the while we pay you a pittance, cut your benefits, expand your hours and generally crush anything like passion or a soul you ever had until you burn out and quit.

But hey, the administrators are making six figs, and all your students are gonna get a iPads, so, score!

Re:everytime this is tired

[meta-monkey]

I'd vote for you. I remember when you taught me a better method for finding cube roots.

Re:everytime this is tired

[bluefoxlucid]

I don't remember that. http://www.wikihow.com/Calcula... ?

Re:everytime this is tired

[Trailer Trash]

Note that I said nothing of the books being on a tablet. While that's certainly possible it would be nice to see text books distributed solely for the cost of printing and distribution.

Re:everytime this is tired

[meta-monkey]

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Re:everytime this is tired

[dj245]

Of course, that would only work in a sane country. In the United States, we make our teachers get Master's degrees, whereby they pay thoughtful attention to different learning methods and how to make things click for different students who exhibit different types of understanding. Then we take those freshly minted grads, passionate about reaching young minds, and hand them Common Core and every other state-mandated curriculum and force them to recite from the book like robots.

We want kids to have quality educations. Implementing standards and then following them is the cornerstone of even the most basic quality program. Having a good quality control system doesn't guarantee the result will be good. However, NOT having a standardized system of maintaining quality standards means that it is a lot more difficult to have a consistent good result.

There are very few white-collar professions where a person uses their entire 4-year university experiences every single day. As an engineer, I certainly don't need differential equations, integrals, or high-level geometry often, if at all. In fact, a majority of what I learned is of little practical use in my career. It was taught so that I might "be aware" of the topic in case I ever came across something like it. I'm not sure why you think Teachers would be any different. A 4-year degree is not job training. It's an education. There is, and should be, a difference.

Re:everytime this is tired

[unixisc]

And the bizarre solutions they have - Wikipedia, BBC, Khan Academy... What makes them think that these would provide a well rounded education?

Re:everytime this is tired

[Archangel Michael]

I don't see why collaboratively creating a third grade math book should be that difficult.

Politics.

Re:everytime this is tired

[Archangel Michael]

The problem isn't standards. The problem is "One size fits all" standards. There are no gradations or levels of competency, just more or less "pass/fail" series of hoops.

The fact is the industrial method of teaching has to be changed, and we are starting to see those changes. But it is going to require a whole new type of teacher, and most teachers are not up to the task.

Re:everytime this is tired

[Gliscameria]

Maybe "textbooks" are an inferior way to learn? What's the point of having students just read stuff of a tablet - the learning should be interactive. This is what current textbook makers are worried about, and the ones that survive will embrace it. Even, what... 10 years ago we had a fantastic formal logic textbook that came with a CD that you more or less used for everything. It had all the lessons, tests, problems and even an online companion to submit your work. If they had something in the kin of codeacademy for physics/chemistry/math/grammer I think that would be a no brainer - I don't know this would work with history or heavy memorization disciplines.

Re:everytime this is tired

[unixisc]

I dunno exactly about South African education, but typical textbooks don't 'last' 10-20 years, nor is their cost $100 outside the US or Europe. A typical textbook lasts the year or 2 for that grade, after that, they get replaced by new ones. Yeah, the kid can go back to his old class textbooks and read that, but how many actually do?

I like the idea of tablets replacing textbooks. Let's decouple 2 things:

1. 1. The cost of textbooks, and how they are distributed
2. 2. The medium in which textbooks are distributed

Addressing the second issue first, it is a good idea to have configurable textbooks depending on the grade the student is in. Let's say there is a universal textbook in the cloud, and of that, an appropriate subset is to be downloaded onto the tablet/laptop and that's what the student studies from. Aside from the physical issue of slaughtered trees and having several books, this helps customize the contents of the pad to keep just what the student needs at any point of time. If these are issued by school districts, as opposed to being owned by the students or paid for by parents, then it makes sense for school IT admins to have locked down versions that restrict what a student can or can't download. If it's owned by the students, then the sole role of the school IT admins would be to ensure that the students have what they need for the school year. However, having an iPad shouldn't eliminate things like writing, or physically working out math problems, like calculations of height of a tree based on its shadows.

The first issue - cost of textbooks - I agree that there should be a standardized textbook for at least STEM and Geography. Maybe the cost of developing all that could be amortized over a population over time, until it ramps down to a nominal fee. I do think subjects like History would be thornier things to have, since those tend to be subjective based on the opinions of people teaching those. And I know I'll be hated for saying this, but screw the arts. Having a Masters in English Literature or Gender studies isn't gonna land you a job outside legal, so let's not have that in the curriculum. Stick to STEM and the commerce subjects - Economics, Accountancy, Commerce, and stay out of esoteric subjects.

Bottom line - tablets/computers do have a role in school, and can be the new medium of textbooks. However, making students overly dependent on them would make them incapable of independent calculations or analysis. Such as knowing how much change you need to give a customer for a $7.64 meal when he pays you $12.64 w/o using a calculator.

Re:everytime this is tired

[Cyberax]

Romans also had stagnated in a pre-industrial world. Hardly a role model.

Re:everytime this is tired

[laurencetux]

what i could see is a truly epicly massive Education DataCore where STEM stuff could have the Standard Textbooks stored and then have the top say half dozen* or so "alt" textbooks for the rest of the subjects (including The Arts).

And even with STEM stuff how do you decide to teach Electronics? Conventional or Electron Flow?? hint DO BOTH wanna see WW2 from the German side?? then access that file and check it out.

the only locks i would want to see is keeping students from subjects that are not "age appropriate" (as locally defined).

the data and the test/quiz/homework bits should be kept separate (this btw is 85% of how textbooks get changed from school year to school year).

Re:everytime this is tired

[laurencetux]

" I find the use of 'Irish Coffee' to be racist."

the problem is its a dramatic visual of the problem

White on top brown below and fueled by booze

Re:everytime this is tired

[rtb61]

The interactive aspect is exactly why tablets fail in education. The keyboard is essential in ensuring student input and creativity is the focus and not just becoming a mindless consumer of content. The keyboard also protects the screen and acts as a more effective stand. Now all that is needed is a shift to alphabetic keyboards for the new generation coming out.

Re:everytime this is tired

[TheSync]

The LA Unified School District is spending over $1 billion to give all students (650,000) iPads.

Note that Beverly Hills School District is independent, and not part of LAUSD...

Re:everytime this is tired

[complete loony]

This is South Africa, where they already have open licensed text books covering a significant fraction of their school curriculum.

Re:everytime this is tired

[shugah]

My kids elementary school in Vancouver did this. They replaced an entire computer lab of PCs with a bunch of iPads. Half the iPads were stolen within 6 months, but worse than that - they were useless. A tablet is good for consuming content, not creating content. If you want kids to learn to do something more useful with a computer than watch YouTube videos, teach them to work on real computers.

Re:everytime this is tired

[TWX]

Alphabetic keyboard?

Last time I looked at a keyboard, all letters of the alphabet were represented.

Re:everytime this is tired

[bluefoxlucid]

So will America.

Tablets. Yup. That's what Ed is missing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you all know the famous story?

Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier whilst he finger-painted on a Syracusian tablet running Android 0.0000001 Olive Tree.

Re:Tablets. Yup. That's what Ed is missing...

[meta-monkey]

Android 0.0000001 Olive Tree

Man, they had really shitty desserts back then.

Not a Bad Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Tech in school is generally a bad idea, I feel (children don't need tablets to learn) but this is an example of it done right. South African schools can use those tablets to build a massive library of free reference resources and public domain literature and share that with the students. It's more a pop-up computer lab, if anything.

This is the solution how?

[DumbSwede]

And how would this in any way address the “Irish Coffee” problem?

If anything I could see this exacerbating the problem. Rich white kids are probably more computer literate than poorer black peers – going full on digital will amplify the difference.

Do it if it improves education in general (a big if). I know that tablets and online education are the future, but one that never quite arrives in the correct form. Content is key whether it is online or in a book. Handing out hardware doesn’t solve the content problem.

Re:This is the solution how?

[meustrus]

South Africa is not America, and computer illiteracy won't stop poor black kids from learning how to use what sounds like basically an e-reader. And in this case, it sounds like they got the content right:

Content from Wikipedia, the BBC, the complete works of Shakespeare and Khan Academy is all cached locally for teachers to reference during lessons and pupils to use for self-directed study and research.

Re:This is the solution how?

[Tx]

Content is key whether it is online or in a book. Handing out hardware doesn’t solve the content problem.

Good thing they're not just handing out hardware then.

FTA: "As with Sunward Park, the schools in this new pilot will be using a centralised portal developed by Bramley’s MIB Software for managing tablets and aggregating educational content into a single portal. MIB’s backend pulls in CAPS aligned digital textbooks from the likes of Via Afrika as well as extra resources from around the web."

Cool! Just one thing missing...

[dskoll]

... all that's needed is for Eskom (the South African electrical utility) to actually supply reliable power to recharge all those tablets!

well, i failed. i actually read the article

[turkeydance]

these tablets are traveling Time Clocks for Teachers.

Good Luck

[Anonymous Coward]

he's hoping it will be an end to 'Irish Coffee' education in which rich white students float to the top

Rich students have so many advantages over poor students that nothing you can do in the schools is ever going to fully compensate for it - not that they shouldn't try. From infancy wealthier kids are (on average of course) spoken to more, with a more varied and stimulating vocabulary, and with more encouraging words. They are generally exposed to more stimulating activities, and read to more regularly. By the time they hit Pre-K they already have significant cognitive advantages. The achievement gap needs to be tackled at its root causes if you really want to try to close it.

Seriously...

[altrent2003]

Do they expect to fix education problems by throwing more tablets at it?

Use an e-reader rather than a tablet

[davidwr]

If it were me though, I'd go the way the military does for some of its members: A "sealed" (no radio or USB, with tamper-evident seals on the case) e-reader pre-loaded with the textbooks the student will need. This will keep theft way down.

Make it rugged enough to handle 5-10 years of careless use by students, but cheap enough so if it gets lost or really banged up it can be written off.

Use "e-paper" so there is no battery use until the student turns the page and so they can read it right before bedtime without causing sleep issues. Throw in a speaker for audio-books/text-to-speech/audio-translations/etc.

At the end of the year, unscrew the cases, replace or refresh the data chip with next year's books, and apply new tamper-evident seals.

In large quantities, a typical-tablet-sized device could be made for well under $50 before you add in the licensing fees for the books and the licensing fees for any applicable patents (sigh). Amortize that over 5 years and you are talking $10/year/student before paying off patent-holders, licensing the books, and paying the wages of the employees who refresh the machine each year.

To placate copyright owners (an unfortunate necessity), the "data chip" should be unreadable (i.e. encrypted) unless it is plugged into the same device as it was plugged into when it was first inserted or when it was last refreshed.

An optional enhancement to this would be a USB or similar port that ONLY talked to devices who presented a token cryptographically signed by the school that issued them. This would allow for things like e-library books, teacher-prepared books or presentations to be taken home (without color though, e-paper is B/W only as far as I know), and a less-labor-intensive end-of-year-refresh process.

If the school wants to issue tablets for the purposes of computation or Internet access, they should either be:
* In-school-use only
* leased to students who don't have a home computer or home Internet, and/or
* "leased" at no cost to students who don't have a home computer or home internet and can't afford one

Re:Use an e-reader rather than a tablet

[laurencetux]

something that might cut down on theft of these tablets (since you are going custom anyway)

1 make it obvious that this is a childs ELearning device by cooking the rom and using a nonstandard casing

2 rig it so that if you open the unit it fuses something important (main power lines or the CPU data lines) on the motherboard (dead man circuit with glue on the back??)

3 make these things as cheap and low power as possible (cheap enough that OS upgrades are not worth it)

4 the only 2 jacks on the device should be the USB power connector and a Headphone jack (memory chip if removeable should be in the battery compartment)

also shouldn't SOLAR power be useable in this case?? (even if you have say a half dozen kids using a single powerunit)

Daylight viewable display?

[WillAdams]

Or are the kids only going to be using these indoors?

Is anyone doing a true daylight viewable display, like the transflective LCDs which were used on Fujitsu tablets?

I need to replace my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121, and there simply don't seem to be any real options (need a Wacom stylus as well).

XC Collaboration for Microsoft Windows®

[lippydude]

"The XC Collaboration AddOn Software is a 3rd party product and not a default part of your installation of SMART Notebook Platform. In order to use this AddOn, you first have to download, install and activate it."

Ref: LAUSD

[Virtucon]

Ask how it went in LA. Also, does it bother anybody that "Khan Academy" popped up again?

"Put together in a hurry" Great.

[Radical Moderate]

I work in educational IT, and that generally means some executive wants something shiny with no clue as to the resources needed to make it work. Hilarity ensues.