No More Pencils, No More Books - Just a Tablet PC
Come this fall, every sixth grader at Sacramento Country Day School in California will receive an iPad -at not cost to their parents.
"There are hundreds and hundreds of educational apps for the iPad," he said. "We found that there are so many [that] we felt there was a tremendous opportunity to bridge the gap between the traditional pen and paper and textbook and laptop," Stephen Repsher, headmaster of the private school told ABCNews.com.
Considering the state's parlous financial system, it may take a bit longer before most public schools in the state follow suit. But the adoption of the tablet may still well prove to be a harbinger.
It's just another tool in the quiver of tools that educators use to help children understand and learn and develop critical skills as they move toward college," according to Repsher.
Another private school cited by ABC, St. Catherine's High School in Racine, Wisc., says it intends to give iPads to its sixth and seventh graders. The bigger goal: By 2012, the plan is to equip all students and teachers in grades 6-12 with iPads instead of textbooks. For anyone who remembers going through school lugging around dog-eared - and bulky - textbooks - that sounds like an appealing alternative. And if that argument resonates with more educators around the nation, Apple, which early in its history carved out a niche in the education market, stands to be the beneficiary.
But the argument that schools should be early adoptors isn't uniform.
Racine's local paper, the Journal-Times, published an editorial cautioning that being on the cutting edge" may leave one "bleeding."
There is much unknown about using the iPad in education, such as how rugged they will be in everyday use, whether competitors will offer the same or better features for a lower cost, and whether students will actually find them useful. Princeton University students who received Amazon's Kindle electronic book readers in a pilot project, for example, disliked them because they were too slow and had limited features. Most important, teachers need to figure out exactly how iPads can best be used. It seems that substantial investments in computers have not made a drastic difference in standardized test scores, nor should they be viewed as a complete educational solution.
Certainly children need to know how to handle computers and should have access to some at some times, but more crucially they need the ability to think logically, write clearly and grasp the fundamentals of mathematics so they can evaluate information from the vast bathroom wall of the Internet, can understand and formulate complex arguments, and can understand what spreadsheet formula is appropriate.