Posted on 01/20/2011 10:09:29 AM PST by Academiadotorg
Forget America’s spending crisis. Ignore America’s education crisis. The latest teaching tool to show up in America’s classrooms is the Apple iPad, a product that many educators seem to view as the magic potion that will ignite a lifetime of learning for our nation’s students. At Roslyn High School on Long Island where the first 47 iPads were handed out to students several weeks ago, the school district apparently aims to provide iPads to all 1,100 students, according to the New York Times.
“It allows us to extend the classroom beyond these four walls,” noted English teach Larry Reiff, who “posts all his course materials online.”
More and more schools are embracing this new technology as “the latest tool to teach Kafka in multimedia, history through ‘Jeopardy’-like games, and math with step-by-step animation of complex problems.”
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
People are stupid.
First thing you need are good people who can teach and have something worth learning.
You could have kids sitting on the floor with nothing if the teacher is good enough.
That was a bust then, and this will be a bust now. Just a waste of $600 per student that could be better spent on textbooks and computer labs.
“IPad teaching tools – er – toys have even caught on in a Scottsdale, AZ kindergarten where the principal noted that “of all the devices out there, the iPad has the most star power with kids.””
I remember when teachers thought putting an Nintendo would help with education too! LOL!
Oh well! I guess these kids will make great mailroom workers arguing over who has the coolest apps, at the company owned by that Indian kid that went to school outdoors and learned calculus from instructions written on a chalkboard.
Assuming we want to give students technology to aid them in learing, iPads are far inferior choices to laptops.
Laptops are cheaper, are far better for academic purposes and resemble the devices the students will use in the workplace when they grow up.
iPads (and all current pads, slates, tabs, etc.)are cool toys with some academic value, but laptops are far more practical.
Yes but if they aren’t being taught anything, it makes no difference.
Disagree to an extent
When the KG, 1st and 2nd grade level children of today enter the workforce in 20 years, laptops will have been phased out.
People will have essentially some sort of mobile device and a docking station. Odds are most things will be streamed as hard drives dissappear as well
Our district just raised a bond with the promise that the money would keep local grade schools open.
Months after the bond increase, they announce our grade school will be closed because of lack of money.
My oldest child comes home last week telling me that the school will be giving free iPads to the students next year.
Not really an iPad issue but I’m very frustrated.
I don’t think the current “pad/slate” configuration will ever be the standard for business. Maybe at the cash register of the fast food restuarant, but not for creating business documents, manipulating data, and that sort of thing.
The reason is that the input on them stinks. A flat pad with a on screen keyboard is an ergonomic and productivity nightmare compared to a physical keyboard. Even voice input won’t solve this as I don’t see an office full of people talking out loud to their computers working.
I’m guessing in 10 or 20 years we wil be mainly using devices that are configured like very thin lap tops, with real keyboards (perhaps virtual, but not on the main display screen) but that also have touch screens. Sort of a hybrid between pads and laptops.
why are tax dollars going to buy apples? Apples are much more expensive. Terrible idea. Ipads are expensive and have limited utility.
Fast laptops, full computers, cost substantially less than ipads.
A ridiculous waste of money.
Accountants, engineers and others aren’t going to be tapping on a screen. Only something approximating a keyboard will do in those applications. My experiencing using the ipad to configure email addresses and facebook accounts for my relatives has conviced me of that.
The popular media would have us believe that it’s only a matter of months before we’re attaching our phones to projectors and giving detailed presentations with the things. Of course, everybody ends up pplaying “Angry Birds” on the damn things, 90% of the time. See the case cited in “US v Flying Cars”, et al ;)
BTW, my brother-in-law holds the patent for the iPhone and iPad interface. He created it a MIT as a musical interface in 1993. Whenever he brings it up, I remind him that he stole it from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”.
Hard Drives will only “disappear” in the sense that they’ll be replaced with Solid State Drives, because nobody trusts Comcast with their illegal music and goat porn collection.
“because nobody trusts Comcast with their illegal music and goat porn collection”
There you go hacking my account again ;-).
>>>BTW, my brother-in-law holds the patent for the iPhone and iPad interface. He created it a MIT as a musical interface in 1993. Whenever he brings it up, I remind him that he stole it from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”.<<<
Even on TNG and the other Star Trek series, you only occasionally see any data entry done (and always two thumb entry) on the PADDs that are all over the 24th Century. They mainly use them for reading, and sealing business deals with thumbscans, (and I’m sure, off camera, for playing Angry Birds).
When real data entry needs to be done, they sit down at one of those massive, and nicely slanted consoles. I think Lt. Commander data can type about 4 words per minute on a PADD and about 83,000 wpm on a console.
Hard Drives will only “disappear” in the sense that they’ll be replaced with Solid State Drives, because nobody trusts Comcast with their illegal music and goat porn collection.
LOL. I agree. And your point with accountants and engineers is well taken, you won’t be using excel 2020 on an IPAD.
However the laptop will start to be phased out over the next 20 years. Whatever iteration comes of it, well to be honest I am excited to see it.
But hey, I am just some dumbass 29 year old :)
Great to see the educrats blowing taxpayer’s money on toys for the boys and girls. Obviously they have to keep finding new ways to spend the current funding so they can ask for even more funding next year and complain they don’t have enough to teach the children. The majority of these kids will rejoice that they now can watch even better you-tube vids while facebooking their friends as the teacher drones on.
We have a generation of video-driven stimulus-overridden kids that can’t spend five minutes focusing on a thought problem and working it out. The IPADS will make perfect babysitters, thus relieving the teachers from trying to keep them entertained 24/7.
Yeah, well, I admit to having been overoptimistic about voice input for over a decade - but IMHO the brain-verbal interface is too inherent in the human person to not become the ultimate standard computer input.The privacy concern is realistic, but I assume that it can be overcome with a sort of mask to obscure the lip motion and muffle the sound of the user's voice, without obscuring the face of the user objectionably. In any event, did you ever think that you become as accustomed as you are to seeing/hearing people walking down the street seemingly talking to themselves while using cell phones?
But the voice recognition software is still not up to the task - yet. I assume that another order of magnitude Moore's Law increase in processing power will get it done. And/or the use of the GPU or a specialized voice processing chip will do it. They used to talk about "user friendly" computers - but in a world where the bleeding edge is a computer array which can compete in a "Jeopardy!" match, it might indeed be possible to make a computer which would start to seem like a friend. C3PO, anyone?
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