iPads in education: Not actually evil, but pretty close Education in the USA has long been a stronghold of Apple, the venerable Apple II being cheap and tough enough to survive in that hostile environment, skool. But Apple’s gouging of UK consumers meant the prices were so high back in the day that it was worth flying to New York and paying air fares hotel and taxes to buy the …
For school environment I think e-book readers would be a much better fit. Firstly students can carry one device instaed of dozens of books. It's possible to make notes on books so surely they can be modified to allow basic text input and files and maybe email. No fancy apps that can distract students. A lot cheaper than tablets, and I think e-ink screens are more robust than LCD panels.
Well, apart from the fact that all ebook reading apps on the market today are woefully inadequate for text books. They are designed for linear books like novels that you read from page 1 to 500. For books you browse, consult, study with, lookup as reference and so on, the required functionality does not exist. Annotate is the best you can do but good luck for doing something, anything with your annotations.
There was a good article on El Reg about Kindles in universities:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/26/kindle_flunks_out_of_college/
"ebook reading apps on the market today are woefully inadequate for text books"
Probably true but I don't think it would take too much to get eiter the readers or the ebooks up to scratch. Most of that functionality is indexing, text-based search, handwriting recognition, note-adding etc, not a big deal technically.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/apple-scratch-app/
Such a shame as tablets generally and iThings in particular are popular with students.
I'm still hoping for a wacom stylus based tablet with handwriting recognition including maths -> LaTeX and automatic shape recognition before I retire. Oh, plus an embedded version of SAGE Maths (the German Linux based Maths engine, not accounting software), but iPython would do.
http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2010/12/03/fantastick-intro/
An iPad makes a nice music software controller....
And it's the lack of a complete educational ecosystem that makes it anything but a Dynabook. And no, merely having text books available to buy from the iBooks store doesn't really cut it. Of course, this isn't just an Apple iPad problem; Android is similarly weak in this area. Perhaps as HTML 5 matures, the web will play a greater role (in which case, all tablets and notebooks would become more Dynabook-like).
Seems to be about to plunge down the iPad slope, the bids offered from various suppliers were less than awe inspiring. The PC offerings were decidedly ordinary, HP netbook, fine for middle schoolers but a little diminutive when handled by a 200lb linebacker. The iPads will be replacing the awful MacBooks which although awful weree actually almost fit for purpose which the iPads are not. As someone said further up the discussion they would be better getting a decent ebook reader.
Check him out - as the only educator in the UK (that I'm aware of) actually working with tablets on a fundamental basis, he is worth listening to because he can talk from real world experience...
Gosh, it can't be because he actually uses iPads, can it? Surely El Reg wouldn't be so bigoted...?
Thanks for that name Fraser Speirs. His blog has this post on it
http://speirs.org/blog/2013/3/4/beyond-consumption-vs-creation.html
In the post there is a chart showing a qualitative relationship between task complexity and duration for each kind of device [phone, tablet, PC]. Quite thought provoking that one.
Point 1: I'm not sure however that these regions on the complexity/duration plane he is defining are actually distinct. As an old man, I use mainly a laptop which suspends to RAM when the lid is closed. I can use that for quick hops onto wolframalpha or a google OR a sustained piece of writing. No context jump as I decide what device to use... and no limit if a simple thing turns complex
Point 2: the 'hard' limit on task complexity that Mr Speirs assumes with tablets is interesting. Perhaps that could be to do with the necessarily simplified UI that a tablet device has (ducks for cover on that one...)
I'm now going to have to cite The Register in my professional development log for this year...
For a few quid more you can equip them with laptops which can be used for virtually anything (art, comp sci etc) and for even more cash you can get toughbooks etc that can be run over by a tank and as an added bonus don't look cool so less nickable. If you really want to save money and stop them installing (without using wine etc) games stick on linux of some description.
Wait, not shiny, not sci-fi future cool. Never mind nothing to see here.....
Laptops as bloody silly as tablets more software but even more fragile(yes but have you seen the price of tough books), how about those students where, the dog ate my charger so I couldn't do my homework,the psycos(real educational term) that will eat/have sex with/push things into the ports/ chew them/sell them(got stolen on the bus,train Sir)/swap them/. Teachers that can hardly manage a projector, smartboard, mouse and remote control, teachers that grump and groan about setting home work on showmyhomework.com (slow crap don't do it) let alone creating suitable materials,collecting and marking online homework.
Oh look it the end of the year and the budget has run out, that broken tablet, PSU, docking station, charger, any other bloody thing, is going to have to wait for the next academic / financial year.
Then there is the training issues, Oh look a course to send our technicians on, "oh that's expensive - I know we will send a senior teacher and the network manager on it - that will do"
How about "Can't you just share one?, as Jimmy is new and it takes weeks to get one, as Emma has forgotten hers, no you bloody well can't they are single user devices.
I have yet to hear of a school (in the UK) successfully(not putting £500000 in every year) using Ipads (for more than the first three weeks), there is bugger all educational software for them. The only people who like them are the suppliers of wireless lans and iPads.
Oh! the curriculum has had another Govian turn we need new software(not yet available and too expensive)
Grumpy - perhaps but I've run out of energy rather than things to list that will go wrong.
http://snap.berkeley.edu/
SNAP! A version of Scratch that does actually work on an iPad. I've not used it enough to see if the dumbing down is a few steps too far, the first thing is that there's not much in terms of sprite support, but the flowcharts seem to work.
"I find it hard to believe that the life expectancy is as long as two years, since that’s about how long the average corporate laptop lasts when given to grownups."
a)just because a corp replaces things every 2 years, doesn't mean they only last 2 years.
b)You've not been in a school have you... they often have old PIIs chuntering away, struggling under all the 'security' software (that stops you changing the desktop wallpaper but happily lets you view hard porn), on which kids are supposed to learn about computers. Then the teachers might have 4-5 year old laptops.
The wife's school has some iPad 1 units that haven't broken yet.
For very young kids I think tablets are a great resource, you do not see 2-3 year olds able to use keyboard+mouse but they are very easily able to learn how to use an iPad (scarily so, almost - weird to see a kid who can't talk but knows how to find Cars in Video app).
Two years may be the average but the record time I know is 20 minutes from a manager being given a brand new, top end and very pricey laptop to it being a pile of useless junk. It had a docking station. The docking station had latches to hold the laptop firmly. Rather than undoing the latches to release the laptop, the manager (of the system programming group no less) decided levering it free with a big screwdriver must be the obvious and right thing to do.
A teacher friend said her school bought 5 ipads to teach pupils. It's not a well funded school so that was a lot of money for them. I was really annoyed they thought they *had* to buy an Apple branded tablet rather than one of many cheaper brands of Android tablets. They could have bought 10 Android tablets for the same money - that's twice as many children using them at once. Double the value for money. It's inevitable that kids will break some of them so it's better to have a cheaper device broken - cheaper to replace.
There is no disadvantage in buying Android. It's unbalanced and uninformed coverage in the mass media that always refers to ipads when talking about tablets that causes this, plus a bit of Apple snobbery out there too.
It's like schools who spend £20K on Macs to teach design when they could have bought twice as many PCs for the same money or just saved half the money. You get the same leading software on both platforms so it makes no difference to teaching or the children.
What's worse is the kids mindset is forced to think they *have* to buy a Mac at home if they want to design at home or do it professionally. Finding the extra money for a Mac is unfair on some families who would have been so grateful to be told that buying a PC for half the price would have been just as good. Apple is a badge and that's what you pay for. They make good machine, I'm not knocking the quality or innovation, but when schools and families are struggling to keep afloat they shouldn't be made to think Apple is the only solution for tablets or computer design.
If they couldn't get the software that they wanted for Android then it doesn't matter how cheap they are, they've waisted their money. Apple have gone out of their way to ensure that plank is in place, complete with a textbook authoring package.
As for buying Macs for design work, they should be buying whatever is being used out in the real world so that the students know what they are doing when it comes to getting a job. If design houses out in the real world are using Macs (and where I work the design department is a little island of Macs among a sea of PCs) then that's what they buy.
"As for buying Macs for design work, they should be buying whatever is being used out in the real world so that the students know what they are doing when it comes to getting a job."
Despite what many may think - especially businesses - school is supposed to be an education, not an apprenticeship.
The job of the school system is to teach BOTH theoretical and practical subjects. It's unlikely that history or religious education, for example, will have much practical application in the real world, but subjects like engineering drawing and IT are pretty relevant. The last thing we want is for one side of the equation to be taught in exclusion to the other, and yes, one of the aims is to prepare students for work in the real world.
"The job of the school system is to teach BOTH theoretical and practical subjects."
As what point does using something practical that may not be the thing used by industry sector X make it not practical? This idea is ass-backwards.
"subjects like engineering drawing and IT are pretty relevant."
I don't think I have ever been taught engineering drawing and I didn't learn anything IT relevant from school - if anything I was the one leading the school. Probably not uncommon for anyone of my generation with an interest in computers.
Apparently those with less aptitude of my age can struggle along anyway so I guess it doesn't matter that none of my peers were using the computers of two decades+ in the future because they didn't exist yet either.
"The last thing we want is for one side of the equation to be taught in exclusion to the other, and yes, one of the aims is to prepare students for work in the real world."
And who knows what "the real world" will be like by the time they reach it? Sure as hell the world of IT has changed a lot since I was in primary school. Otherwise I demand compensation for the fact that Folio on the BBC Micro did not prepare me for MS Word!
I do not like this mindset. I would prefer we teach children to think and have adults capable of adapting to the world they find themselves in.
Set expectations low and expect them to be met.
Your point was? Just because you weren't offered engineering drawing as an option at school doesn't mean that it doesn't and shouldn't exist. The failings of your personal IT training also have nothing to do with it. I don't agree with the modern approach to IT (which seems to think that it's fine to teach kids how to use PowerPoint, which is something I've never had occasion to more than view during my whole working life) while not explaining any of the theory and how the hardware works, but I don't suggest that this part of the course or something similar should be dropped entirely.
Here's the point you seem to be missing, badly: schools should teach BOTH the theory and the practical. If they are teaching the practical then they should be doing so in a way that will be useful if the child ends up working with it in industry. If they get both then they can work out WHY things don't work rather than doing them by rote.
"Your point was? Just because you weren't offered engineering drawing as an option at school doesn't mean that it doesn't and shouldn't exist"
No. Perhaps try reading what I said.
"The failings of your personal IT training also have nothing to do with it."
<sarcasm>Yes. I do so weep that I have not had the benefit of primary school or secondary school IT training. Because it's really crippled my IT career. </sarcasm>
<-- That would be the point by the way.
"but I don't suggest that this part of the course or something similar should be dropped entirely."
So explain to me how my peers managed to sort this out when PowerPoint didn't even exist when we were in schools?
Could it perhaps be because it's just not even slightly challenging to use for what it is mostly used for? That maybe if there is something more advanced maybe they could get their employer's to train them for it rather than for businesses to expect them to be trained by schools?
"Here's the point you seem to be missing, badly: schools should teach BOTH the theory and the practical."
Here's the point you seem to be missing, badly: your definition of practical is FUBAR.
Apple have iBooks and far more educational type apps - great support and it's less of a changing target - they typically are supported for longer and are more secure. I'd happy having 5 iPads over 10 cheap Android tablets as in the long run they would be of more use and probably less cost.
The primary school, of which I'm one of the community governors, has just purchased a stack of jPad IIs. The Head has £30k that had to be spent...
It looks like 1 slab between 2 pupils and they will be locked away at night and have those rubber bungy edge protectors.
My concern is that teachers/heads are taken to expo's where only one kine of hardware (Apple) is demonstrated. I did not know about the loss-leader discounting that my have been offered.
surely someone else offers a manged solution for 10" android tablets and they /must/ be easier to lock down than the iPad. Also, I'm concerned that the LEA/council has not separated the wifi into corp-admin/Curriculum-pupil.
It may be my ignorance, but how does iTunes 'lock-in' come into this, as that eco-system seems to be a license to fleece the schools?
There's a guardian article floating around about how wonderful iPads are in schools, but if they'd used 'slab' as a synonym, then most of the same would apply?
I don't want the kids asking for an 'iPad' when they should be asking for a 'tablet computer' and investigating what's best for their requirements.
I'm not concerned about 'programming' at the moment, but we are concerned that 'ICT' is not properly embedded across the curriculum, as opposed to being a separate subject.
The bigger problem is actually that "everything is an iPad" - whether it runs Android, Windows or whatever else. They get called iPads, newspapers run articles about using such "iPads" in the classroom, etc.etc.etc. It's like "hoover", it's become synonymous with the product rather than the brand.
My school have gone through the netbook fad, through the IWB fad, and they are currently in the "iPad" fad. We bought 30 tablets (Android, because we weren't going to waste the money on Apple until we knew that they'd be used) - the teacher in charge literally told me that they have no idea what they'll do with them. Right up until weeks after delivery, they still didn't know what they could do or were going to use them for. In fact, they still don't.
We gave a handful to the nursery who use a program that takes photos for recording skills. It's basically a photo app where you can tag the child. So we paid £100 per device, plus a site licence of the software, so they can take a photo and mark a child's name on it.
The rest are earmarked for classroom use but given that in the testing of no less than 6 different models of tablet (none of which we ended up using for the classrooms) we couldn't find more than one or two useful apps for classroom use, I can see them being where the netbooks are now - stuck in a trolley somewhere and wheeled out once-a-year to please the PTA that funded them. Honestly, even when it comes to apps and websites to use, the school have no idea what they can do and have been wowed by flashy presentations and - to be honest - there's not that much that's actually useful as soon as you stop being impressed by someone sharing their screen or similar. I imagine 90% of their use will be to replace the handheld slates, sorry chalkboards, sorry whiteboards, that schools give to pupils about one lesson in 20 so they can write their answer on it to show the teacher.
People are shocked that, as an IT Manager in schools (everything from sixth form college down to private prep schools), one of the first things I'd do if I were put in charge would be to rip out all the electronics from the classrooms (it now can cost upwards of £10k to kit out an average classroom just for IT) and have a single ICT suite capable of holding 30 kids. There's no need for all that junk and it's not being used and where it IS being used, it provides no measurable advantage over just having that same teacher and NO equipment at all. And the technology is distracting from the things they should be learning.
Sure, Scratch and other apps are good but the good apps are so dumbed down in their real-world use (i.e. teachers that can't do it themselves and have to follow cheat-sheets) that by the time you price it up, kit it out, teach people how to use it, support it, replace it, etc. then you could have hired another couple of teachers or one who REALLY knows IT in the first place. And they'd be able to teach with a handful of old computers and pen-and-paper.
The Reg needs a floating comments system so your post can be raised to the top of the stack. It seems a shame that it's buried away here on the second page.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. There seems to be an incredible rush to get new technology into the classroom long before anyone's worked out if it's actually going to be of any use.
Yet we donated an iPad 2 to our kids nursery / pre-school and they think it's fantastic - they can spend a bit of time with each child teaching them letters / numbers and writing skills. They say the kids have responded really well with it - they can use it all day and charge it overnight - doddle to setup and the apps are very useful yet very cheap.
"There's a guardian article floating around about how wonderful iPads are in schools, but if they'd used 'slab' as a synonym, then most of the same would apply?"
Not really true - Apple have done a lot to help ensure they work well in education with things like iBooks Author, iTunes U. At the end of it they tend to last a long time (and still supported) - you can get plenty of accessories for them and there is massive support from app developers.
Sure some may get broken but I'd imagine the actual lifespan of a typical Apple iPad to be significantly greater than a similar Android tablet. 3GS and iPad 1s are 3-4 years old and still supported - yet so many Android devices are running old / insecure versions of Android and will not get updated.
Apple also build in tools to aid with security / restrictions and provisioning so the TCO may well be far lower.
My kid's primary school has a suite of very old PCs that are basically only used for Scratch, web searching, and learning how to use (God help us) PowerPoint and Word.
According to my daughter, it takes about 15 minutes just for all the class to get logged in, and even then about a quarter of the machines just won't be working, so kids have to double up. These things are slow, and yet still require some serious IT support which costs the school much-needed cash.
Given that most kids over 10 these days seem to have either iPod Touchs or smartphones - and definitely will have more computing power accessible at home than the entire school suite - having IT as its own separate world is bonkers. Like it or not, the future is one of augmented memory and networking - and technology like tablets work far better than clunky PCs.
Don't worry you can get exactly the same problems with a suite of new computers, particulary when the teachers don't or won't take any notice of Billy Bob messing with the keyboard, mouse, screen , network connection just so long as the Powerpoint can go up on the projector.
Most kids have what?, well bully for you living in such an area and sod the poor souls that don't have the money to have one, augmented memory is crap when flushed.
> and even then about a quarter of the machines just won't be working
Acquiring PCs is trivial. I was at a customer yesterday who was throwing out about 30 P4-grade machines because they are moving all the engineers (for an office refit), and this is the stuff no-one could justify hanging on to any more. I dragged a Core Duo machine out of the pile, and that will be my Fedora machine next week.
The tricky bit, IME, is to get schools to go looking for such kit; when I worked in a school, no new PCs could be acquired unless they came from RM. So PCs were expensive, and rarely bought. And almost always a shit spec anyway.
Vic.
IT teacher here. Bsc in Computing. 30 years experience as both hardware and software engineer. I was asked to formulate a school policy for IT development. My solution involved thin client equipped classrooms in each department with music, art/design and IT with custom spec PC's and Mac (that left a bad taste but there you go). A rolling programme of development that took into account upgrading and repair costs. My managers bought 30 tablets as a trial because I hadn't been forward thinking enough. They managed to avoid iPads because I lied and said they wouldn't "integrate with our network". The kids use them to play games and music mostly. The cost of the trial would have equipped a full classroom!. I was told we have to have tablets because the whole world is going that way and we have to follow or be seen as inadequate. All the research I showed them was ignored. I just seems that the managers in education are as stupid and ill informed as all the managers I worked for in industry. SHEEP.
would have loved to stop the trial dead and spent the money wisely. I'm happy to see if everyone else fails (or succeeds) before committing thousands of pounds that may be better spent patching holes in the roof. The point is that ALL tablet devices are a luxury that public education can not afford until it has been shown to give definite benefits. We went for two thirds windows devices as the IT manger was more comfortable with those. The Android tablets have had lots more use however as we can write our own apps for them. I have a few colleagues in other schools who have been given iPads as an incentive and the vast majority struggle to know what to do with them. Personally I can get two Android devices for every iPad and that alone directs my spending advice.
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