[Offtopic] Ipads

[Paul Chandler]

Folks,

Can I poke my nose into the ipad discussion?  I would do so more as a parent
of a year 8 student who has been required to purchase an ipad than as an
ed/ICT professional.

I'm not going to complain (or name the school!)  The ipad is in lieu of
textbooks, and economically I think the balance is about right.  We've had
great fun with an ipad in the  home over Christmas, and there's some really
cool apps and games.  They are certainly very nifty machines to have.  I've
had fun rejigging the proxy server and configuring a windows-based airprint
server so that the thing will print at home (which is an otherwise PC
environment).  We've tollerated the 500MB download for the latest iOS when
iTunes told us it was an update we couldn't live without.

But in all seriousness - the issue of textbooks aside - what do schools
actually do with them in the classroom?  iOS won't run flash or java, so
that immediately alienates the ipad from a large swag of education resources
already 'out there'. Are there really apps equivalent to the Phet resources,
in science, for instance?  Text entry on the ipad seems to me to be clumsy.

When you can buy an ePC for less than a quarter of the price of an ipad, I
just wonder what the extreme attraction to ipads actually is - and I'd like
to get some insight into some exciting classroom practices that "you folks
who using them" will have discovered that has not yet occurred to me!

Thoughts, people?

-- 
Dr Paul Chandler
Research Fellow: Multimedia grammatical design and authoring pedagogy
(Kahootz) project,
School of Education, University of New England
(Project website: http://www.une.edu.au/kahootzresearch)

located at Australian Children's Television Foundation
145 Smith Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne, 3065
e-mail: paul.chandler at une.edu.au
Ph: 0400 198 187
Fax: (03) 9419 0660
Skype: paul.d.chandler
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