[Offtopic] Ipads

[Cameron Bell]

Well - here is one thing I found I can do with an iPad, that I can't do with a netbook. Mind you It is the only thing at this stage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esOyfvRunyE

My personal opinion is that the intro of iPads is a tad premature and that it is an expensive trial that parents are bearing the cost of in a lot of cases. My daughter has one (Government supplied) and I have seen her use it very constructively, but apart from the physical benefits of instant on, small form factor, extended battery life, she has done nothing that couldn't be done on a netbook. As far as I can tell there has been no significant pedagogical change driven by the use of the devices- yet.
Yes you need to have access to the devices to see what they can do and how you may develop uses for them, but to have parents funding playtime for teachers is a bit unfair. If schools are serious about the introduction, they should fund it themselves, do a rigourous (and independent) assessment of the benefits before booklisting them. It really does smack of "look at what we are doing".
I think to truly drive the pedagogical change you can envisage these devices creating, they need to be the 3G version and GPS enabled - many schools are hamstringing any developments by locking them to their wireless infrastructure (due to cost). Personally, I think an independently owned netbook with 3G would allow a greater transformation in learning than the iPad. It would force a school down the path that we are inevitably going and give them a true head start.
I believe that if a school finds itself pressured to rely on every new toy to engage the kids and promote itself then it needs to spend more time and money on the curriculum and teachers, not the technology.

Cheers
Cameron

On 26/02/2011, at 9:08 AM, Paul Chandler wrote:

> 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
>  I am pdchandler on Delicious
>  Add me to your network
> 
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