“It’s midmorning and the faces of the students in Tim Wesmiller’s religious studies class are bathed in the baby-blue glow of their iPad screens,” Patrick May reports for SiliconValley.com.
“Faculty and students in this two-year iPad pilot project at Archbishop Mitty High School say this is the future of education,” May reports. “‘The richness and potential here is much greater than just e-books,’ Principal Tim Brosnan says. “The students have embraced the idea that learning happens not just in class but at home and anywhere else they can go online. The iPad’s not some magic pill, but seeing students collaborate on them seems to add more life to the learning process.”
May reports, “For the past two school years, Mitty’s pilot project has put Apple’s popular tablets in the hands of 250 students in 14 classes. Next fall the school will rent an iPad for all 1,680 students and 104 teachers, putting Mitty at the vanguard of a quickening trend toward digitalized education. ‘What’s coming this fall is huge, and I think you’ll see it happening in every school across the country in the next five years,’ Brosnan says. ‘It’s almost as if the iPad was the device we were all waiting for.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Unfortunately for students and teachers, not all schools will go iPad. At some, ignorant, cloistered, and/or kickback-happy “decision makers” will instead opt for pretend iPads, dooming their students to inferior hardware, second-class (or worse or no equivalent) apps, security issues, and other problems. Schools that do not opt for iPads, like those who do not choose Macs, are doing a tremendous disservice to their students, teachers, and community.
Look at the private schools with top ratings: They almost always have Macs and, already, iPads.
If your child’s school, public or private, holds a meeting about buying “tablets” you should attend and voice your opinion that your students and teachers deserve the gold standard, Apple iPad, not some Chinese or Korean piece-of-crap iPad knockoff. All of the focus from quality e-textbook publishers and education app developers will be on iPad first.
Even today, some school’s computer labs still consist of a bunch of shitty Dells that are either broken and/or infested with malware because some clueless idiot blew it. Where were you when that horribly stupid decision was made? This time around, don’t fail your kids.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
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