Schools will be converting to Tablet PCs

[Aaron]

A friend of mine who is a teacher in High School said that most schools are trying to convert to tablet PCs in lieu of books within the next ten years. I'm not sure if this is as good as it sounds, especially without knowing the health risks it might pose to a developing child's vision, as well as things like carpal tunnel, etc. It's nice that they wouldn't have to cut down trees to make school books, but at the same time, I think they should make sure and investigate it before enacting it. This could be the Nintendo Gameboy 3d all over.

 

Aaron

[joeblast]

Who's making up for the price difference? Is it going to be...*ahem*..."free?"

[ralis]

Who's making up for the price difference? Is it going to be...*ahem*..."free?"

 

 

With you and your Tea Bagger friends, the almighty dollar reigns supreme. I see no concern at all from the right wing Republican Tea Baggers that children receive a first rate education. Especially poor children that are in school districts that have very little funds to pay for a real education. I believe the Tea Bagger agenda is to keep children ignorant and poorly educated and therefor, easily indoctrinated to right wing propaganda.

 

The U.S. lags behind all industrialized nations in categories such as math and science. A quality education should be free for all. That would be of great benefit to this society.

 

Having a little problem with attachment to money Joe?

[三江源]

A new local school here in London opened with lots of hoopla about how wondrous they were with their pc for every child. In fact it just didnt work, they ran too slowly, got too glitchy, no one could fix that many glitchy snotty laptops.. classes ran too slowly..padlocks got lost, they got dropped and flung around, anyway, to cut a glamorous story short, they returned to good old pen and paper pretty quickly.

[Chang]

When my Mother went to school she wrote with chalk on a slate. I used a pen and paper as did my children. My Grandchildren will use a hand held computer.

 

I suppose that it is simply progress but my gut feeling is that we are getting too clever by half and that it all may end in tears.

 

But then again I am just an old fart.

[zanshin]

Chalk and slate ould probably be the most environmentally friendly one.

 

I think there is an advantage to engaging the kinesthetic system by going thru the motions of writing when you are trying to learn certain things.

 

I was optimistic that when they put all our documentation on computer it would make it better and smoother for us in health care, a few aspects may be better, but mostly the slow, snotty, glitchy computers make it pretty frustrating.

[joeblast]

With you and your Tea Bagger friends, the almighty dollar reigns supreme. I see no concern at all from the right wing Republican Tea Baggers that children receive a first rate education. Especially poor children that are in school districts that have very little funds to pay for a real education. I believe the Tea Bagger agenda is to keep children ignorant and poorly educated and therefor, easily indoctrinated to right wing propaganda.

 

The U.S. lags behind all industrialized nations in categories such as math and science. A quality education should be free for all. That would be of great benefit to this society.

 

Having a little problem with attachment to money Joe?

Sounds like you'll need a towel to clean all that spittle off of your screen!

 

Yadda yadda - why'd your guys kill the student voucher program for those disadvantaged kids then?

 

Yeah we spend a ton on education and get less than stellar results - is that the fault of the money spent, or is that the fault of the teachers, or is that the fault of the teacher-culture, or those who decide the curriculum? Its no different than the argument that oh, the US spends way higher than other OECD countries on health care and for "not as good" results...ok, so that means if we just tossed a little more money at the problem then we'd obtain those bestest results. Of course totally disregarding that part of that function is we simply have more discretionary income to spend on such things plugged into a very bad model that leaves people with their hands on the price controls well sequestered behind a curtain to just charge whatever since nobody ever sees granular cost being the main reasons "we spend more."

 

Sorry ralis, but especially in times of busted budgets, the question of cost effectiveness is quite a prescient one. One cannot simply throw money at a problem and expect it to be solved! We're seeing the results of that philosophy all over the place these days. So while "education should be free" that sounds great and all, but really man...it helps to keep reality at least on the outskirts of your philosophy and not wallow endlessly in realms of theory where one may utilize arbitrarily large amounts of resources to allocate to an issue and claim that's all we need to solve it.

[Mal]

[zanshin]

 

Yeah we spend a ton on education and get less than stellar results - is that the fault of the money spent, or is that the fault of the teachers, or is that the fault of the teacher-culture, or those who decide the curriculum? Its no different than the argument that oh, the US spends way higher than other OECD countries on health care and for "not as good" results...ok, so that means if we just tossed a little more money at the problem then we'd obtain those bestest results. Of course totally disregarding that part of that function is we simply have more discretionary income to spend on such things plugged into a very bad model that leaves people with their hands on the price controls well sequestered behind a curtain to just charge whatever since nobody ever sees granular cost being the main reasons "we spend more."

of your philosophy and not wallow endlessly in realms of theory where one may utilize arbitrarily large amounts of resources to allocate to an issue and claim that's all we need to solve it.

I don't know that it's the fault of any of that. A problem with linking teacher merit pay to test performance is it's a huge disincentive to any teacher wanting to work in a poor district. It's really hard to help kids learn and test well without parent and community support. In our current system wealthy districts can pass a levy and get tablets for all; poor ones have not enough outdated books. Throwing money only to the groups that show performance and can do well on standardized tests isn't going to solve anything either, just makes the disparity worse.

[zanshin]

The district my mom teaches in, unofficially, over the past couple decades, has been the school in their county that has been very accomodative of taking kids with physical or learning disabilities and trying to meet their needs. With the right wing educational initiatives, the school administration is really trying to get away from doing this, can't afford it and then the kids with problems drag down the scores and funding even worse.

[thelerner]

They're doing some fairly large field tests with Ipads at our local schools. Students don't get them, but they're wheeled out on carts for a few classes and kids use some individual apps. Apparently the money is coming out of there computer budget.

 

A cheaper way to go would be Kindles. Used ones go for about $129, I could see kids getting them to take home. My kids all have 15#+ back packs, it'd be nice if they could load there text books on them. Especially if it was cheaper then buying a physical book. Unlike in my day, schools are charging for textbooks now.

 

Still tech is no substitute for a good teacher. Great teacher with chalk will beat a computer any day. But there may be hybrids like Khan academy. Where you get a great teacher in electric form.

 

There was a cool TED video on how children learned best 3 to a computer. An alchemy took place where less was more, the kids were forced to collaborate and did significantly better then 1 to 1.

 

If you're unfamiliar with Khan Academy and TED, google them, both are examples in how the internet can be a positive force in dynamic educating.