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UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads

36 points by petewailes 14y ago

quarterto 14y ago
Missing from headline: "(Obnoxiously Cheerful Music Will Start Immediately)".
alanctgardner2 14y ago
As a student, I tried to use a tablet with ebooks exclusively for a few of my university classes, and it was fairly dreadful. Not because having a tablet is distracting, but because it's not the best way to organize reference information. When I was trying to do homework, I wanted - the questions from page 251, the table of equations from 190, and to be able to flip through and find similar examples. Obviously e-books fail miserably if you need quick access to multiple pages. As a test-taking tool, an iPad is not terribly effective either. The maths teacher shows that she can quickly aggregate the solutions, but there's no good way for the students to express their thought process. I'm pretty sure by their age, if I had simply written the answer on the paper I wouldn't have been given full marks. It's important to teach students good mathematical form from an early age, and this definitely undermines that. Consider maths is one of the easiest classes to write tests for, I wonder how science, english etc. are getting on - likely a lot of terribly simple multiple choice. Lastly, everyone seems so smug. The school's administration thinks they've taken this gigantic problem of how to do learning electronically and they've just knocked it out of the park. I know it's a sort of fluff piece, but it'd be better to see a longer video about problems they solved, lessons they learned, etc. As it stands, it looks like a lot of off-the-shelf software cobbled together by a local Apple rep, which is hardly ground-breaking. They've just thrown a lot of money at it. The administrator featured doesn't seem to be overly technical, and the teacher seems more interested in the fact that now she doesn't have to go home and mark things in her spare time ( but, of course, she's 'dedicated', as she says herself ).
- cryptoz 14y ago
  Most of those problems have very simple solutions in software features. > When I was trying to do homework, I wanted - the questions from page 251, the table of equations from 190, and to be able to flip through and find similar examples. Obviously e-books fail miserably if you need quick access to multiple pages. The solution to this could be implemented in under a week, for sure. Add a little UI for temporary bookmarks. Let the reader save a set of relevant pages (questions, table of equations, examples) and then swipe between them. Simple.
  - mirumirai 14y ago
    That's exactly what I did studying for the GRE with a pdf ebook. Flipping between bookmarks feels just as fast as flipping physical pages.
  - alanctgardner2 14y ago
    Except for the loading times. If you've ever used a graphics-heavy textbook, especially on a high-res device like the iPad 3, rendering pages takes forever. It's not just a UI problem, it's an issue of effectively caching the bookmarked pages, and for a large book that might be a big problem.
    - mikevm 14y ago
      I read some scanned PDF files (over 150MB) and they work fine in GoodReader on my iPad 2. I'm sure that graphics heavy vector PDF files would work even faster.
  - sopooneo 14y ago
    I like to have multiple books open at once all in my field of view. I think you could only replicate that with multiple tablets.
- crusso 14y ago
  Keep in mind that you were self-experimenting with a tablet in limited ways vs the holistic approach this school is taking. Problems that you encountered trying to use a tablet in a book-oriented environment could be solved by curriculum changes, technology improvements, UI changes, etc. While improvements to a tablet approach can resolve all of the problems you're mentioning, a regular book will never be regex searchable. A regular piece of paper will never let the teacher know your scores immediately so she can help you past problems and provide instant feedback. A regular set of class books will never decrease the need to linearly increase the number of pieces of paper needed for the amount of materials you want the students to have.
  - alanctgardner2 14y ago
    I've pointed out in a couple places, I don't buy the "instant feedback" solution. If I write some maths on paper, my teacher can see where I went wrong. If I check a box on a tablet, it's a boolean. Was I right, or wrong? The teacher saves some time in marking, but now I'll have to go and show them my work (on the forbidden paper!) to see where I went wrong. As far as searching, the index at the back of a book is likely more useful than full-text search. Usually I'm not interested in a particular term, but 'that thing that we covered last week, with the Fourier Transform', or something like that. There aren't any keywords, regexes won't help - you need a well-organized textbook where the headings and sub-headings facilitate this kind of searching. Curriculum changes seem like the wrong way to go as well - if a tablet isn't good for teaching a subject, don't jam the subject into a format the tablet can understand. This is clearest in the testing case, but it's generally applicable: the tablet, as a device, exposes an interface. Paper exposes the ultimate interface: it accepts any free-form input. At best tablets can work in a similar way, but we have a hard time doing anything useful with this input. As we normalize the input to make it easier to process, we move away from a general purpose input device, and we force students to think and express themselves in the specific way we designed the interface to work.
- simonh 14y ago
  It's true that current software has limitations, but I'm confident these will be improved and I've found loads of workarounds. I run pan & paper RPGs and have a lot of reference material in different PDFs, many of which are compilations of pages I've put together myself with PDFtk[1]. One trick is to screenshot the pages you need to refer to frequently into a photo album. You can also photo pages from paper books for quick reference this way. I also use this trick with map screenshots for journeys where I won't have online access. I used that for a trip to the Lake District. Another trick is to have each PDF file you need to switch between open in a separate app, then four-finger swipe between them. When you learn that trick it's amazing how well it works. Many of the PDFs I keep in iBooks are also in Dropbox and Google Drive and my most used ones are pinned/starred for local storage so I can easily move back and forth between three different files. This method probably won't work as well for ebooks though. Far from ideal, sure, but I've found it a very practical and usable solution. [1] http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/
  - stinos 14y ago
    all these tricks are nice and useful, but in my experience they cost more time and are less effective than just lying out all needed paper material in front of you, on your desk, so switching between them is merely a matter of moving your eyes. Of which the electronic equivalent is having lots of screen space like 3 monitors.
    - simonh 14y ago
      Fair enough, but I still think an iPad is a fantastic supplement to using paper materials. It can completely replace them in a lot of use cases, and offers capabilities (such as taking literal photo copies of printed materials, whiteboards, notice boards, etc for reference later) that paper can't compete with. It can't replace paper completely, sure, but they are very rapidly becoming indispensable tools in a lot of situations and I think that will soon include education.
- mikevm 14y ago
  I'm a student that uses an iPad with ebooks exclusively, and I much prefer the experience to a physical book. As others have said, you complain about software problems, and not inherent problems in the hardware device. In fact, GoodReader lets you set up bookmarks so you can flip back and forth. It also lets you open books in multiple tabs, so you can work with a few books simultaneously. Don't forget another important feature of eBooks - you can search the whole book. You can also annotate without ruining the physical copy ;-). The only problem is books that aren't well made, for example, PDFs without hyperlinks (like "Equation 2.6.1" is not clickable so you have to flip back).
kitsune_ 14y ago
Of course, of all tablets, it had to be an iPad!
- obtino 14y ago
  TBH, it's hard to get the same level of user-experience from an Android tablet. There are very few apps on Android which offer the same level of experience as those found on the iPad. Also, in a school setting, how do you expect students and teachers to deal with different versions of operating systems and device specifications?
  - skymt 14y ago
    I doubt the degree of magic involved in the user experience factors into institutional technology purchasing. And fragmentation is hardly an issue when the school is buying all the hardware. Frankly, your comment reads like a pair of talking points taken off the shelf and jammed in where they don't fit.
    - obtino 14y ago
      > I doubt the degree of magic involved in the user experience factors into institutional technology purchasing. User experience is not magic. It's something that involves a lot of time and effort on behalf of the apps developers. It does contribute to the choices made by individuals and this filters up to the institution level. How do you think the iPad penetrated the enterprise? > And fragmentation is hardly an issue when the school is buying all the hardware. True. However, what happens when the school wishes to use an app that's not supported by the device they purchased? As an Android user I've found plenty of apps that fail on my device while working perfectly on others. Sure there are problems with compatibility with apps on different versions of iOS, but they are relatively minor compared to the problems that I've come across on Android.
- objclxt 14y ago
  There is something to be said for service continuity. After-market support from Android manufacturers can be variable, whereas it's something of a known quantity with Apple. There's also the software issue: there is simply a better and more wide reaching range of tablet optimised educational software on iOS than Android. Also, on a more practical level, trying to procure a thousand Nexus 10s is no easy task. I don't think one platform is inherently better than the other in the education market, but it should be pretty self-evident that Apple is better set-up to currently sell into the sector.
OGinparadise 14y ago
Personally I found tablets AND laptops lagging a plain old paper notebook when it came to reviewing notes before the test. Distraction is another thing (sit on the back and watch to get an idea) but I presume that iPads can eventually be modified to access only coursework.
fpp 14y ago
This project has been going on for some time - very interesting. Recently I've been hearing about (planned / just started) similar projects in the UK and the US with K12 and higher education. TMK its iPads as frontends, Meru Wireless Networks to connect the about 2000 iPads, MS Server 2008 with AD and MS Exchange at the backend. for more info see: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/the-school-where-every-teacher-has-an-ipad-and-every-student-has-an-ipod-7578167.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/t... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13FO_A0Sokw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13FO_A0Sokw (plus an Apple UK profile on ESSA) http://www.apple.com/uk/education/profiles/essa/ http://www.apple.com/uk/education/profiles/essa/
steverb 14y ago
My kids' high school (http://knoxcountystemac.knoxschools.org/ http://knoxcountystemac.knoxschools.org/) has done this as well. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, the kids aren't hauling 30 pounds of books to and from school everyday, school lockers are pretty much superfluous, and the iPad is a great tool. On the other hand, it's very hard for me as their parent to tell (at a glance) whether or not the kids are actually doing school work or just screwing around and it's very easy for the kids to get distracted if they aren't having a good concentration day. Like everything else, it's a bit of a mixed bag.
- robmcm 14y ago
  Can you not restrict them so they can't install games etc? [EDIT] The iPads, not the kids!
  - steverb 14y ago
    Not that I can tell, but we took the controversial tack of telling the kids not to install any games on there. So far, it's working for us.
    - js2 14y ago
      Settings > General > Restrictions?
      - steverb 14y ago
        I don't have an iPad in front of me, but so far as I can tell there is no "Only let useful apps be installed" setting. Besides, it's an attitude issue. Preventing them from installing stuff via a setting isn't going to stop a kid from screwing around if they really want to (IMO). We choose to address the attitude and the actual behavior (if and when it occurs).
  - UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
    With enterprise tools for iPad you have complete and total control over how the device is used. You can restrict installing apps, uninstalling apps, using the camera, loading the App Store, talking with Siri, altering settings, etc. See this list for some of the things you can do: http://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/1.2/#cadbf9e41d http://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/1.2/#cadbf9e41d Yet more: http://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/1.2/#cad5370d089 http://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/1.2/#cad5370d089
mpclark 14y ago
Meanwhile, here's another 'iPads in the classroom' story from last week, focussing on how fast the kids destroy them: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255546/School-spent-500-000-giving-pupils-iPads-admits-HALF-broken.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255546/School-spent...
- objclxt 14y ago
  ...it's a terribly misleading story (which doesn't come as a surprise to me, it's the Daily Mail after all), because it conveniently omits breakage rates of one-to-one laptop deployments. It may not come as a surprise to many people to learn that laptops break almost as often as tablets when deployed one-on-one in schools. A quick Google led me to one study from 2004 in Maine, where over an 18 month period 50% of laptops required repair, and 35% of students experienced laptops breaking down or being accidentally damaged[1]. The main difference is that a higher percentage of tablets require total replacement, which is somewhat understandable as tablets (be they Android or iOS) are far less user serviceable. [1]: http://maine.gov/mlti/articles/research/PCHSLaptopsFinal.pdf http://maine.gov/mlti/articles/research/PCHSLaptopsFinal.pdf
  - revelation 14y ago
    I don't understand. There are schools (the majority of them!) that do neither tablet nor laptop "1-to-1 deployments", for maybe this very reason.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  It did also say that the cases they were using weren't great, and when swapped out they were much less prone to breakages. Plus kids are kids, things are going to get broken, that's why the devices were insured.
jstalin 14y ago
Maybe it's generational (I'm 33) and maybe it's personal preference, but I much prefer a physical book over reading on a tablet. I remember reading an article somewhere saying that our brains do a better job of organizing material if it's a physical book because part of the organization process is remembering where in the book the remembered material was. I get no sense of "place" when reading an e-book. I even print out important material because that makes it easier for me to read.
- pkorzeniewski 14y ago
  I have similar feelings about reading books on tablet, I just can't get used to it. The only advantage to me is the unlimited number of books I can 'carry', otherwise I'll always choose a physical book.
- UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
  I find tablets fine for reading one single book, in particular when you're reading that book from cover to cover. So if I want to buy a fiction book (e.g. The Hobbit) on my Kindle it works just fine. But when it comes to non-fiction/reference books the technology is just not ready. You don't read cover to cover, you bounce around, you mark sections, you take notes, you check your answers in the back, and yet the software I have seen does all of this stuff badly. Plus whenever people roll out one of these snazzy "look how hip and modern we are" school programs I never read about how much they spent on teacher training or development of researches (apps, lesson plans, etc). So I always wonder if they literally just turned up with a pack of iPads one day and said to the teachers "make this work!" Without any real thought given to how exactly the teachers are meant to use them.
- crusso 14y ago
  I'm 10 years older than you, but when I'm doing development, I hardly use physical materials at all anymore. Development problems melt like butter when confronted with Chrome->Google->stackexchange. The last thing I want to start doing is searching around for the right book, look through the index, thumb from indexed page to indexed page, look back at the index because I forgot the 4th page number I saw that looked like it might apply, wonder if the latest version of the framework I'm using fixed the problem I'm seeing, etc. My kids live on their tablets and computers. They will have even less problems adapting to that mode of working than we do - and the solutions they have to reproduce useful paper techniques like highlighting and note taking will completely change the picture in high-tech's favor.
nicholassmith 14y ago
£65k saved off photocopying is huge. I've seen copier bills so I know what they can be like, but that's crazy savings from introducing it. Wonder if they're just emailing everything out now, which makes significantly more sense. I'm in favour of iPads in school. I've ran through a few of the educational programs on the iPad (including iTunes and Udemy as well as textbooks), it's a great resource and helps to consolidate everything I need in one place. When I was at Uni I was one of the few people who used a laptop to take notes in lectures as I found it easier to split my focus. I can't watch the video but I'm guessing that they've got all the iPads through the enterprise system that most big companies are (or should be anyway) using, which gives them a bit more granularity on what's going on, pushing updates and some additional restrictions. I'm sure teachers are smart enough to realise that kids with fully unlocked iPads are going to spend their time mucking about.
- Macha 14y ago
  An iPad is currently £330. We'll be generous and assume Apple gave the school a 50% discount (which is huge and probably unlikely as I'd imagine even Apple aren't charging 100% markup). So £165 per iPad * 840 students (according to the video) = £138,600. They've spent more than double what they saved on photocopying, not to mention that 840 iPads take a lot more maintenance than five or six photocopiers.
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    Well the cost of the iPads is a fixed cost, and they'll run them as long as possible. The savings won't ever cover the costs, but we're also missing figures for how it changed IT spending (did they need new machines? Have they avoided them?). It's an expensive proposition that's for sure, but so were computer suites 15 years ago and they had those when I was a wee lad.
mavhc 14y ago
The school did a presentation at an Apple event I went to, the pupils were there too. Apple was pushing 1 to 1 deployment, everyone sets up their own accounts. There's loads of licencing and control issues though ("apps are only $1, just buy a new licence for every new pupil"). Fine for university level, but still a lot of compromises for schools.
- objclxt 14y ago
  >There's loads of licencing and control issues though ("apps are only $1, just buy a new licence for every new pupil") There is a volume licensing program for the App Store, where schools retain ownership and can buy in bulk at a discount (where developers opt in to allow such discounts). But in fairness, distribution still isn't perfect out of the box (it's done via one-time codes on the App Store. It is possible to automate this, but not as standard).
sopooneo 14y ago
Someone close to me works at a very good public high school in Massachusetts. The district is in the middle of the enormous task of planning/budgeting/funding a new school building. At one point they showed some preliminary plans to various interested parties, and the teachers were immediately prompted to ask where the bookshelves were, or where freestanding ones could even be placed. The answer from the superintendent was that this school was to have no physical books whatsoever, so they're not bothering with shelves.
- ensignavenger 14y ago
  There are a lot of things that go on 'book' shelves that aren't books! I think this was a major design flaw.
- snogglethorpe 14y ago
  ARgh, where do they find these people, and why are they entrusted with important positions affecting the education of our kids?! Seriously, what are the qualifications required for school administrators? These stories give the impression that they're crazily gullible and shallow people, whose decisions are guided more by the latest school-administrator fads than by actual experience with education...
cantlin 14y ago
The extraordinary overhead of printing, purchasing and distributing education texts alone would seem to make this a no brainer. The cost of supplying 840 pupils with iPads and covers, even at consumer rates, would only be around £350K. From the stated numbers, this would be recouped in saved photocopying bills alone in around five years. Clearly there will be significant software and operations costs, but I would speculate that the less obvious time and material savings (e.g. updating a hand-out from a previous class to reflect new teaching best practices) would more than offset these costs. Centralising resources is a natural side effect of digital distribution, and encourages resource sharing at all levels of the organisation. It's easy to think up other small but significant wins enabled by this approach. We've probably all had the experience of watching a stand-in teacher struggle to fill the lesson time because the regular guy has become suddenly indisposed. With good systems in place it's easy to imagine this being a non-problem.
- nodata 14y ago
  An iPad will never last five years: if they don't become laughably obsolete, they will be broken.
josteink 14y ago
So good that kids get to learn of the Orwellian world of 1984 as early as possible. They get to learn that computers are sealed shut before they even get to use their imagination about what's should be doable. Good good good. Can't have it based on something open, something which can bring things back to the public. That would be counter-productive. Wasn't the UK supposed to be a frontier country on open data and open data-systems in the public sector or am I mixing things up?
- crusso 14y ago
  You're polemically trying to start a political argument when this school is trying to solve academic challenges. The fact is that the iPad is (or at least was) the best tablet available for them to use, so they used it rather than get trapped in the morass of trying to create hardware or use hardware that wasn't as far along. In reality, they're validating a model that would make it easier for open source alternatives to flourish down the road.
  - betterunix 14y ago
    "academic challenges" Which challenges the school chooses to address is a political issue in and of itself. If the goal of the school is to educate students so that they can become outstanding citizens, then it is probably not a good idea to train them that Apple's approach -- with its restrictions and censorship -- is how things should be, which is precisely what they are doing by giving everyone iPads. Words of wisdom: "The medium is the message." "they're validating a model that would make it easier for open source alternatives to flourish down the road" There is nothing about the iPad that helps open source. It is a computer that is built from the ground up to fight against any sort of hacking, tinkering, or user programming. In what world does open source mesh well with "pay us to be able to distribute your programs" or "you are only allowed to program the computer in the languages that we choose?"
    - crusso 14y ago
      with its restrictions and censorship So the students can't post an email or blog expressing their open thoughts because it's an iPad? Is so, I'd agree with you. You more likely mean because Apple doesn't allow one to publish randomly to their app store? If so, then you're twisting the notions of censorship. Exactly how are regular text books open for modification in schools? Writing in my textbooks was strictly forbidden. Apple's restriction on their app store has nothing meaningful to do with students expressing themselves. There is nothing about the iPad that helps open source. The whole tablet market would still not likely have been proven without the iPad. Go back before the iPad was introduced and find the market estimates for tablets. The fact that you could even imagine replacing this school's hardware with something like it that's open source is thanks to the iPad. The iPad VALIDATED the market and many of the concepts built on top of it. Without it, open source or even Android alternatives would still not be here. On top of all of this, who wants the students hacking on their tablets anyway? That tablet is for distributing information and coordinating with the teacher. The last thing you want is for it to be easy for a prankster to create applications that would facilitate cheating or mayhem. You also don't want a system that is all hacked up with 3rd party app store items riddled with trojans that keeps the students from opening their legitimate apps and learning.
randomsearch 14y ago
Using backlit tablets for extended periods gives me really bad eye strain. I tried reading on my (high-res) iPad when I first got it, and after an hour my eyes were hurting too bad to continue. AFAIK this is caused by eyes drying due to reduced blink rate. All backlit tablets will have this problem. Therefore, I still buy old-school books and print out material when I need to read it in-depth. Does no-one else think this is a concern when giving young children tablets as a replacement for non-backlit books? RS
- jimzvz 14y ago
  I agree completely, I would have hated to have to read my text books on a backlit screen.
- meaty 14y ago
  No one cares about this until about 3 months in at which point they are going to have to put up with it. This is why known a kobo and a computer and nothing else. You just can't read on a backlit device.
deleted 14y ago
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meaty 14y ago
UK education 'graduate' here. I have three children. I both love and find this development abhorrent. Positive things: The amount of textbooks I had to carry around was immense whilst at school. I actually physically injured myself carting crap around all day. There was always a shortage of books in the library. This allows side channels to be used (I.e. Stealing eBooks) as well. It allows offline communication between students and teachers. Getting time is hard. The information is interactive. Bad points: EVery back end for these things (particularly LGFL Fronter is a fucking huge piece of shit with absolutely no consistency or information architecture. This is the killer. This will be a substitute of actually taking notes which is an extremely important part of assimilating information and understanding. They will get broken in two seconds flat. Back in my day we had BBC Micros. These and TI-81 calculators are the only thing to survive. If its not left after a nuclear war with the cockroaches, then its not going to survive a UK school. Apple. No way should a closed platform be used in a school. The government have fucked that up since the introduction of RM PLC in 1992. The predecessor Acorn was so open it was unbelievable. We'd regularly hack something up in class for data collection or calculation or control from scratch. I have seen the quality of work from a UK secondary school. The children need to learn to write and be creative with real tactile things before they get abstracted away with technology. The inflexibility will dumb down education to only answers that can be machine marked. It will contract out most common skills to a machine on demand. Children, much as some of the more stupid adults today are pretty much google regurgitation machines. I see other children's homework which is basically cut and pasted bits of web sites. Oh the shelf life of IOS devices isn't good as well. 3 years per unit before it either has a useless battery life or the unit is no longer updated and the app store won't push new apps to it.
hdivider 14y ago
This could be great, but I doubt maths-heavy subjects can be studied effectively with an iPad. This is kind of sad, because maths-heavy textbooks could be vastly improved if they were properly implemented for tablets. Man, if I had the time, I'd love to work on a comprehensive solution for this: e.g. an app for studying maths-heavy material by letting you leverage the power of the device while making user interaction at least as good as ordinary paper - and maybe better. Say, you have a maths or physics textbook to study, and you're about to work on exercises. The solutions to these could then be immediately accessible (no need to enter page numbers), along with an editable list of relevant theorems/quantitative relations or wordy definitions. Wolfram Alpha integration would probably work well for many kinds of problems (e.g. calculus, or more basic algebra), to provide checks to solutions, or even to find solutions that the author didn't provide. I bet this sort of stuff can accelerate learning, and it's just the tip of the iceberg. If this could be done, then you can imagine a physics student graduating with 4 years' worth of textbooks, in-class notes and each and every exercise he/she worked on all properly accessible on one iPad and preserved for the future. (Currently, lots and lots of instructive exercises and worked examples just get chucked out once the course is done.) Maths-heavy subjects obviously introduce many formatting issues, and there's always the added layer of difficulty due to the constant need for exercises and solutions. As far as I can see though, many of these problems have already been solved in other contexts (e.g. LaTeX) - so maybe they 'just' need to be cleverly wired together and coated with an innovative UI. Just a thought.
deleted 14y ago
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36 points by petewailes 14y ago

Missing from headline: "(Obnoxiously Cheerful Music Will Start Immediately)".

As a student, I tried to use a tablet with ebooks exclusively for a few of my university classes, and it was fairly dreadful. Not because having a tablet is distracting, but because it's not the best way to organize reference information. When I was trying to do homework, I wanted - the questions from page 251, the table of equations from 190, and to be able to flip through and find similar examples. Obviously e-books fail miserably if you need quick access to multiple pages. As a test-taking tool, an iPad is not terribly effective either. The maths teacher shows that she can quickly aggregate the solutions, but there's no good way for the students to express their thought process. I'm pretty sure by their age, if I had simply written the answer on the paper I wouldn't have been given full marks. It's important to teach students good mathematical form from an early age, and this definitely undermines that. Consider maths is one of the easiest classes to write tests for, I wonder how science, english etc. are getting on - likely a lot of terribly simple multiple choice. Lastly, everyone seems so smug. The school's administration thinks they've taken this gigantic problem of how to do learning electronically and they've just knocked it out of the park. I know it's a sort of fluff piece, but it'd be better to see a longer video about problems they solved, lessons they learned, etc. As it stands, it looks like a lot of off-the-shelf software cobbled together by a local Apple rep, which is hardly ground-breaking. They've just thrown a lot of money at it. The administrator featured doesn't seem to be overly technical, and the teacher seems more interested in the fact that now she doesn't have to go home and mark things in her spare time ( but, of course, she's 'dedicated', as she says herself ).

cryptoz 14y ago
Most of those problems have very simple solutions in software features. > When I was trying to do homework, I wanted - the questions from page 251, the table of equations from 190, and to be able to flip through and find similar examples. Obviously e-books fail miserably if you need quick access to multiple pages. The solution to this could be implemented in under a week, for sure. Add a little UI for temporary bookmarks. Let the reader save a set of relevant pages (questions, table of equations, examples) and then swipe between them. Simple.
- mirumirai 14y ago
  That's exactly what I did studying for the GRE with a pdf ebook. Flipping between bookmarks feels just as fast as flipping physical pages.
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  Except for the loading times. If you've ever used a graphics-heavy textbook, especially on a high-res device like the iPad 3, rendering pages takes forever. It's not just a UI problem, it's an issue of effectively caching the bookmarked pages, and for a large book that might be a big problem.
  - mikevm 14y ago
    I read some scanned PDF files (over 150MB) and they work fine in GoodReader on my iPad 2. I'm sure that graphics heavy vector PDF files would work even faster.
- sopooneo 14y ago
  I like to have multiple books open at once all in my field of view. I think you could only replicate that with multiple tablets.
crusso 14y ago
Keep in mind that you were self-experimenting with a tablet in limited ways vs the holistic approach this school is taking. Problems that you encountered trying to use a tablet in a book-oriented environment could be solved by curriculum changes, technology improvements, UI changes, etc. While improvements to a tablet approach can resolve all of the problems you're mentioning, a regular book will never be regex searchable. A regular piece of paper will never let the teacher know your scores immediately so she can help you past problems and provide instant feedback. A regular set of class books will never decrease the need to linearly increase the number of pieces of paper needed for the amount of materials you want the students to have.
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  I've pointed out in a couple places, I don't buy the "instant feedback" solution. If I write some maths on paper, my teacher can see where I went wrong. If I check a box on a tablet, it's a boolean. Was I right, or wrong? The teacher saves some time in marking, but now I'll have to go and show them my work (on the forbidden paper!) to see where I went wrong. As far as searching, the index at the back of a book is likely more useful than full-text search. Usually I'm not interested in a particular term, but 'that thing that we covered last week, with the Fourier Transform', or something like that. There aren't any keywords, regexes won't help - you need a well-organized textbook where the headings and sub-headings facilitate this kind of searching. Curriculum changes seem like the wrong way to go as well - if a tablet isn't good for teaching a subject, don't jam the subject into a format the tablet can understand. This is clearest in the testing case, but it's generally applicable: the tablet, as a device, exposes an interface. Paper exposes the ultimate interface: it accepts any free-form input. At best tablets can work in a similar way, but we have a hard time doing anything useful with this input. As we normalize the input to make it easier to process, we move away from a general purpose input device, and we force students to think and express themselves in the specific way we designed the interface to work.
simonh 14y ago
It's true that current software has limitations, but I'm confident these will be improved and I've found loads of workarounds. I run pan & paper RPGs and have a lot of reference material in different PDFs, many of which are compilations of pages I've put together myself with PDFtk[1]. One trick is to screenshot the pages you need to refer to frequently into a photo album. You can also photo pages from paper books for quick reference this way. I also use this trick with map screenshots for journeys where I won't have online access. I used that for a trip to the Lake District. Another trick is to have each PDF file you need to switch between open in a separate app, then four-finger swipe between them. When you learn that trick it's amazing how well it works. Many of the PDFs I keep in iBooks are also in Dropbox and Google Drive and my most used ones are pinned/starred for local storage so I can easily move back and forth between three different files. This method probably won't work as well for ebooks though. Far from ideal, sure, but I've found it a very practical and usable solution. [1] http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/
- stinos 14y ago
  all these tricks are nice and useful, but in my experience they cost more time and are less effective than just lying out all needed paper material in front of you, on your desk, so switching between them is merely a matter of moving your eyes. Of which the electronic equivalent is having lots of screen space like 3 monitors.
  - simonh 14y ago
    Fair enough, but I still think an iPad is a fantastic supplement to using paper materials. It can completely replace them in a lot of use cases, and offers capabilities (such as taking literal photo copies of printed materials, whiteboards, notice boards, etc for reference later) that paper can't compete with. It can't replace paper completely, sure, but they are very rapidly becoming indispensable tools in a lot of situations and I think that will soon include education.
mikevm 14y ago
I'm a student that uses an iPad with ebooks exclusively, and I much prefer the experience to a physical book. As others have said, you complain about software problems, and not inherent problems in the hardware device. In fact, GoodReader lets you set up bookmarks so you can flip back and forth. It also lets you open books in multiple tabs, so you can work with a few books simultaneously. Don't forget another important feature of eBooks - you can search the whole book. You can also annotate without ruining the physical copy ;-). The only problem is books that aren't well made, for example, PDFs without hyperlinks (like "Equation 2.6.1" is not clickable so you have to flip back).

kitsune_ 14y ago

Of course, of all tablets, it had to be an iPad!

obtino 14y ago
TBH, it's hard to get the same level of user-experience from an Android tablet. There are very few apps on Android which offer the same level of experience as those found on the iPad. Also, in a school setting, how do you expect students and teachers to deal with different versions of operating systems and device specifications?
- skymt 14y ago
  I doubt the degree of magic involved in the user experience factors into institutional technology purchasing. And fragmentation is hardly an issue when the school is buying all the hardware. Frankly, your comment reads like a pair of talking points taken off the shelf and jammed in where they don't fit.
  - obtino 14y ago
    > I doubt the degree of magic involved in the user experience factors into institutional technology purchasing. User experience is not magic. It's something that involves a lot of time and effort on behalf of the apps developers. It does contribute to the choices made by individuals and this filters up to the institution level. How do you think the iPad penetrated the enterprise? > And fragmentation is hardly an issue when the school is buying all the hardware. True. However, what happens when the school wishes to use an app that's not supported by the device they purchased? As an Android user I've found plenty of apps that fail on my device while working perfectly on others. Sure there are problems with compatibility with apps on different versions of iOS, but they are relatively minor compared to the problems that I've come across on Android.
objclxt 14y ago
There is something to be said for service continuity. After-market support from Android manufacturers can be variable, whereas it's something of a known quantity with Apple. There's also the software issue: there is simply a better and more wide reaching range of tablet optimised educational software on iOS than Android. Also, on a more practical level, trying to procure a thousand Nexus 10s is no easy task. I don't think one platform is inherently better than the other in the education market, but it should be pretty self-evident that Apple is better set-up to currently sell into the sector.

OGinparadise 14y ago

Personally I found tablets AND laptops lagging a plain old paper notebook when it came to reviewing notes before the test. Distraction is another thing (sit on the back and watch to get an idea) but I presume that iPads can eventually be modified to access only coursework.

fpp 14y ago

This project has been going on for some time - very interesting. Recently I've been hearing about (planned / just started) similar projects in the UK and the US with K12 and higher education. TMK its iPads as frontends, Meru Wireless Networks to connect the about 2000 iPads, MS Server 2008 with AD and MS Exchange at the backend. for more info see: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/the-school-where-every-teacher-has-an-ipad-and-every-student-has-an-ipod-7578167.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/t... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13FO_A0Sokw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13FO_A0Sokw (plus an Apple UK profile on ESSA) http://www.apple.com/uk/education/profiles/essa/ http://www.apple.com/uk/education/profiles/essa/

steverb 14y ago

My kids' high school (http://knoxcountystemac.knoxschools.org/ http://knoxcountystemac.knoxschools.org/) has done this as well. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, the kids aren't hauling 30 pounds of books to and from school everyday, school lockers are pretty much superfluous, and the iPad is a great tool. On the other hand, it's very hard for me as their parent to tell (at a glance) whether or not the kids are actually doing school work or just screwing around and it's very easy for the kids to get distracted if they aren't having a good concentration day. Like everything else, it's a bit of a mixed bag.

robmcm 14y ago
Can you not restrict them so they can't install games etc? [EDIT] The iPads, not the kids!
- steverb 14y ago
  Not that I can tell, but we took the controversial tack of telling the kids not to install any games on there. So far, it's working for us.
  - js2 14y ago
    Settings > General > Restrictions?
    - steverb 14y ago
      I don't have an iPad in front of me, but so far as I can tell there is no "Only let useful apps be installed" setting. Besides, it's an attitude issue. Preventing them from installing stuff via a setting isn't going to stop a kid from screwing around if they really want to (IMO). We choose to address the attitude and the actual behavior (if and when it occurs).
- UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
  With enterprise tools for iPad you have complete and total control over how the device is used. You can restrict installing apps, uninstalling apps, using the camera, loading the App Store, talking with Siri, altering settings, etc. See this list for some of the things you can do: http://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/1.2/#cadbf9e41d http://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/1.2/#cadbf9e41d Yet more: http://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/1.2/#cad5370d089 http://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/1.2/#cad5370d089

mpclark 14y ago

Meanwhile, here's another 'iPads in the classroom' story from last week, focussing on how fast the kids destroy them: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255546/School-spent-500-000-giving-pupils-iPads-admits-HALF-broken.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255546/School-spent...

objclxt 14y ago
...it's a terribly misleading story (which doesn't come as a surprise to me, it's the Daily Mail after all), because it conveniently omits breakage rates of one-to-one laptop deployments. It may not come as a surprise to many people to learn that laptops break almost as often as tablets when deployed one-on-one in schools. A quick Google led me to one study from 2004 in Maine, where over an 18 month period 50% of laptops required repair, and 35% of students experienced laptops breaking down or being accidentally damaged[1]. The main difference is that a higher percentage of tablets require total replacement, which is somewhat understandable as tablets (be they Android or iOS) are far less user serviceable. [1]: http://maine.gov/mlti/articles/research/PCHSLaptopsFinal.pdf http://maine.gov/mlti/articles/research/PCHSLaptopsFinal.pdf
- revelation 14y ago
  I don't understand. There are schools (the majority of them!) that do neither tablet nor laptop "1-to-1 deployments", for maybe this very reason.
nicholassmith 14y ago
It did also say that the cases they were using weren't great, and when swapped out they were much less prone to breakages. Plus kids are kids, things are going to get broken, that's why the devices were insured.

jstalin 14y ago

Maybe it's generational (I'm 33) and maybe it's personal preference, but I much prefer a physical book over reading on a tablet. I remember reading an article somewhere saying that our brains do a better job of organizing material if it's a physical book because part of the organization process is remembering where in the book the remembered material was. I get no sense of "place" when reading an e-book. I even print out important material because that makes it easier for me to read.

pkorzeniewski 14y ago
I have similar feelings about reading books on tablet, I just can't get used to it. The only advantage to me is the unlimited number of books I can 'carry', otherwise I'll always choose a physical book.
UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
I find tablets fine for reading one single book, in particular when you're reading that book from cover to cover. So if I want to buy a fiction book (e.g. The Hobbit) on my Kindle it works just fine. But when it comes to non-fiction/reference books the technology is just not ready. You don't read cover to cover, you bounce around, you mark sections, you take notes, you check your answers in the back, and yet the software I have seen does all of this stuff badly. Plus whenever people roll out one of these snazzy "look how hip and modern we are" school programs I never read about how much they spent on teacher training or development of researches (apps, lesson plans, etc). So I always wonder if they literally just turned up with a pack of iPads one day and said to the teachers "make this work!" Without any real thought given to how exactly the teachers are meant to use them.
crusso 14y ago
I'm 10 years older than you, but when I'm doing development, I hardly use physical materials at all anymore. Development problems melt like butter when confronted with Chrome->Google->stackexchange. The last thing I want to start doing is searching around for the right book, look through the index, thumb from indexed page to indexed page, look back at the index because I forgot the 4th page number I saw that looked like it might apply, wonder if the latest version of the framework I'm using fixed the problem I'm seeing, etc. My kids live on their tablets and computers. They will have even less problems adapting to that mode of working than we do - and the solutions they have to reproduce useful paper techniques like highlighting and note taking will completely change the picture in high-tech's favor.

nicholassmith 14y ago

£65k saved off photocopying is huge. I've seen copier bills so I know what they can be like, but that's crazy savings from introducing it. Wonder if they're just emailing everything out now, which makes significantly more sense. I'm in favour of iPads in school. I've ran through a few of the educational programs on the iPad (including iTunes and Udemy as well as textbooks), it's a great resource and helps to consolidate everything I need in one place. When I was at Uni I was one of the few people who used a laptop to take notes in lectures as I found it easier to split my focus. I can't watch the video but I'm guessing that they've got all the iPads through the enterprise system that most big companies are (or should be anyway) using, which gives them a bit more granularity on what's going on, pushing updates and some additional restrictions. I'm sure teachers are smart enough to realise that kids with fully unlocked iPads are going to spend their time mucking about.

Macha 14y ago
An iPad is currently £330. We'll be generous and assume Apple gave the school a 50% discount (which is huge and probably unlikely as I'd imagine even Apple aren't charging 100% markup). So £165 per iPad * 840 students (according to the video) = £138,600. They've spent more than double what they saved on photocopying, not to mention that 840 iPads take a lot more maintenance than five or six photocopiers.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  Well the cost of the iPads is a fixed cost, and they'll run them as long as possible. The savings won't ever cover the costs, but we're also missing figures for how it changed IT spending (did they need new machines? Have they avoided them?). It's an expensive proposition that's for sure, but so were computer suites 15 years ago and they had those when I was a wee lad.

mavhc 14y ago

The school did a presentation at an Apple event I went to, the pupils were there too. Apple was pushing 1 to 1 deployment, everyone sets up their own accounts. There's loads of licencing and control issues though ("apps are only $1, just buy a new licence for every new pupil"). Fine for university level, but still a lot of compromises for schools.

objclxt 14y ago
>There's loads of licencing and control issues though ("apps are only $1, just buy a new licence for every new pupil") There is a volume licensing program for the App Store, where schools retain ownership and can buy in bulk at a discount (where developers opt in to allow such discounts). But in fairness, distribution still isn't perfect out of the box (it's done via one-time codes on the App Store. It is possible to automate this, but not as standard).

sopooneo 14y ago

Someone close to me works at a very good public high school in Massachusetts. The district is in the middle of the enormous task of planning/budgeting/funding a new school building. At one point they showed some preliminary plans to various interested parties, and the teachers were immediately prompted to ask where the bookshelves were, or where freestanding ones could even be placed. The answer from the superintendent was that this school was to have no physical books whatsoever, so they're not bothering with shelves.

ensignavenger 14y ago
There are a lot of things that go on 'book' shelves that aren't books! I think this was a major design flaw.
snogglethorpe 14y ago
ARgh, where do they find these people, and why are they entrusted with important positions affecting the education of our kids?! Seriously, what are the qualifications required for school administrators? These stories give the impression that they're crazily gullible and shallow people, whose decisions are guided more by the latest school-administrator fads than by actual experience with education...

cantlin 14y ago

The extraordinary overhead of printing, purchasing and distributing education texts alone would seem to make this a no brainer. The cost of supplying 840 pupils with iPads and covers, even at consumer rates, would only be around £350K. From the stated numbers, this would be recouped in saved photocopying bills alone in around five years. Clearly there will be significant software and operations costs, but I would speculate that the less obvious time and material savings (e.g. updating a hand-out from a previous class to reflect new teaching best practices) would more than offset these costs. Centralising resources is a natural side effect of digital distribution, and encourages resource sharing at all levels of the organisation. It's easy to think up other small but significant wins enabled by this approach. We've probably all had the experience of watching a stand-in teacher struggle to fill the lesson time because the regular guy has become suddenly indisposed. With good systems in place it's easy to imagine this being a non-problem.

nodata 14y ago
An iPad will never last five years: if they don't become laughably obsolete, they will be broken.

josteink 14y ago

So good that kids get to learn of the Orwellian world of 1984 as early as possible. They get to learn that computers are sealed shut before they even get to use their imagination about what's should be doable. Good good good. Can't have it based on something open, something which can bring things back to the public. That would be counter-productive. Wasn't the UK supposed to be a frontier country on open data and open data-systems in the public sector or am I mixing things up?

crusso 14y ago
You're polemically trying to start a political argument when this school is trying to solve academic challenges. The fact is that the iPad is (or at least was) the best tablet available for them to use, so they used it rather than get trapped in the morass of trying to create hardware or use hardware that wasn't as far along. In reality, they're validating a model that would make it easier for open source alternatives to flourish down the road.
- betterunix 14y ago
  "academic challenges" Which challenges the school chooses to address is a political issue in and of itself. If the goal of the school is to educate students so that they can become outstanding citizens, then it is probably not a good idea to train them that Apple's approach -- with its restrictions and censorship -- is how things should be, which is precisely what they are doing by giving everyone iPads. Words of wisdom: "The medium is the message." "they're validating a model that would make it easier for open source alternatives to flourish down the road" There is nothing about the iPad that helps open source. It is a computer that is built from the ground up to fight against any sort of hacking, tinkering, or user programming. In what world does open source mesh well with "pay us to be able to distribute your programs" or "you are only allowed to program the computer in the languages that we choose?"
  - crusso 14y ago
    with its restrictions and censorship So the students can't post an email or blog expressing their open thoughts because it's an iPad? Is so, I'd agree with you. You more likely mean because Apple doesn't allow one to publish randomly to their app store? If so, then you're twisting the notions of censorship. Exactly how are regular text books open for modification in schools? Writing in my textbooks was strictly forbidden. Apple's restriction on their app store has nothing meaningful to do with students expressing themselves. There is nothing about the iPad that helps open source. The whole tablet market would still not likely have been proven without the iPad. Go back before the iPad was introduced and find the market estimates for tablets. The fact that you could even imagine replacing this school's hardware with something like it that's open source is thanks to the iPad. The iPad VALIDATED the market and many of the concepts built on top of it. Without it, open source or even Android alternatives would still not be here. On top of all of this, who wants the students hacking on their tablets anyway? That tablet is for distributing information and coordinating with the teacher. The last thing you want is for it to be easy for a prankster to create applications that would facilitate cheating or mayhem. You also don't want a system that is all hacked up with 3rd party app store items riddled with trojans that keeps the students from opening their legitimate apps and learning.

randomsearch 14y ago

Using backlit tablets for extended periods gives me really bad eye strain. I tried reading on my (high-res) iPad when I first got it, and after an hour my eyes were hurting too bad to continue. AFAIK this is caused by eyes drying due to reduced blink rate. All backlit tablets will have this problem. Therefore, I still buy old-school books and print out material when I need to read it in-depth. Does no-one else think this is a concern when giving young children tablets as a replacement for non-backlit books? RS

jimzvz 14y ago
I agree completely, I would have hated to have to read my text books on a backlit screen.
meaty 14y ago
No one cares about this until about 3 months in at which point they are going to have to put up with it. This is why known a kobo and a computer and nothing else. You just can't read on a backlit device.

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meaty 14y ago

UK education 'graduate' here. I have three children. I both love and find this development abhorrent. Positive things: The amount of textbooks I had to carry around was immense whilst at school. I actually physically injured myself carting crap around all day. There was always a shortage of books in the library. This allows side channels to be used (I.e. Stealing eBooks) as well. It allows offline communication between students and teachers. Getting time is hard. The information is interactive. Bad points: EVery back end for these things (particularly LGFL Fronter is a fucking huge piece of shit with absolutely no consistency or information architecture. This is the killer. This will be a substitute of actually taking notes which is an extremely important part of assimilating information and understanding. They will get broken in two seconds flat. Back in my day we had BBC Micros. These and TI-81 calculators are the only thing to survive. If its not left after a nuclear war with the cockroaches, then its not going to survive a UK school. Apple. No way should a closed platform be used in a school. The government have fucked that up since the introduction of RM PLC in 1992. The predecessor Acorn was so open it was unbelievable. We'd regularly hack something up in class for data collection or calculation or control from scratch. I have seen the quality of work from a UK secondary school. The children need to learn to write and be creative with real tactile things before they get abstracted away with technology. The inflexibility will dumb down education to only answers that can be machine marked. It will contract out most common skills to a machine on demand. Children, much as some of the more stupid adults today are pretty much google regurgitation machines. I see other children's homework which is basically cut and pasted bits of web sites. Oh the shelf life of IOS devices isn't good as well. 3 years per unit before it either has a useless battery life or the unit is no longer updated and the app store won't push new apps to it.

hdivider 14y ago

This could be great, but I doubt maths-heavy subjects can be studied effectively with an iPad. This is kind of sad, because maths-heavy textbooks could be vastly improved if they were properly implemented for tablets. Man, if I had the time, I'd love to work on a comprehensive solution for this: e.g. an app for studying maths-heavy material by letting you leverage the power of the device while making user interaction at least as good as ordinary paper - and maybe better. Say, you have a maths or physics textbook to study, and you're about to work on exercises. The solutions to these could then be immediately accessible (no need to enter page numbers), along with an editable list of relevant theorems/quantitative relations or wordy definitions. Wolfram Alpha integration would probably work well for many kinds of problems (e.g. calculus, or more basic algebra), to provide checks to solutions, or even to find solutions that the author didn't provide. I bet this sort of stuff can accelerate learning, and it's just the tip of the iceberg. If this could be done, then you can imagine a physics student graduating with 4 years' worth of textbooks, in-class notes and each and every exercise he/she worked on all properly accessible on one iPad and preserved for the future. (Currently, lots and lots of instructive exercises and worked examples just get chucked out once the course is done.) Maths-heavy subjects obviously introduce many formatting issues, and there's always the added layer of difficulty due to the constant need for exercises and solutions. As far as I can see though, many of these problems have already been solved in other contexts (e.g. LaTeX) - so maybe they 'just' need to be cleverly wired together and coated with an innovative UI. Just a thought.

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