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[nutballs]

http://4sp.in/37d

didnt take long at all.
Brilliant if you ask me, as long as all the books are available electronically.
50 pound backpack traded for a 1.5 pound ipad. sold!

[perkiset]

So long as it's not a replacement for real teachers and real work, I'm good with it. Too often, "educators" (actually, administrators and bean counters, not teachers) are more worried about cost effectiveness than actual critical thinking - If they're using it to FREALS enhance the learning experience I'm all for it. But I must admit to a certain cynical suspicion that it's marketing driven...

[rcjordan]

For the past 18 months or so, I've been doing some kibitzing with a private school department head regarding digital coursework. Seeing a teacher use a smartboard effectively in class, post support materials & course syllabuses on the class website, and also maintain after-class help for students and contact with parents via email, you quickly come to realize that textbooks (and perhaps even the physical classrooms) are being can be marginalized.

I think this MN move is perhaps a year premature. They seem to be taking a flying leap of faith re course material.  It's out there, but I wonder if they've had anyone really assemble a finished product?  Still, I think it's do-able and somebody has to be first. I can think of a few reasons a rural HS in MN might just be a perfect place to cobble it all together.

[isthisthingon]

So long as it's not a replacement for real teachers and real work, I'm good with it. Too often, "educators" (actually, administrators and bean counters, not teachers) are more worried about cost effectiveness than actual critical thinking - If they're using it to FREALS enhance the learning experience I'm all for it. But I must admit to a certain cynical suspicion that it's marketing driven...

@ marketing driven 

When it comes to education you know my position on this.  It's a damn crime to infuse our educational institutions with technologies that forbid source-level study.  Open your source or get the hell out of our schools, imho    All else is just a pathetic attempt to control the future of technology by grooming students into one fold or another 

[perkiset]

When it comes to education you know my position on this.  It's a damn crime to infuse our educational institutions with technologies that forbid source-level study.  Open your source or get the hell out of our schools, imho    All else is just a pathetic attempt to control the future of technology by grooming students into one fold or another 

Lordy. "Open your source or get the hell out" Based on the license scheme most currently employed out there, there'd almost literally be nothing left in our schools. And what is there would be total horsepoop.

Anarchic reboots like that would not help students at all.

[kurdt]

Jeez.. Apple is going to be replacing A LOT of units.

[isthisthingon]

Here's to horsepoop: Why should open source software be used in schools?

 

EDIT: "It is indeed a strange world when educators need to be convinced that sharing information, as opposed to concealing information, is a good thing."

 

[Phaëton]

The dvds have pushed the books against the wall already in my local library
and more and more terminals are being wired in ... they have giant screen
monitors , fast connections, nice headphones and volumes of rom media where
all the books used to be.

[kurdt]

The dvds have pushed the books against the wall already in my local library
and more and more terminals are being wired in ... they have giant screen
monitors , fast connections, nice headphones and volumes of rom media where
all the books used to be.

It's just a phase. Books are not coming back and those terminals are only half of the equation.. you'll see

[Bompa]

It's a shame. 

In the long run literature will suffer.  Who's going to read Gone With The Wind
on their ipad or notebook or whatever, (other than nop). 

If reading diminishes, so will language, vocabulary, spelling, and communication.

What is the world coming to?


Old man.

[Phaëton]

If reading diminishes, so will language, vocabulary, spelling, and communication.

What is the world coming to?

i can haz grammer?

or cheezeburgerzes?

epic FAIL? FTW FWTIW im just sayin'

thats what im talkin about

oh no i didnt

oh and on the subject of iPads raising children...   
soon well be able to say happy grandPad's day or something?

yo, that's whats up.. lmk what ya think asap ok cu l8r k bye

[nutballs]

Lol

[perkiset]

Lol this all from a group of tech people.

A long time ago, it was thought that if a car could ever make it to 40mph the wind would rip your face off.

It's not the tool or the mechanism IMO. It's intersting, Bomps, that you use Gone With The Wind as an example. Who even read that after the movie was made in 1939, only 3 years after the book came out? Now I'm with you when it comes to Emerson, Thoreau and the like ... But after college where people are forced to read them, how many people do? As a counter point, i enjoy the essays of Emerson quite a bit but cannot be bothered to take a book with me everywhere I go ... But it's now in my virtual bookshelf on the iPad and it's with me all the time. I actually am reading more now that i have the pad than I was before, because it is more convenient.

And that's the deal really, isn't it? If a device facilitates me reading and makes it easier for me to do so, I'm more likely to do so. It's not as romantic as a book, but it's damn cool. Are we more concerned with the mechanism or the result? Does the destination change if we take a car rather than ride a horse to get there?   

[Phaëton]

In the early nineties a friend of mine was employed by better education, inc
he wrote modula-2 stuff to do this very same electronic interactive classroom and was
implemented in christopher newport university's classroom... it was with
ti- calculators that were all networked with IR and an overhead projector
basically a quiz as you go class system... they made lots of money developing
it but without something as powerful as the ipad it was nothing more than a beefed
up game show..

http://www.bedu.com/

Better Education, Inc.

Better Education, Inc. is an educational research organization located in Yorktown, Virginia. The organization was formed in the late 1980's by a small group of scientists, educators and programmers who wanted to find new ways to use computer technology to improve learning in the classroom. Most members of the group had been associated with a major technological achievement (NASA space shuttle, Concord jet, ozone-monitoring systems, earth-orbiting space satellites, Commodore home computers, etc.) and they wanted to apply their talents to the field of education. Their objective was to find new ways to use computer technology to improve teaching and learning. The result of their effort was an entirely new genre of instructional technology which they called the"Classroom Communication System". Better Education was awarded a patent on the technology in 1991. After extensive testing and evaluation to identify and validate the learning benefit, Classtalk was formally introduced in October, 1994.

[perkiset]

Bear in mind that no one here is claiming that the ipad is going to be the electronic interactive classroom. I am with you that most of that stuff is just horseshit. BAD horseshit. The effort in MN is to simply replace textbooks with electronic textbooks. That will certainly expand to more, since the tool will be in the hands of the students, but I don't think that's the charter of the program.

My kids are now required to turn in their homework electronically. They type it anyway, and then post it into the teachers account from their account (to keep fraud down, certainly) and alls good. There's no more The Dog Ate My Homework. At all. It's easy and crisp for my kids to demonstrate that they got their work in on time ... Or not, in which case they are fairly dealt with like others that missed a deadline.

I think we miss some important forward notions if we lump all electronic stuff into one bucket. There are plenty nasty horrible things that shouldn't be in education. DONE CORRECTLY i don't see a problem with the direction that they are going.