opinion on ipads in schools?

[pspfreak]

Our school is starting to roll out iPads for every student. They have completed 6 and 7th grades, and specific classes that need them. What is your opinion on ipads in the classroom. Do you think they would of been better getting laptops for everybody, or a case with a keyboard.

[AlwaysFSX]

Expensive waste of money.

[Freaky_spider]

better get a surface like my school has, its pretty amazing, ipads are useless for school work

[Osmium]

Don't have computers in schools. My being on this forum is why.

[pspfreak]

Surprisingly the IT teacher who works on android made the suggestion.

[flibberdipper]

Better than these fucking Chromebooks.

[Guest]

My school issues iPad to students, and I have to say, between the note-taking, word processing, and great apps for science, math, and history, it's actually really useful. We have interactive textbooks, which are much cheaper than physical ones, and can do more.

 

Though some schools will probably just hand kids iPads and call it a day, I think mine planned it out a little better.

[Guest]

better get a surface like my school has, its pretty amazing, ipads are useless for school work

I do not concur.

[C_Mike]

I think laptops are a bit more useful than iPads. Much easier to type on, and for specific classes like computing they're essential.

[DigitalHermit]

Waste of money... I mean why? Does the school use an iOS app to teach students?

 

Best way to go imo is a rugged midrange Android tablet (rentals) or roll out the needed app for both Android and iOS (it shouldn't be that difficult to do if you'll be working with a server-client model)...

[SeriouslyMikey]

I think computers is enough. All I had was old Windows Vista PC's that even had trouble running PhotoPhop. Got us by. I don't see why a child in a school will need access to a tablet, when it doesn't give anything more than what a PC can do.

[rambi36]

I prefer laptops any day!

[Guest]

Having seen both 'Laptops in Classrooms' and 'iPad - iLearn' programs in action my vote goes directly to the ipads and tablets in general for a number of reasons.

• Weight
  • Ipads are a lot lighter when you take into account their casing, the charger and then the device itself while still offering good battery life.
• Application
  • To be honest I do not see that students should be typing all of their work out - it should still be hand written. For the last year or so of my school life we did have Dell notebooks in the classroom however I barely bought mine in favor of my personal iPad purely for text books and occasionally as a easy to use pen and touch based calculator. iPad's are much easier to use for textbooks allowing you to flip pages easily and zoom in on content. Put this in contrast with Adobe Reader or similar which on a 10" laptop display is a pain in the ass to use when paired with a crappy touchpad.
• Distraction
  • It is much more difficult to be distracted on a tablet than it is a laptop. My reasoning behind this is that the laptop screen builds a barrier between what the student sees and what the teacher sees. Old computer rooms were always designed with a circle in mind because it allowed the teacher to better communicate with the students and also monitor their progress or in some cases, lack there of during lessons. With an iPad left face up on a desk as a textbook, a teacher can keep a better eye on what the student is actually doing. There was many a time I saw students on Facebook & Myspace (easy to bypass proxies for Vic education department), Skype/MSN ect. iPads in particular also prevent this as multitasking on an ipad involves a lot of manual work to switch between two applications whereas with laptops and the majority of most tablets, it's one or two clicks or taps and you've switched from Skype to what you're meant to be doing quite easily before the teacher catches wind of the issue. 
• Durability
  • Now I guarantee that most of you will disagree when I say an iPad is more durable than a laptop but when you're looking at sub $1000 notebooks that have poor plastic construction like those from Dell, the aluminium and glass mix body of an iPad in combination with a notebook style case is a hell of a lot more durable. Mix this with flash based storage in comparison with WD Blue 5400RPM drives that break quite easily when thrown around in a school bag or knocked off a desk and the iPad from what I've seen first hand lasts a lot longer. 
• Deployment
  • Having seen and been involved in the deployment of netbooks in classroms, iPad's are a lot easier to deploy on a mass scale as each netbook has to be imaged which is roughly a 3 hour plus process for every unit depending on the network infrastructure. 

[AlwaysFSX]

Waste of money... I mean why? Does the school use an iOS app to teach students?

 

Best way to go imo is a rugged midrange Android tablet (rentals) or roll out the needed app for both Android and iOS (it shouldn't be that difficult to do if you'll be working with a server-client model)...

Because technology makes everything easier! I'm looking at you @AMorassOfPixelz

 

Taking notes and writing things needs to be done by hand.

[Bogica]

Computers as they are more robust. Kids tend to hit mouse and keyboards and if they break it's much easier to replace them and cheaper than it is to replace an iPad or laptop. PC's are perfectly fine for classroom needs, no need for anything more than that.

[ThatSweetGamer]

My old school district did this but with macbook airs... It was horrible, a big distraction, and depended on the network to work when half the time it didn't. they wasted 960k on macbooks. No joke...

[Interfectorem]

iOS on a tablet, just ugh.

[pspfreak]

iOS on a tablet, just ugh.

iOS on anything. Ugh

[murratri]

I have an Ipad for school but because of the shit they put on it, its takes at least 3 minutes to google something and more if I misspell anything. This makes them essentially useless for school.

[Interfectorem]

iOS on anything. Ugh

Agreed. iOS, in my opinion feels like wasted space on iPads. It works well for iPhones. But I just don't like the "locked-down-ness" of iOS.

[frostin1990]

Remember that story where a kid who hated apple products so much that the moment he knew the school was giving them to students he went and pissed on all the ipads in the school warehouse and they had to dispose all of them.Wish this happened very often.

[Trik'Stari]

Fucking stupid. Your little asses can write by hand and get hand cramps and carpal tunnel like I did.

 

Remember that story where a kid who hated apple products so much that the moment he knew the school was giving them to students he went and pissed on all the ipads in the school warehouse and they had to dispose all of them.Wish this happened very often.

Seems justified. If they'd handed me one when I was in school I'd have refused to accept it based on the principle that it's an apple.

[jezza39]

I think tablets don't belong in a classroom, and laptops probably shouldn't be there either. Good luck doing maths and physics on a laptop or iPad. You don't write exams on a computer, you do it by hand (except for one or two IT courses). 

 

I personally prefer physical paper textbooks to pdfs as it's so much easier to flip through pages in a book than to scroll.

[murratri]

I also think they should of gotten us Thinkpads instead of ipads because they will last longer better. The school said they wanted to use the same ipads from when I was in 7th to 12th grade. They think they will be useable in 5 years. i loled when they said that.

[SnowGhost1212]

Honestly, I think that Microsoft should be dominating the market for school devices. I can definitely see the Surface Pro 3 being quite useful in classroom situations. If Microsoft played there cards right I think that could definitely be seen as an "Advanced" Chromebook type device (in terms of design for productivity of non-enthusiast computer users).