School adopting tablets

My kid also starting at private school next year...Pre Primary though. Hopefully by the time he is in 3rd or 4th grade textbooks will be in the cloud. He is 4 years old now and he has had a tablet for more than a year already. Obviously Angry Birds is not "schoolwork" but he understood touchscreen swiping etc very quickly...
 
Why not see if you can organise a lot of the tablets from the MyBB specials, they are decent enough and I am sure you can get a massive discount if you buy a few, yes they won't be Samsung Galaxy tabs but they will more then likely be enough for the students and at that price they can keep them for R1300 instead of handing them back.
 
Lupus said:
Why not see if you can organise a lot of the tablets from the MyBB specials, they are decent enough and I am sure you can get a massive discount if you buy a few, yes they won't be Samsung Galaxy tabs but they will more then likely be enough for the students and at that price they can keep them for R1300 instead of handing them back.
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The deal has been done and Nexus 7's distributed to the kids already.
 
Mike Smit said:
My wife is at my kids school now where the school is talking about introducing tablets from next year. I was too lazy to go.

So far the costs are as follows.
School supplies tablet initially.
Parents have to pay an annual fee of R1,300.
If the child loses the tablet, the parent must pay for lost one, pay for replacement, and continue to pay the annual fee.

This seems unfair. I get the fee is to slowly recover the initial spend on the tablet. If the child however loses it and the parent must now pay a double tablet cost then surely the annual fee should stop?
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How is it unfair? You child loses it, you pay. Seems 100% fair to me.
 
Boksburg School also adopts

I already see people in their early 20's who can't spell without a spell checker (must laugh if they quickly copy and paste into Outlook or Word, before they use what they have written) and even then they sometimes use a wrong spelling of the word that has a different meaning. So spell checker doesn't help them very well. Also, I hope they are still going to write. Writing is still a very important skill, showing good hand eye coordination etc. People who can only type and not write, that doesn't sound right.

What's next, pupils will not even type, they will give voice commands......
 
I'm wondering how this will actually works in the classroom itself.

Is someone building Apps for these Tablets? Or are they using web services and the kids log into a web application using the Tablets?
 
Probably ebooks where they can make side notes etc. With some sort of Word or notebook to make notes
 
Mike Smit said:
Yup. You get it.
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No.

The monthly payment is for the one that got lost.

So even if you pay that for the next 100 months, you would still need to replace the tablet.

Just replacing it isn't enough.

You pay twice because you are getting 2.

If your car gets stolen you're not going to tell bank "Forget about my payments now, I already bought another car." It doesn't work like that. You still have to pay off the first car.
 
beans100 said:
Boksburg School also adopts

I already see people in their early 20's who can't spell without a spell checker (must laugh if they quickly copy and paste into Outlook or Word, before they use what they have written) and even then they sometimes use a wrong spelling of the word that has a different meaning. So spell checker doesn't help them very well. Also, I hope they are still going to write. Writing is still a very important skill, showing good hand eye coordination etc. People who can only type and not write, that doesn't sound right.

What's next, pupils will not even type, they will give voice commands......
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That would be great, wouldn't it

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html

Makes you think doesn't it.
 
Nerfherder said:
That would be great, wouldn't it

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html

Makes you think doesn't it.
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Nice vids, thanks. The kids in the footage were stimulated by these new things in their environment and wanted to learn how to use them, but nobody taught them or spoon fed them. Reminds me of how I taught myself a basic English, just to play Space Quest.
Hope the kids that "adopts" the tablets in school also gets the positive kind of stimulation seen in this footage.
 
King David Linksfield has had an iPad program since 2009, now has 3 grades using iPads with iBooks for textbooks I believe.
 
Schools are moving quickly to digital content and not without quite an investment from themselves and parents. Besides the wireless infrastructure that needs to be in place, staff need to be trained on how to best use tablets in the classroom. Then somebody has to find, assess and then licence / purchase the content which could be apps, pdfs, mobi, epub, or websites. As far as I know the Dept of Education does not have a submission process yet for digital content which means it is pretty much a free for all on what devices and content to procure. Many local publishers are offering "digital books" which are in fact just pdfs of the printed book. Try reading a page that has been designed for an A4 page on a 7 inch tablet, I'd rather have the printed book thanks.

Digital formats for educational resources could be split even further. Your language subjects could have most of its content as epub, while your sciences might well be better suited as apps with built in interactivity (e.g. animated diagram of the water cycle). Currently apps and epubs mostly have different procurement methods, apps are often licensed (software) and epubs bought per copy (publishing). Not to say it will not change, but will take quite a shift in procurement systems.

It doesn't seem fair that schools restrict families to one kind of device. I'm sure there must be a growing number of families that have an previous generation iPad or Galaxy tab that can be passed on to the children as a learning device and parent upgrade to a newer device for themselves.
 
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