iPad is a catalyst for Education Revolution
06 May 2010 | News | Ali Gorelova on Google+
iPad has been out for a week. College students everywhere will be happy that it will replace having to carry a notepad, calculator or a textbook. iPad has all these educational tools and if it does, deservedly, become popular it will certainly revolutionize the classroom experience.
Let us take books for instance, each subject, be it English literature, physics, chemistry, or anthropology, requires a lot of reading and college students have to carry stacks of books on each of these subjects, which is a real pain in the back.
iPad stands to change all that. Soon every textbook will be available on iPad. All those pages that once were very heavy can be carried in just a package weighing 1.5 pounds. Moreover, the textbooks on iPad will have better page viewing quality than paperback version. You could flip through the chemistry book’s electronic pages and see the simulation explaining water changing from solid to liquid.
As students switch to iPads they will switch away from pencils and notepads. The multi-touch interface of iPad makes note-taking simple. It removes the need to copy someone’s notes, or the tape recording of lectures. With many first class note taking apps in the pipeline, skipping class will be much easier.
Science and Math classes are also going to change. If you are taking advanced science and math classes, you will require a very costly calculator. This, in comparison to the iPad is quite basic in functionality. iPad will do many more advanced calculations.
iPhone has many calculator programs for it. Access to public data and a vast array of functions is cheaply available through Wolfram Alpha. You can access all this using iPad which was not possible on a pocket calculator. With iPad expected to become cheaper, any good iPad idea can be adopted for development by the keen iPad app developers, which could soon end up in the market.
Quite soon, every student will be using the apps and sharing answers with fellow students and professors in real time. This provides immediate feedback to the instructors on the students’ understanding whilst in a class session. A popular clicker device is used these days, to show students’ understanding of multiple choice questions. Imagine the complexity, when students will be able to submit drawings, graphs, solutions to difficult problems.
Some money has been spent on marketing the iPad to college students; it certainly has a lot of powerful potential in the educational arena. It is one great area where new technology and new ideas will be accepted as people will be able to try them on iPad. Because it replaces a lot of heavy things students have to carry, substituting them for additional features, the price is fully justified. If Apple lowers the iPad-only educational materials’ price each college student will buy an iPad.
We are poised to witness a real educational revolution and wonder how people carried pages and pages of text. Imagine the workload getting lighter.
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