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Colleges Dream of Paperless, iPad-centric Education

admin — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 06:03:51 +0000

Three universities are getting pumped to hand out free iPads to students and faculty with hopes that Apple’s tablet will revolutionize education.

Seton Hill University, George Fox University and Abilene Christian University each pre-ordered bundles of iPads — sight unseen — with plans to experiment with how the tablet could change classroom learning. In interviews with Wired.com just prior to the iPad’s launch last week, officials from each university saw the iPad as having potential to render printed textbooks obsolete.

“Those big, heavy textbooks that kids go around with in their backpacks are going to be a thing of the past,” said Mary Ann Gawelek, vice president of academic affairs at Seton Hill, which is giving iPads to its 2,100 students and 300 faculty members beginning this fall. “We think it’s leading to something that’s going to provide a better learning environment for all of our students. We’re hoping that faculty will be able to use more of a variety of textbooks because textbooks will be a little bit less expensive.”

One hitch in the universities’ plans is that Apple has not inked deals with any textbook publishers to bring their offerings to the iPad’s iBooks store. So far Apple and publishers have only formed partnerships around e-books for fiction and nonfiction titles, like those available for the Kindle.

For textbooks, students can currently access about 10,000 e-textbooks through a third-party company called CourseSmart, which includes titles from the five biggest textbook publishers. CourseSmart is a subscription-based service that charges a fee for students to access e-textbooks of their choice for a limited time. The company has already announced an iPad app (demonstrated below).

By Brian X. Chen | Wired.com April 2010

iPad a Solid Education Tool, Study Reports

admin — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 05:48:17 +0000

More and more schools are jumping on the digital bandwagon and adopting iPads for daily use in the classroom. Apple’s education-related announcements yesterday will no doubt bolster the trend, making faculty tools and student textbooks more engaging and accessible.

But today another data point emerged, demonstrating that the iPad can be a valuable asset in education. In a partnership with Apple, textbook publishers Houghton Mifflin Harcourt performed a pilot study using an iPad text for Algebra 1 courses, and found that 20 percent more students (78 percent compared to 59 percent) scored ‘Proficient’ or ‘Advanced’ in subject comprehension when using tablets rather than paper textbook counterparts.

The study was conducted at a Riverside, California, middle school from Spring 2010 to Spring 2011 using HMH’s Fuse: Algebra I app. Similar pilot courses and iPad programs have cropped up all over the country, primarily in private and boarding schools, and select universities. In the public school sector, more than 600 school districts have adopted a 1:1 iPad program.

The iPad seems to help students better connect with the content at hand.

“Students’ interaction with the device was more personal. You could tell students were more engaged,” said Coleman Kells, principal of Amelia Earhart Middle School. “Using the iPad was more normal, more understandable for them.”

Tablets could be less daunting to students, too. Marita Scarfi, CEO of digital-focused marketing agency Organic, says that moving textbooks to mobile devices will reinvent learning.

“Now you don’t know if a book is super huge and formidable,” Scarfi says. “Learning can be done in snackable chunks. It could be reoriented.”

Another study centered on an iPad game, Motion Math, has shown that the iPad can help with fundamental math skills. Fifth graders who regularly played the game for 20 minutes per day over a five-day period increased their test scores by 15 percent on average (you can check out more about this study on Wired’s GeekDad).