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I know that some of us in our other classes have been discussing iPads and their use in the education space, and I dug this up from my archives as some of what teachers and admins have to say about buying and using the iPad in their schools.

Bridget, The potential for iPad may realize even more with the availability of online textbooks, which may include videos. The availability of various apps will influence the proliferation of iPad. Upside - novelty, excitement, and no back breaking bag packs, downside- penmanship may suffer and teachers may have to do some extra homework! http://thejournal.com/articles/2011/07/11/putting-the-ipad-to-work-in-elementary-classrooms.aspx

Maung - I actually attended Gagliolo's session at ISTE this summer as I, too, am a proponent of this new technology, but as you point out, this means "extra homework" for the teacher. And most teachers I know are already strapped for time and professional development and are not interested in a new device that is "one more thing" they have to learn and use in an overwhelming standards based curriculum environment. The only way (in my opinion) that we can get teachers to embrace this new technology is to have it do something MORE efficiently and easily than something THEY ALREADY do. It cannot be an add-on. It has to replace something overtasking from their plate.

Logical Choice Technologies has released an update to Letters Alive, an augmented reality education app for kindergarten and preschool. Letters Alive is a reading curriculum for preschool and kindergarten (and grades 1 through 5 for remediation and ESL) that consists of augmented reality-infused animal cards, augmented reality-infused word cards, software, teacher resources, and student activity sheets.

This is incredible. They REALLY took the AR capabilities and built out a robust curriculum. They didn't just stop with what I have seen as a "typical" use of AR (making the image or the letter appear as 3D objects), rather, they made the cards interactive and educational with sounds, changing color, sentence structure, punctuation, etc. Incredible!

An interesting discusion about whether Amazon will replace publishers. With the increasing digitization of books, writers will align with the big platforms such as Kindle or the Apple Store.