Three universities are getting pumped to hand out free iPads to students and faculty with hopes that Apple’s tablet will revolutionize education.
“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
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.
The iPad may succeed where Amazon’s Kindle DX failed.
Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” Aaron Horvath
the iPad is fast, sports a colorful touchscreen and supports enough apps to cater to a broad audience of students
Seton Hill, George Fox and Abilene Christian said that in addition to giving students iPads, they would train teachers to integrate mobile web software and iPad apps into their curricula.
George Fox’s iPod Touch program wasn’t the greatest success, because it turned out that the iPod Touch wasn’t the primary device students were bringing to the classroom.
the iPad’s bigger screen will change that.
Bill Rankin, a professor of medieval studies at Abilene Christian, called the iPhone program the “TiVoing of education,” because the iPhone was giving students the information they need, when they want it and wherever they want it.
“This is really about people re-imagining what books look like — re-imagining something that hasn’t really been re-imagined in about 550 years,” Rankin said.
“We’re challenging them to design features that would take full advantage of photos and texts and HTML5. There’s an academic component to that — forcing students to think differently about how information is distributed and presented to readers.”