

UK School Replaces All Textbooks with iPads - petewailes
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20930195

======
alanctgardner2
As a student, I tried to use a tablet with ebooks exclusively for a few of my
university classes, and it was fairly dreadful. Not because having a tablet is
distracting, but because it's not the best way to organize reference
information. When I was trying to do homework, I wanted - the questions from
page 251, the table of equations from 190, and to be able to flip through and
find similar examples. Obviously e-books fail miserably if you need quick
access to multiple pages.

As a test-taking tool, an iPad is not terribly effective either. The maths
teacher shows that she can quickly aggregate the solutions, but there's no
good way for the students to express their thought process. I'm pretty sure by
their age, if I had simply written the answer on the paper I wouldn't have
been given full marks. It's important to teach students good mathematical form
from an early age, and this definitely undermines that. Consider maths is one
of the easiest classes to write tests for, I wonder how science, english etc.
are getting on - likely a lot of terribly simple multiple choice.

Lastly, everyone seems so smug. The school's administration thinks they've
taken this gigantic problem of how to do learning electronically and they've
just knocked it out of the park. I know it's a sort of fluff piece, but it'd
be better to see a longer video about problems they solved, lessons they
learned, etc. As it stands, it looks like a lot of off-the-shelf software
cobbled together by a local Apple rep, which is hardly ground-breaking.
They've just thrown a lot of money at it. The administrator featured doesn't
seem to be overly technical, and the teacher seems more interested in the fact
that now she doesn't have to go home and mark things in her spare time ( but,
of course, she's 'dedicated', as she says herself ).

~~~
cryptoz
Most of those problems have very simple solutions in software features.

> When I was trying to do homework, I wanted - the questions from page 251,
> the table of equations from 190, and to be able to flip through and find
> similar examples. Obviously e-books fail miserably if you need quick access
> to multiple pages.

The solution to this could be implemented in under a week, for sure. Add a
little UI for temporary bookmarks. Let the reader save a set of relevant pages
(questions, table of equations, examples) and then swipe between them. Simple.

~~~
alanctgardner2
Except for the loading times. If you've ever used a graphics-heavy textbook,
especially on a high-res device like the iPad 3, rendering pages takes
forever. It's not just a UI problem, it's an issue of effectively caching the
bookmarked pages, and for a large book that might be a big problem.

~~~
mikevm
I read some scanned PDF files (over 150MB) and they work fine in GoodReader on
my iPad 2. I'm sure that graphics heavy vector PDF files would work even
faster.

------
jstalin
Maybe it's generational (I'm 33) and maybe it's personal preference, but I
much prefer a physical book over reading on a tablet. I remember reading an
article somewhere saying that our brains do a better job of organizing
material if it's a physical book because part of the organization process is
remembering where in the book the remembered material was. I get no sense of
"place" when reading an e-book. I even print out important material because
that makes it easier for me to read.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
I find tablets fine for reading one single book, in particular when you're
reading that book from cover to cover. So if I want to buy a fiction book
(e.g. The Hobbit) on my Kindle it works just fine.

But when it comes to non-fiction/reference books the technology is just not
ready. You don't read cover to cover, you bounce around, you mark sections,
you take notes, you check your answers in the back, and yet the software I
have seen does all of this stuff badly.

Plus whenever people roll out one of these snazzy "look how hip and modern we
are" school programs I never read about how much they spent on teacher
training or development of researches (apps, lesson plans, etc).

So I always wonder if they literally just turned up with a pack of iPads one
day and said to the teachers "make this work!" Without any real thought given
to how exactly the teachers are meant to use them.

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steverb
My kids' high school (<http://knoxcountystemac.knoxschools.org/>) has done
this as well. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

On the one hand, the kids aren't hauling 30 pounds of books to and from school
everyday, school lockers are pretty much superfluous, and the iPad is a great
tool. On the other hand, it's very hard for me as their parent to tell (at a
glance) whether or not the kids are actually doing school work or just
screwing around and it's very easy for the kids to get distracted if they
aren't having a good concentration day.

Like everything else, it's a bit of a mixed bag.

~~~
robmcm
Can you not restrict them so they can't install games etc?

[EDIT] The iPads, not the kids!

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
With enterprise tools for iPad you have complete and total control over how
the device is used.

You can restrict installing apps, uninstalling apps, using the camera, loading
the App Store, talking with Siri, altering settings, etc. See this list for
some of the things you can do:

<http://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/1.2/#cadbf9e41d>

Yet more:

<http://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/1.2/#cad5370d089>

~~~
steverb
Yeah, except they need to be able to do a lot of those things. They need to
install apps, but there are certain apps they definitely do not need. Also, I
(the parent) don't have full access to the device to do whatever, as it
belongs to the school system and they handle the administration of it.

It doesn't really matter with regards to my children. We believe in addressing
behavior directly (talking to them, rewarding/punishing behavior, etc). We
just told them not to use their iPads for games without asking first (same
rules as apply to their laptops), protect your privacy, blah blah blah.

Again, my major beef is that it takes more effort to verify that they are
staying out of trouble. It's not impossible, but it's nerve wracking that I
can't glance and see that they are doing homework, I have to actually maneuver
around and look over their shoulder.

Trust but verify is our motto.

------
mpclark
Meanwhile, here's another 'iPads in the classroom' story from last week,
focussing on how fast the kids destroy them:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255546/School-
spent...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255546/School-
spent-500-000-giving-pupils-iPads-admits-HALF-broken.html)

~~~
objclxt
...it's a terribly misleading story (which doesn't come as a surprise to me,
it's the Daily Mail after all), because it conveniently omits breakage rates
of one-to-one laptop deployments.

It may not come as a surprise to many people to learn that laptops break
almost as often as tablets when deployed one-on-one in schools. A quick Google
led me to one study from 2004 in Maine, where over an 18 month period 50% of
laptops required repair, and 35% of students experienced laptops breaking down
or being accidentally damaged[1].

The main difference is that a higher percentage of tablets require total
replacement, which is somewhat understandable as tablets (be they Android or
iOS) are far less user serviceable.

[1]: <http://maine.gov/mlti/articles/research/PCHSLaptopsFinal.pdf>

~~~
revelation
I don't understand. There are schools (the majority of them!) that do neither
tablet nor laptop "1-to-1 deployments", for maybe this very reason.

------
randomsearch
Using backlit tablets for extended periods gives me really bad eye strain. I
tried reading on my (high-res) iPad when I first got it, and after an hour my
eyes were hurting too bad to continue.

AFAIK this is caused by eyes drying due to reduced blink rate. All backlit
tablets will have this problem.

Therefore, I still buy old-school books and print out material when I need to
read it in-depth.

Does no-one else think this is a concern when giving young children tablets as
a replacement for non-backlit books?

RS

~~~
meaty
No one cares about this until about 3 months in at which point they are going
to have to put up with it.

This is why known a kobo and a computer and nothing else. You just can't read
on a backlit device.

------
nicholassmith
£65k saved off photocopying is _huge_. I've seen copier bills so I know what
they can be like, but that's crazy savings from introducing it. Wonder if
they're just emailing everything out now, which makes significantly more
sense.

I'm in favour of iPads in school. I've ran through a few of the educational
programs on the iPad (including iTunes and Udemy as well as textbooks), it's a
great resource and helps to consolidate everything I need in one place. When I
was at Uni I was one of the few people who used a laptop to take notes in
lectures as I found it easier to split my focus.

I can't watch the video but I'm guessing that they've got all the iPads
through the enterprise system that most big companies are (or should be
anyway) using, which gives them a bit more granularity on what's going on,
pushing updates and some additional restrictions. I'm sure teachers are smart
enough to realise that kids with fully unlocked iPads are going to spend their
time mucking about.

~~~
Macha
An iPad is currently £330. We'll be generous and assume Apple gave the school
a 50% discount (which is huge and probably unlikely as I'd imagine even Apple
aren't charging 100% markup). So £165 per iPad * 840 students (according to
the video) = £138,600.

They've spent more than double what they saved on photocopying, not to mention
that 840 iPads take a lot more maintenance than five or six photocopiers.

~~~
nicholassmith
Well the cost of the iPads is a fixed cost, and they'll run them as long as
possible. The savings won't ever cover the costs, but we're also missing
figures for how it changed IT spending (did they need new machines? Have they
avoided them?). It's an expensive proposition that's for sure, but so were
computer suites 15 years ago and they had those when I was a wee lad.

------
kitsune_
Of course, of all tablets, it had to be an iPad!

~~~
obtino
TBH, it's hard to get the same level of user-experience from an Android
tablet. There are very few apps on Android which offer the same level of
experience as those found on the iPad.

Also, in a school setting, how do you expect students and teachers to deal
with different versions of operating systems and device specifications?

~~~
skymt
I doubt the degree of magic involved in the user experience factors into
institutional technology purchasing. And fragmentation is hardly an issue when
the school is buying all the hardware. Frankly, your comment reads like a pair
of talking points taken off the shelf and jammed in where they don't fit.

~~~
obtino
> I doubt the degree of magic involved in the user experience factors into
> institutional technology purchasing.

User experience is not magic. It's something that involves a lot of time and
effort on behalf of the apps developers. It does contribute to the choices
made by individuals and this filters up to the institution level. How do you
think the iPad penetrated the enterprise?

> And fragmentation is hardly an issue when the school is buying all the
> hardware.

True. However, what happens when the school wishes to use an app that's not
supported by the device they purchased? As an Android user I've found plenty
of apps that fail on my device while working perfectly on others. Sure there
are problems with compatibility with apps on different versions of iOS, but
they are relatively minor compared to the problems that I've come across on
Android.

------
hdivider
This could be great, but I doubt maths-heavy subjects can be studied
effectively with an iPad.

This is kind of sad, because maths-heavy textbooks could be vastly improved if
they were properly implemented for tablets.

Man, if I had the time, I'd love to work on a comprehensive solution for this:
e.g. an app for studying maths-heavy material by letting you leverage the
power of the device while making user interaction at least as good as ordinary
paper - and maybe better. Say, you have a maths or physics textbook to study,
and you're about to work on exercises. The solutions to these could then be
immediately accessible (no need to enter page numbers), along with an editable
list of relevant theorems/quantitative relations or wordy definitions. Wolfram
Alpha integration would probably work well for many kinds of problems (e.g.
calculus, or more basic algebra), to provide checks to solutions, or even to
find solutions that the author didn't provide. I bet this sort of stuff can
accelerate learning, and it's just the tip of the iceberg.

If this could be done, then you can imagine a physics student graduating with
4 years' worth of textbooks, in-class notes and each and every exercise he/she
worked on _all properly accessible on one iPad and preserved for the future_.
(Currently, lots and lots of instructive exercises and worked examples just
get chucked out once the course is done.)

Maths-heavy subjects obviously introduce many formatting issues, and there's
always the added layer of difficulty due to the constant need for exercises
and solutions. As far as I can see though, many of these problems have already
been solved in other contexts (e.g. LaTeX) - so maybe they 'just' need to be
cleverly wired together and coated with an innovative UI.

Just a thought.

------
josteink
So good that kids get to learn of the Orwellian world of 1984 as early as
possible. They get to learn that computers are _sealed shut_ before they even
get to use their imagination about what's should be doable.

Good good good. Can't have it based on something open, something which can
bring things back to the public. That would be counter-productive.

Wasn't the UK supposed to be a frontier country on open data and open data-
systems in the public sector or am I mixing things up?

~~~
crusso
You're polemically trying to start a political argument when this school is
trying to solve academic challenges.

The fact is that the iPad is (or at least was) the best tablet available for
them to use, so they used it rather than get trapped in the morass of trying
to create hardware or use hardware that wasn't as far along.

In reality, they're validating a model that would make it easier for open
source alternatives to flourish down the road.

~~~
betterunix
"academic challenges"

Which challenges the school chooses to address is a political issue in and of
itself. If the goal of the school is to educate students so that they can
become outstanding citizens, then it is probably not a good idea to train them
that Apple's approach -- with its restrictions and censorship -- is how things
should be, which is precisely what they are doing by giving everyone iPads.

Words of wisdom: "The medium is the message."

"they're validating a model that would make it easier for open source
alternatives to flourish down the road"

There is nothing about the iPad that helps open source. It is a computer that
is built from the ground up to fight against any sort of hacking, tinkering,
or user programming. In what world does open source mesh well with "pay us to
be able to distribute your programs" or "you are only allowed to program the
computer in the languages that we choose?"

~~~
crusso
_with its restrictions and censorship_

So the students can't post an email or blog expressing their open thoughts
because it's an iPad? Is so, I'd agree with you.

You more likely mean because Apple doesn't allow one to publish randomly to
their app store? If so, then you're twisting the notions of censorship.

Exactly how are regular text books open for modification in schools? Writing
in my textbooks was strictly forbidden. Apple's restriction on their app store
has nothing meaningful to do with students expressing themselves.

 _There is nothing about the iPad that helps open source._

The whole tablet market would still not likely have been proven without the
iPad. Go back before the iPad was introduced and find the market estimates for
tablets. The fact that you could even imagine replacing this school's hardware
with something like it that's open source is thanks to the iPad. The iPad
VALIDATED the market and many of the concepts built on top of it. Without it,
open source or even Android alternatives would still not be here.

On top of all of this, who wants the students hacking on their tablets anyway?
That tablet is for distributing information and coordinating with the teacher.
The last thing you want is for it to be easy for a prankster to create
applications that would facilitate cheating or mayhem. You also don't want a
system that is all hacked up with 3rd party app store items riddled with
trojans that keeps the students from opening their legitimate apps and
learning.

~~~
betterunix
"You more likely mean because Apple doesn't allow one to publish randomly to
their app store? If so, then you're twisting the notions of censorship."

It is not just that Apple has standards for their own app store. Fedora has
standards for its repositories, but I would not accuse them of any kind of
censorship.

The problem is that Apple has created a computer whose software can _only_ be
installed from the App Store, unless you pay Apple a special fee and agree to
all manner of unfriendly licenses (on top of those you already agreed to to
use your computer in the first place). We are past the point of talking about
theoretical risks associated with such a system; Apple already refused to
allow political cartoons to run on iPads. If you do not call that censorship,
what do you call it?

"Apple's restriction on their app store has nothing meaningful to do with
students expressing themselves."

Unless those students happen to be expressing themselves by writing software.

"The whole tablet market would still not likely have been proven without the
iPad"

I have my doubts. Apple only marketed their tablet well; they did not invent
the technology that made it possible.

"who wants the students hacking on their tablets anyway?"

I do, because like many people, I learned to program by hacking every computer
available to me in my spare time. I would not be where I am today if I had not
had the opportunity to do so. By surrounding students with computers they
cannot hack at will, this school is telling their students that they are not
allowed to learn to program in such an unsanctioned way; the students must
wait until some teacher comes along to teach them some standardized
programming curriculum, and too bad if they had been trying to learn something
else. Right now, the students are lucky in that they most likely have a
computer to hack at their home; that may not be the case in the future,
especially if these sorts of restricted computers continue to gain popularity.

"The last thing you want is for it to be easy for a prankster to create
applications that would facilitate cheating or mayhem"

Mayhem? If the school's IT staff cannot deal with the "mayhem" caused by a
single computer, they are incompetent.

As for cheating, sure, that's a risk of giving students programmable
computers. The answer is not to try to restrict student activities on those
computers, any more than the answer to cheating by leaving notes in a bathroom
stall is to watch students go to the bathroom. It is not hard to build a
computer that can be rapidly reimaged before an exam. It is not hard to deny
student's internet access during an exam. It is not hard for a teacher to
check for ad-hoc networks during an exam.

Why deny students the ability to learn outside the standard curriculum? Why
insist that they must come from families that can afford to buy more computers
for them, when you could have the school give them computers to program? We
had programmable desktops when I was in high school, and the benefits were
clear: there was a club for hackers who just liked to hack (and even a system
where they would help maintain the school's network). Back then, we had
desktops; it would have been great to have something we could carry around
with us.

"You also don't want a system that is all hacked up with 3rd party app store
items riddled with trojans that keeps the students from opening their
legitimate apps and learning."

Funny how we didn't have this problem at my high school. The reason is pretty
simple: misbehaving computers could be reimaged quickly. Students who
repeatedly and deliberately installed malware were suspended, no different
from students who drew graffiti or broken into other students' lockers.

Your argument amounts to this: students cannot learn unless they are following
the prescribed curriculum, so any student who tries to hack the computer that
was issued for the prescribed curriculum must be either a cheater, a vandal,
or that they will just harm their education by doing things they were not told
to do. That is a narrow view of learning and it is the reason so many
intelligent kids hate going to school.

------
cantlin
The extraordinary overhead of printing, purchasing and distributing education
texts alone would seem to make this a no brainer.

The cost of supplying 840 pupils with iPads and covers, even at consumer
rates, would only be around £350K. From the stated numbers, this would be
recouped in saved photocopying bills alone in around five years. Clearly there
will be significant software and operations costs, but I would speculate that
the less obvious time and material savings (e.g. updating a hand-out from a
previous class to reflect new teaching best practices) would more than offset
these costs. Centralising resources is a natural side effect of digital
distribution, and encourages resource sharing at all levels of the
organisation.

It's easy to think up other small but significant wins enabled by this
approach. We've probably all had the experience of watching a stand-in teacher
struggle to fill the lesson time because the regular guy has become suddenly
indisposed. With good systems in place it's easy to imagine this being a non-
problem.

~~~
nodata
An iPad will never last five years: if they don't become laughably obsolete,
they will be broken.

------
fpp
This project has been going on for some time - very interesting. Recently I've
been hearing about (planned / just started) similar projects in the UK and the
US with K12 and higher education.

TMK its iPads as frontends, Meru Wireless Networks to connect the about 2000
iPads, MS Server 2008 with AD and MS Exchange at the backend.

for more info see: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-
news/t...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/the-
school-where-every-teacher-has-an-ipad-and-every-student-has-an-
ipod-7578167.html) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13FO_A0Sokw> (plus an Apple
UK profile on ESSA) <http://www.apple.com/uk/education/profiles/essa/>

------
sopooneo
Someone close to me works at a very good public high school in Massachusetts.
The district is in the middle of the enormous task of
planning/budgeting/funding a new school building. At one point they showed
some preliminary plans to various interested parties, and the teachers were
immediately prompted to ask where the bookshelves were, or where freestanding
ones could even be placed. The answer from the superintendent was that this
school was to have no physical books whatsoever, so they're not bothering with
shelves.

~~~
snogglethorpe
ARgh, where do they find these people, and why are they entrusted with
important positions affecting the education of our kids?!

Seriously, what _are_ the qualifications required for school administrators?
These stories give the impression that they're crazily gullible and shallow
people, whose decisions are guided more by the latest school-administrator
fads than by actual experience with education...

------
mavhc
The school did a presentation at an Apple event I went to, the pupils were
there too. Apple was pushing 1 to 1 deployment, everyone sets up their own
accounts. There's loads of licencing and control issues though ("apps are only
$1, just buy a new licence for every new pupil"). Fine for university level,
but still a lot of compromises for schools.

~~~
objclxt
> _There's loads of licencing and control issues though ("apps are only $1,
> just buy a new licence for every new pupil")_

There is a volume licensing program for the App Store, where schools retain
ownership and can buy in bulk at a discount (where developers opt in to allow
such discounts). But in fairness, distribution still isn't perfect out of the
box (it's done via one-time codes on the App Store. It is possible to automate
this, but not as standard).

------
quarterto
Missing from headline: "(Obnoxiously Cheerful Music Will Start Immediately)".

------
OGinparadise
_Personally_ I found tablets AND laptops lagging a plain old paper notebook
when it came to reviewing notes before the test.

Distraction is another thing (sit on the back and watch to get an idea) but I
presume that iPads can eventually be modified to access only coursework.

