Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> writes:
As for purchasing another iPad, they should last at least 3 years and that will drop the price down to something less than $150 per annum. A sensible use of electronic text books could easily save more than that. Parents could probably save $50 on year 11 and 12 expenses by just getting electronic versions of Shakespeare alone!
I dunno about privileged upper-middle-class Victorians, but I spent most of my time in .wa.au state schools, and IIRC[0] a $150/ann increase in school fees would have caused a riot. Plenty of students there were in third-hand uniforms and IIRC the textbooks were all owned by the school and borrowed by each class for the year. A lot of those textbooks were a couple of decades old, too -- I doubt hand-me-down tablets would last that long. So OK, assuming students have power at home (probably reasonable), an ebook reader might be cost effective because you can study at night after the library closes, without having to cart dead trees back and forth, and with access to content that would otherwise require a trip to the state library. I'm all for making that option available to people -- that's no different from taking extra math classes after school at the local uni. But requiring it is Not Cool, and that goes double for requiring a specific vendor. (When I'm ranting about vendor lock-in to people like the ATO, this is where I also point out that the vendor is not Australian, and therefore they're also serving foreign interests.) [0] I may be off by an order of magnitude... nobody bothered to tell me how much was being spent on my education.
A new iPad will last all day, older ones might not but probably few students will be using one all the time anyway. A typical classroom will have at least 3 double power points. If it became common for students to have older iPads that don't last then it would just be a matter of having the students who need their iPad charged sitting near the power points, it seems unlikely that there would be a need to have more than 6 iPads being charged at once.
So now you have students playing musical chairs during a lesson because the lesson requires an ipad, and their (personalized) ipad is out of juice? Sounds pretty disruptive. (Though I think that's mostly a non-issue, as we agree recent equipment ought to last all day, and students probably have access to power at home.)
If one of the cheaper Android tablets was chosen then battery life would be shorter. But it wouldn't be difficult to just install more power points in classrooms and arrange desks so that there's no OH&S issue of charging cables going across open floor.
I suspect it would still be an issue in home ec and science labs, at least -- lots of conductive liquids being spilled everywhere...
These are all problems that can be solved. Solving them will be reasonably cheap when compared to the costs of paper text books.
Are you assuming every student buys every textbook, and throws it away at the end of the year?