
On Tue, 20 Nov 2012, "Trent W. Buck" <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
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.
Of course there are cheaper options. The list retail price for Android tablets is well under $200 and a bulk order could probably get it below $100. That would make it about $33 per annum if the kids can refrain from breaking them.
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.
http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/24/school-bag-weight/ Yes, I've blogged about this in the past. According to my calculations most high school students are at risk of back injury due to the weight of their school bag. As tablets weigh less than text books (the Nexus 10 is lighter than a year 12 text book and smaller tablets are lighter still) and ebook readers are even lighter than tablets it's clear that there are significant benefits to be gained from using electronic texts.
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.
I'm sure that when schools migrated from an ink well per desk to personalised ball-point pens they had similar discussions. But things got sorted out and students manage to bring working pens and pencils to class.
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...
Is "Home ec" a real subject? When I was at school it was one subject where they dropped the pretence that it was anything other than child-minding. As for science labs, I presume that they have solved such problems in real laboratories and presumably the same solution can be applied in school (whether it's safe use of tablets or just using paper). If we are going to maintain the illusion that school is teaching skills that are relevant to work then we should be able to have schools implement practices that work in a commercial environment.
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?
It has been claimed that careful students can buy second hand books and keep them in good enough condition to sell them for the same price. Presumably such careful students can make their tablet last for a long time and also have a low effective cost. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/