What do you think about tablets being used in schools?

James B. wrote:

Hey DB, when ya have to explain the joke. KInda/Sorta takes the humor away from it

Well, it must have still worked in a way if I got the " " icon from you.

So this "24 year old high school student" drops by a music message board to make one single post about how wonderful tablets are and never returns?

Does Apple have a street team?

MetalGuy71 wrote:

So this "24 year old high school student" drops by a music message board to make one single post about how wonderful tablets are and never returns?

Does Apple have a street team?

Seriously

chewie wrote:

MetalGuy71 wrote:

So this "24 year old high school student" drops by a music message board to make one single post about how wonderful tablets are and never returns?

Does Apple have a street team?

Seriously

Shhhh, quiet you guys. We're hoping if we play along with this one, we might all win free tablets/laptops from Apple or somethin'. Don't blow it for us!

Fat Freddy wrote:

chewie wrote:

MetalGuy71 wrote:

So this "24 year old high school student" drops by a music message board to make one single post about how wonderful tablets are and never returns?

Does Apple have a street team?

Seriously

Shhhh, quiet you guys. We're hoping if we play along with this one, we might all win free tablets/laptops from Apple or somethin'. Don't blow it for us!

yeah! You all keep scaring the women away so don't mess this one up!

Addy wrote:

Heh when I was in school a Tablet meant a notepad and normally meant Penmanship

Haha,thats what I was thinking. We had tablets but you wrote on them.The Wide Ruled variety!

I'm glad my kids didn't have them until High School. At least they had to sort of learn how to write on their own. The school can try to block stuff but part of having them is to search out stuff on the web and the kids are masters of finding the backdoors to stuff, the only thing some of them work hard at. Ours isn't a rich school but it saved tons on new textbooks so that was the breaking point. A huge problem though and it's been mentioned, kids now don't have the knowledge or desire to learn to work long and hard on something and how does this bode for the future. Remember having to do research papers the old fasioned way, library, looking through tons of old material, footnoting etc?

Dark Horseman wrote:

I'm glad my kids didn't have them until High School. At least they had to sort of learn how to write on their own. The school can try to block stuff but part of having them is to search out stuff on the web and the kids are masters of finding the backdoors to stuff, the only thing some of them work hard at. Ours isn't a rich school but it saved tons on new textbooks so that was the breaking point. A huge problem though and it's been mentioned, kids now don't have the knowledge or desire to learn to work long and hard on something and how does this bode for the future. Remember having to do research papers the old fasioned way, library, looking through tons of old material, footnoting etc?

....... and looking through Library card drawers.............

Know this is a stretch but......look what technology did to the institution of music. Apply that to the institution of learning and who knows what repercussions may occur ?

I had to walk uphill both ways to school when I was a child...

Use the tablets. Throw out the textbooks permanently. Throw out the high cost and low return on textbooks. Throw out the slow adaptation of textbooks. Throw that shit away in the garbage. Forever. Use the tablets and utilize the fact that factual errors can be easily fixed. An enormous amount of historical information is fudged, outdated, or flat out left out in many textbooks. This can be rectified with tablet technology.

However, teach kids to WRITE utilizing pen/paper. People need to know how to write, and they need to know how to read, and they need to know how to spell. Right now they don't know any of that. They're total idiots. And that's not because of tablets or the Internet, it's because of a little thing called the State and His good buddy the Media. There is no institution of LEARNING in the "public" sector with the way things currently are - only chimp-level fact absorption -, therefore a change is needed.

You think kids will get the historical information using the internet? They will skim through and glean only what they think they need and much on the interwebs isn't correct. Plus, cheating off papers posted on the net is much easier.

It's not the use of the Internet that should be what they're using, just the fact that whatever textbook the school uses, if incorrect or outdated information is there, can easily be rectified if it's an e-book, rather than making a billion new huge books and then suddenly your huge book is worth less than you paid for it. Education via the WWW is lunacy.

exact33 wrote:

I had to walk uphill both ways to school when I was a child...

Me too! In BOTH directions! In the SNOW! And we had nothing to eat but wood and rocks! But we were HAPPY and SATISFIED with those rocks!

Ok, yeah. Problem is, it's easier for teachers to just assign generalized projects without checking on the background of the source.

Oh, jennyy!! Why hast thou forsaken us?

Please come back and impart some new wisdom to this tired thread!! Please jennyy, the 24 year old high school student. We miss you and your tireless efforts to make us "old-schoolers" see the error of our ways!!

Do general subjects like math and spelling really need to be updated though? History and science i can see, but is there much difference between a 1991 math book and a 2013 math book? Ditto Spelling. Also, i sure hope that the tablets dont replace REAL literature (especially since some libraries carry out-of-print or obscure books that have no chance of showing up online).

I love my real literature and own plenty of real books and will continue to do so. Those books and the way they work in the grand scheme of things however is not for the most part a result of endless bureaucratic processes of anti-progress the way that it is in schools and businesses where an endless endless endless excessive paper trail has taken the place of everything else. The problem with this country is we have mistaken complacency for realism. We're too obsessed with the way things are and not looking enough to the way things should be.

A move to tablets is no example of progress for the sake of itself - it would save millions of dollars, cut physical waste in all contexts, and make information easily available in an up-to-the-minute format no matter the subject.

Orion Crystal Ice wrote:

A move to tablets is no example of progress for the sake of itself - it would save millions of dollars, cut physical waste in all contexts, and make information easily available in an up-to-the-minute format no matter the subject.

The saving of money is subjective and tablets have "street" value that normal school texts book will never have. Theft, loss, and damge can add up fairly quickly, especially in larger school districts where waste of resources is already an issue. If you equip an entire district with this technology, what then happens after the fact. Well ya have to have techs to repair devices, set up networks, and other things that pertain to utilizing the technology in it's fullest purpose.

People with those skills have for the most part advanced degrees and can further burden over-stressed entiltlement structures within employee organizations of public education systems.

I see your point about having information instant. Yet, when we were young and had to make an effort to discover a soluton or obtain details/facts about a certain subject. The knowledge was retained better because of the process. Seems taking parts of that process away from the scenario may be a convenience or a time saver in the short term. The outcome of this practice is easily seen in the complacent attitude of both teachers and students of today. A device making teacher/student interaction further apart than it already is definiltely will not change the education of our children for the better.

Well, the teacher issue, the issue of how the curriculum is run, the issue of what and how they can and cannot teach, and then the teacher's union issue (not always made up of the same people we WANT teaching kids) is a whole other morass I could go off about. Nothing is gonna fix those issues, integral to keeping the teacher-student relationship a healthy one, except the people themselves......................if they're allowed to.

This is, again, of course, all assuming we are speaking about the public schooling machine....sorry, I mean 'system'..

I hear ya OCI...Took my kids out of public system and home schooled.

and I know that isn't something every family is able to do.

Hey! I think I got Jennyy's number! We can call her up:

Jennyy 867-5309

Thrasher73 wrote:

Addy wrote:

Heh when I was in school a Tablet meant a notepad and normally meant Penmanship

Haha,thats what I was thinking. We had tablets but you wrote on them.The Wide Ruled variety!

Ahhhh the good ole days eh?

Wanna hear something funny/scary in my last job I recently quit but I would from time to time service machines in the admin offices of the town I went to elementary school in, and even after 30 years they still used the same design and personalization for their #2 pencils talk about a memory flashback.

James B. wrote:

I hear ya OCI...Took my kids out of public system and home schooled.

and I know that isn't something every family is able to do.

same here but we never started them in public school. And I totally second that not every family is equipped or able to do so.

exact33 wrote:

James B. wrote:

I hear ya OCI...Took my kids out of public system and home schooled.

and I know that isn't something every family is able to do.

same here but we never started them in public school. And I totally second that not every family is equipped or able to do so.

My ol' lady went above and beyond the call of duty taking on that task. She is from the back hollers of West Virginia (striaght up hillbilly as they come) and did a wonderful job.