Scottish iSchool goes 100% iPad
'The best equipment available'
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A Scottish independent Christian school has forsworn books, pencils, pens, and paper, and will now educate its young charges solely via Apple's iPad.
"We wanted to give each of the pupils an opportunity to use the best equipment available," IT teacher Fraser Speirs told the Daily Record
Each and every one of the 105 students at the modestly named Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock will now take all their lessons on their personal "magical and revolutionary" devices.
The students, ranging in age from five to 15, will also do their homework on the Jobsian tablet — although whether they'll each be given an Apple iPad Keyboard Dock with which to type or be forced to tap away on the onscreen keyboard wasn't noted.
"Each of the children will have their own iPad," Speirs said, "which is hooked into the school's wireless network and from there they will use the computers for learning in different subjects." The tablets will enable the young 'uns to access "pre-approved websites for lessons in English, maths, languages and history."
Well, ones that don't have Flash-based content, in any case.
From Speirs' point of view, the iPad provisioning is an educational blessing not only for the school's knowledge-hungry whippersnappers, but also for their doting faculty as well. "They will obviously be able to use the internet for research but we've found that it solves major problems for us — especially in science subjects as now they can watch experiments that would be too dangerous to do in class on YouTube."
Perhaps Speirs has a point: without YouTube, static electricity, sodium in water, and Diet Coke and Mentos experiments could make a bit of a mess. ®
COMMENTS
Physician, heal thyself
If you're going to start criticising someone's choice of educational hardware and proselytising Googles (sic) lesson plans, you'll find you'd be taken a lot more seriously if you could speak English correctly.
"Could have", or "could've". Never "could of".
"Toughened". Never "toughended".
"Thick angry twat". Never "Anonymous Coward"
It looks like your school had quite enough budget cuts, thank you very much.
Yes, it's useless until...
* They need to read someone else's cursive handwriting and can't (if you've not got the experience of it, it just looks like a mess)
* Their battery runs out and they need to write something down
* They need to scribble down a note during a phone call
* They need to fill out a prescribed form
* They need to write out a calculation (not that you can't do that on a computer, but loading up MathCAD to do some relatively simple maths- or spending a while crafting an Excel spreadsheet to do the same is nowhere near as simple (actually, the iPad doesn't HAVE software to do more advanced maths, does it?!)).
* They need to draw a graph.
* They need to annotate someone else's scribbles
* They want to pass notes at school
* They're sitting an exam, which should be away from the computer to prevent cheating (can't guarantee no network/internet connectivity) and to encourage their brains to do the thinking for them (i.e. they do the maths, not their Calculator app).
Or any other of a million and one tasks that require handwriting. I'd also bet it improves fine motor skills and co-ordination when taught from an early age.
So yes, after a couple of years it's probably okay to not teach it again. But it's definitely a required skill.
re : sodium in water
That was a perfectly safe experiment for chemistry teachers to do until the nanny state decided otherwise.
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