iPad meets Education

The well anticipated iPad is coming. The question is from an educator’s standpoint is how is this tool going to fit in the classroom?  What impact is this tool going to have on students?

One article I read hit on the idea of applications focusing on educational purposes and  hopefully already being developed for the iPad and the student.  In this paragraph from the article mentioned this, “Educational apps are around the corner, there is no doubt in my mind.  Good ones, too, not just flash card programs.  Apps that help students record data in science labs, that let them collaborate on text files, that have interactive comics that talk to them in Mandarin, that keep their assignments for them and pop up little reminders about this or that, that store their notes and their thoughts and their little rantings and ravings.”

I know I can’t wait to start using one and seeing its potential.  I also don’t know if I will be getting in on the first wave of orders, but I do know I will have one.

Not only does the iPad bring in the features of digital textbooks, where students of any level of education can access their electronic textbooks.  There will probably be room for growth in this department since there is still debates and negotiations going on when it comes to digital textbooks.  Mobile labs is the future.  No longer do we have to go to the “computer lab” and sit confined to a room and a desk.  Virtual field trips or no longer difficult.  Anywhere on campus students can be reading their digital book and look up words they don’t know, visit the setting of the story they are reading, look up and see other books by the author sitting outside on the playground during recess.  I don’t know, just a scenario that just popped in my head.

Mobile data collecting can be collected on field trips or experiments.  This information can be shared amongst peers for collaboration.  With the painting app, Brushes, students can create new content.

Simply put from this post, “The iPad could be used in class to take notes directly into Pages, classes could be managed with the calendar application, friends can be emailed, research completed on safari, books read on the ebook reader and for those times you are pretending to revise you have the iTunes store for the latest TV programmes, music and movies.

For home the iPad could offer a much more affordable solution over laptops for the studious offspring. A family Mac and a couple of iPads could offer an affordable yet perfectly adequate solution to family computing.

It is too early to say just how much of an impact the iPad will have on education but my initial thoughts are of much excitement ahead in the Apple classroom.”

It was fun to brainstorm ideas my fourth graders had when I asked them, “What do you want the iPad to do for you?”  Some ideas that were talked about was looking up websites the teacher tells them about.  Another, was an app that helps them with their homework.  I had a student bring up the fact that they can even email their written assignment to their teacher.  Not too bad for some quick brainstorming for fourth graders.

It’s going to be fun to innovate the uses and possibilities this tool will have on future classroom and their students.