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My four year old loves it and he even managed to rack up a $130 bill on my credit card with it.
I’d give them each a sound thrashing, then lock them in a quiet room with no television and a stack of books. But then, I don’t have doctorate in education.
I’m thinking that most teachers could be replaced with a computer.
Think of the money we would save. No pension for a computer, no health care, no going on strike, no liberal agenda.
I bet you could replace half the teachers, which would mean you could lay off 80% of the administrators.
I concur, I am all for this idea.
I predict most of these “free” iPads will be broken in short order.
It sounds nice, but at this point its just too expensive for the taxpayers to put in the hand of a young child.
I can see it for high schooler replacing physical books. But a child that young can be home using a computer.
It may be a good choice when the price drops and a sturdy version could be made for young fingers. And if it replaces a certain number of teachers. But the way the world is now, teacher’s jobs exist for the benefit of the teachers, not the kids. The union would never allow that.
I predict a large number of these i pads will come up “missing” “lost” or “stolen.” What are they going to do then, give them a new one?
I have been teaching in an all laptop college for more than ten years. While I embrace the new technology and find many times it enhances my teaching, I have found myself more often resorting to using a whiteboard and engaging my students in discussion. From my student’s comments they prefer this to death by Power Point and say they learn more. I do think I-pads are a game changer and could replace paper text books and offer even more new ways to teach. However, I doubt that kindergarten students would have that much much benefit and could be a distraction.
An incalculably stupid idea. We`re training kids to press buttons to get answers when we should be teaching them to THINK which this machine cannot do anymore than Sesame Street teaches kids anything but that education must be `fun`. Were I running a private school one requirement for attendance would be that none of these machines could be used. Kids don`t spell they spellcheck, they don`t write they cut and paste from Wikipedia, they don`t do math they use a calculator. That teachers like these doesn`t surprise me, as one recently told my friend concerned about his daughter`s poor spelling `Don`t worry, they all just use Google`—by her spelling teacher. Teaching kids to be good machine-playing drones—how ashamed teachers should be.
Level the playing field for all students?
What is sad is THAT is what the overall goal is for the kids...and not to use the Ipad to teach each child creatively and well.
My child’s kindergarten teacher uses hers in our classroom and it’s fantastic. She’s not using it to “level the playing field”, however.
Are they for 'normal' Kindergarteners? Certainly not full time.
If they can reduce cost of textbooks in later grades and help focus on independent study, I've no issue with introducing them. They are not a substitute for all forms of learning.
I think if parents want to get them their own ipad that’s fine but don’t leave it up to taxpayers to fork out money on this.
Besides why enforce into young kids you can’t do your work without an ipad? How about solving problems wihtout a computer? We’ve got kids growing up that can’t handle NOT being connected and can’t function without their phones. They literally do not know what to do or how they will get things done without technology.
A few days without power and these people will be severely messed up.
ping!
I’ve always been a big fan of sci-fi shows like ‘The Outer Limits’ because some of their plots seem so far out there, but then things like this happen and make you think. I remember an episode that was set in the future in which everyone in the world was literally hardwired into a massive world information network via a wireless receiver implanted in their heads. They had preteens performing surgeries and talking like a monotone adult simply by downloading the information. The protagonist of the story, because of a genetic anomaly, couldn’t plug into the network and so had to learn everything from books, and taught himself. Long story short, at the end of the episode the whole network crashed and reduced everyone but the protagonist to the state of an infant, and he had to start teaching them from scratch. Sounds stupid, but with more and more kids these days relying on technology, it doesn’t seem so far off.
There is just something bizarre about much of this discussion. You write as if the PC never existed until the introduction of the iPad, or maybe the iPad II. And you write as if no computer software to aid learning at various ages existed before the iPad.
Such things have actually been around since the mid-1980s, and many articles have been written about school districts that planned to buy a lap top for every student and all the wonders that would result. Many of those articles were written ten and more years ago.
Computers can be learning aids, but to the extent that any of them (including calculators) perform the math or the logic of any learning task, then they are a hindrance to learning and not an enhancement.
But I guess the iPad and wireless connections will make it much easier for kids to access those pre-written English papers and research papers and other writing intended to be performed by the student.
So taxpayers are going to have to buy school kids fancy electronic toys which they would love to have themselves but can’t afford.
A computer screen is a poor replacement for an actual physical book. You can't flip through pages, dog ear pages, get tactile feed back or get even more subtle connections. When I crack open a reference book, even the smell helps prepare my brain for information acquisition.
A computer screen is a poor replacement for a book, and the iPad screen is a poor replacement for a computer screen. It just does not have enough pixels to duplicate a paper page.
Kids spend too much time in front of screens as it is.
5 year olds are not responsible enough to be responsible for a $500 dollar tool. I don't feed my kids off the fine china either.
Since the introduction of the computer into schools, the quality and outcome of education has gotten worse. I'm not saying it is a causal relationship, but it is obvious that throwing technology at the problem has not helped.