Minnesota HS going digital - every student an IPad

[RamboLiberal]

At one school in South Lake, heavy backpacks overflowing with textbooks, notebooks, binders, and papers will be a thing of the past come fall.

When the newly built Lake Minneola High School opens, each student will be issued an iPad loaded with digital textbooks and applications.

"I'm kind of excited. It'll be much more lightweight and portable, and we'll be able to go online for more of our information," said incoming Lake Minneola High School Junior Timothy Duncan of Montverde.

According to Kathy Helbig, the county's Innovative Learning manager, the move is in line with state legislation requiring students be provided with digital content by 2014.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.dailycommercial.com/localnews/story/072011ipads

1750 IPads @ 399 each

[provis99]

1. Ipads are a damn overpriced waste of money.

You can get clones of the Ipad that do the same thing for less than half the price.

I suspect Apple is pushing this on schools.

[Sherman A1]

3. Minus the cost of the text books

the discount the district is getting from Apple (it was 10% for educators, but with a purchase of that size, I suspect it will be better) and the increased availability of reference materials, school related apps and related items.

Granted there are other units out there that could most likely do the job and one hopes that there was an open bid or an RFP, but the concept seems reasonable.

[aquart]

2. How many will be mugged for those iPads?

And who's getting the kickbacks?

[eppur_se_muova]

4. Teach the kids early that "books" are disposable.

Then they won't have any particular attachment to them, except as fleeting entertainment.

[saras]

5. I pity the poor kids who have to learn real science from an IPad

"At one school in South Lake, heavy backpacks overflowing with textbooks, notebooks, binders, and papers will be a thing of the past come fall."

Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. The notebooks and paper will NOT go away until everyone can touch-type with one hand, and gets something on the order of the whole Adobe Suite as well as MS Office as standard software, not to mention becoming competent at whipping out quick sketches with it, in a wide variety of subject areas. Every try to draw a graph, or a trig problem, or a map, or a picture of anything, on an IPad? Really?

But I suppose if people like Newton and Galileo could do it with candles and handwriting, then it's not impossible, just harder.

"I'm kind of excited." So? What does that have to do with anything?

[Davis_X_Machina]

6. We've had 600+ MacBooks in daily use in my high school for three years...

...one per kid -- and very little problem with them.

But then, they're used to it. Every Maine middle-schooler's had an iBook, (now a MacBook) for 7-8 years. Every one.

Not that uncommon any more.