The new Apple iPad has educators everywhere buzzing about the possibilities it could provide for teachers and students in the future. There are a lot of benefits that an electronic tablet could bring to the education world, should school districts choose to invest in this new form of technology.
More Economical Over Time
The price of textbooks for K-12 is incredibly expensive and the price goes up every year. Providing students with iPads could potentially be a lot cheaper than providing them with books. If a student could have an iPad signed out to them each year that they attend school instead of textbooks it could eventually safe thousands of dollars per child.
Ideally, the iPad could stay at school to prevent any theft or damage outside of school grounds and children could access the content from their home computer. This would not only save school districts some money but publishers as well. The need to print textbooks on expensive glossy paper would become obsolete and the technology that the publishers could provide would be limitless.
More Up to Date
Traditional textbooks are purchased by school districts every ten or so years. A lot can happen in ten years, can you imagine all the out of date information in a decade-old science textbook? However, if they iPad were to replace traditional texts the information could be instantly updateable. Publishers of the E-textbook could provide constant updates to information making their books continuously up to date. Students would always have the most up to date information in the world literally at their fingertips.
Eco Friendly
Think of all the paper that could be saved if schools replaced traditional texts with E-books on the iPad. The fact that this would eliminate the need for millions of sheets of printed paper each year is pretty good incentive for consideration. Eventually the iPad could even be used to replace most of the students printed work. With a few technology tweaks students could be reading assignments in their iPad E-textbook, then switching to an iPad virtual notebook application to write their papers and instantly email them to their teacher over a school wide wireless router.
iPad for Education apps
There are already tons of iPad for Education apps available and more are cropping up every day. These apps are a great help for teachers and students and can make learning fun and exciting. To promote iPads desire to link with education, many of these applications are available through the web free for a limited time.