iPads in the Classroom

Link to December 14 San Jose Mercury News article, "Rise of the iKids: Schools test iPads in classrooms".

Excerpt:  Before, during and even between classes at Hillbrook School this fall, seventh-graders have been spotted on the Los Gatos campus, sometimes burbling Spanish or Mandarin phrases into the glowing screen in their hands, other times staring into it like a looking glass.

iPads -- the Apple of almost every adolescent's eye -- are being provided to students at several Bay Area public and private schools this year, including Hillbrook, which claims to be the only K-8 school in America using tablet computers in class and sending them home. This has led to a lot of 12-year-olds swanning around the wooded hillside campus, talking to their iPads.

Summoning up a virtual keyboard recently, Sophie Greene quickly typed a note to herself in iCal, a calendar program, then played back an audio file in which she was speaking Spanish. "We record a conversation, e-mail it to our teacher, Señorita Kelly," she explained, "then she critiques the lesson in Spanish and sends that back to us."

For the 28 seventh-graders entrusted with iPads at Hillbrook, the pictures that flash across the device's screen open a window to a wider world. The iPad allows them to take daily excursions across time and space to such exotic ports as ancient Mesopotamia and modern China.

The only drawback is that with their assignments all composed on iPads, the one excuse that no longer works for Hillbrook's seventh-graders is, "The dog ate my homework."

Related articles:
"Purpose-built" vs. multipurpose machines.  (8/8/2010)
iPad introduced to an already overburdened digital world.  (1/28/2010)
Tablet computers: an over-the-shoulder look.  (1/27/2010)
Apple Tablet makes it easier to buy Don Draper's hat.  (1/27/2010)
Print media hopes Apple Tablet comes with eraser.  (1/26/2010)