Intel goes back to school with StudyBook tablet Intel is set to follow-up on its Classmate PC for school kids with a tablet for the education market, currently dubbed the StudyBook. The Register has learnt that the device will be launched next week. The 10-in tablet will feature dual operating systems and run Intel’s Medfield chips, according to a Digitimes report …
I see it too often in our Regional/European meetings, Managers hunched over their laptops "whilst" someone is giving a presentation. Ok sometimes the presentations are boring but when you have an alternative choice...
I have no experience of the classroom but I can imagine that given the same choice a kid will easilly be distracted and will prefer his laptop, which has games and social media on it, than a lecture from a teacher.
Are kids also allowed to take laptops into exams, if not then why are they in the classroom.
I would be interested too hear the rationalisations for allowing PCs onto the school desktop. ( University excepted - and don't come up with the "It replaces the heavy books argument, please").
The replacing heavy books arguement is better served by e-reader. When you think about the educational benefits that could be relased by a kindle with whispernet i.e. email little Johny's homework direct to his kindle if he's off ill (if Amazon allowed it of course).
If you really insist on the multimedia angle a playbook offers a cheaper alternative that's secure by design.
but really I am not.
The point is that the world children are being born into today is not the world you and I grew up in. In large swathes of the world people are nearly constantly connected to the web, younger people especially. We have to learn different things and in different ways, than we did 30 years ago.
I think kids should be allowed laptops in exams, tablets too, but that the exams should take this into account. How often do you find yourself completely isolated from the raw computing power of the web and the masses of information it holds? If you are isolated from the web, how often is that without a computer of some kind (a laptop, a phone, a tablet, whatever) that has literally thousands of text books worth of storage on it?
If you're under 20, the answer's probably very rarely.
I'm pretty sure lots of commenters will disagree with me here, saying how they spend twelve hours a day in a mill, in a field making sprockets, uphill in the snow both ways. Or that they have many friends who never go online or the like.
Probably true for the older generations.
But for children, the web is the encyclopaedia, the television, the local social club and their penpal and their games console all in one. And it fits in their pocket.
So while laptops in the school seems like a bad idea when you think of a world like we grew up in, is it really so bad that they might not know who Harold defeated at the battle of Stamford Bridge?
I'm not saying they should rely on machines for everything, maths, basic language skills and the knowledge we all gathered as children is important. But how you gather it is really not as important. Sure I had the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but it was slow and it was hard to get the relevant detail out of the morass of information I was presented with. Then my school got Encarta and life became ever so slightly easier, now we have university sites, the dreaded wikipedia and whole hosts of specialist sites accessible at our fingertips.
Learning something from a web page is just as valuable as learning it from a book.
For subjects like history, I can see a strong case for multimedia, interviews with people and so on. Proper first hand evidence.
Oh no, computers in the classroom are definitely a strong part of how children should be taught, nostalgia to the contrary.
Our benevolent government has promised 1 laptop per child in years 9-12, and the 1st group of year 9's with the laptops are now in year 12.
Teachers are encouraged to plan lessons around them, except on any given day 1/3 the class won't have them, 1/3rd will have a flat battery, and the 90% of the remaining 1/3 will be playing flash games or watching movies loaded on their flash drives.
Meanwhile they are so locked down, I can't install software I need to teach, and calls for Italc to be loaded so that teachers can monitor what students are actually doing.
At least I have a "proper" lab to work in where I have admin rights, and can load Italc and at any time in any given period 1/4 the class is locked out because they are playing - and they know I am watching.
Has the program been a success - read any research and it all says yes, ask a teacher and you get a very different response!
I would say year 9 (that's 14 right?) is a lot too late to get children to start using laptops in lessons, by about 9 years.
Probably at the wrong stage in development too, when I was 14 I regularly used my pens to doodle instead of write, or play battleships with the boy I sat next to. I don't think teenagers are generally much good at concentrating anyway.
I completely understand your point of view but there are a few points that I would like to make.
Computers and most other modern gadgets were built by generations that did not have access to these items within the classroom. It did not stop that generation from becoming very effecient with these tools at a later stage.
By introducing computers into the classroom I feel that we are creating a dependance which is very difficult to remove. The elementary skills of Reading, Writing, aRithmetic can be applied in all and almost every occasion within life. Computers are only useful within very limited conditions.
Please don't get me wrong, I have been in IT for more than 20 years and I completely understand the role that computers and IT have to play but I also understand that the only reason I became any good at computing was because I was taught the elementary skills correctly. If I had been subjected to a computer at a very young age my computing skills may have developed but I would probably lacked in others.
In my point of view , I feel that computers make us dependant wheres the basic skills help us to remain independant.
True, computers make us dependant, which is why I said that the basics should remain in place.
But is the dependancy really any greater when it's to a computer than to a book?
I use google, wikipedia and the like extensively in my everyday life. I regard the knowledge of how to intelligently and accurately use these tools as a skill in and of itself. Yes, I grew up having to look in books to find out what I needed to know, did it make it stay in my head better? I honestly couldn't say.
What I can say is that I have a much broader knowledge of things I learnt since I left formal study and started just looking into things that interested me on the web. True, it mightn't be as detailed but largely I would say that's my fault rather than the medium from which I learn.
We have so much knowledge now, so much data in existence, that aside from your specialist area(s) a broad and shallow knowing is about all you can expect. With that I have to say that the internet has massively increased the scope and depth available to anyone connected to it (who reads the appropriate language)
By all means keep teaching arithmetic, literacy and the basic sciences as we've done for years, these methods work. But when it comes to humanities and to a lesser extent higher sciences (though I can see a tablet being extremely useful when learning physics, part of the reason I hated using a laptop in lectures was because I couldn't lob a quick diagram in), take advantage of the fact that we have much better technology and better resources available to us now.
I have a rose-tinted dream of history projects about the second world war being created with interviews from survivors, video of the events and the like interspersed between the text. Of lots of young children thinking of tablets and PCs the way I think about pens and paper. Your school work would be stored on the school servers, so the actual machine you used to access it would be nearly irrelevant. Though the kids could be encouraged to personalise their machines so they have a proper link to their achievements, a better link than covering a book in leftover wallpaper like I used to! Almost makes me wish I was back at school again now.
Well I am sure the kids are grateful for any tech but does figure they get stuck with Intel's crap Atom chips requiring a massive battery that only last a few hours and handsets/tablets that are hot to the touch (lol think Intel finally got rid of fans, congrats). Intel is smart to give it away in the 3rd world because based on how ultrabook sales have gone so far nobody in the developed world wants their stuff in the small form factor side.
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