I'm willing to bet that the technology you grew up with is the technology you like
Exactly. I recently heard a piece on the telephone on NPR... And how it was a technology that was considered evil by many in the beginning and many refused to use it... Now is it even a thought? Does anyone walk around saying "I just refuse to have a telephone! It's ruining our kids/society/etc" ?
Well...TBH, this sounds a bit smug, and seems to be implying that anyone who questions the value of classroom iPads must be a curmudgeon who's afraid of new-fangled gadgets. I wasn't questioning the point of iPads or claiming that they ruin our kids. I was asking if what kind of additional educational value they provide, and if this value is worth multimillion dollar investments by school districts whose budget problems are serious enough that they lay off teachers.
Some of the messages here have highlighted positive aspects of classroom iPads, which is great. But they mostly seemed to apply to 2E kids with similar problems. So these advantages may not apply to the general population. I see that all kids can do projects on an iPad, but they could do the same work on a laptop or desktop, which is cheaper, less likely to be dropped, and harder to steal. From what I see, people are far more likely to need skills on those devices in the workplace or even at college.
If textbooks were available on IPads as PDFs, that might be a good thing. It would reduce the weight of a backpack. But if the textbooks were licensed annually, they would strike me more as a profit center, and I'd object to that idea.
