Replacing School books with Ipads??

Julian's classroom has windows on three sides and room for his desk as well as a separate lectern. Inside, 27 children sit in front of 27 laptops, all logged on to the Khan Academy. Used in the classroom, the Khan Academy flips the traditional curriculum; students listen to the lectures at home, on their own time, and do the homework in class, which allows the teacher time to address student issues individually. As the class progresses, Julian wanders through the desks with an iPad running Khan's dashboard, so he can see who's ahead and who's behind. He doesn't really need it: He already knows exactly how each student is progressing. And he isn't doing as much individual teaching as one might expect. Often, the lagging students are tutored by the students who are ahead. "The kids know whom to call on," says Julian. "It happened on its own. They just began to get out of their seats and work with each other. They've identified their trustworthy peer tutors. They know they can call on Sriram and Akhil and Albert, and that they know what they're talking about. Mainly, I've had to spend time teaching them how to teach."

Erin Green, principal of Covington, loves the Khan Academy and plans to expand it to more classrooms. "Many of the students are working at a level of mathematics that I have never seen in an elementary school before, maybe not even in a junior high school before," she says. "They're engaged and they're excited, and that's the most exciting part. It meets you at your level."

The Khan Academy has also been introduced in two seventh-grade classrooms for struggling learners in the Los Altos district, and the district is considering using it in all schools next year. "Their improvement has been dramatic," says Khan of the slow group, who notes that his studies are small, not peer-reviewed, and just intended for him to get a sense of whether Khan Academy methods are working or not. "We're seeing 70 percent on average improvement on the pre-algebra topics in those classrooms. It definitely tells us it's not derailing anything. All the indicators say that something profound looks like it's happening."

In Julian's class, Sriram, one of the standouts, is asked what he's working on.

"Chains," he responds. "It's like a calculus thingy. But it's really easy."
"Well, to him," says Julian.
Sriram moves aside. The question on his screen looks like this:

ƒ(x) = e cos(x)
ƒ'(x) = ?

Along the right side are five answers:

— e(cos(x)) - 1 • (tan(x))
— (e - (cos(x))) cos(x) (csc(x))
— (cos(x)) • e cos(x) + (sin(x))
— e cos(x) • (-sin(x))
— None of these.


Sriram explains in a halting, impossible-to-understand fashion how he arrives at the answer, plugs it in, and gets a "correct."

"I don't get some of this stuff either," says Julian. "They're like, can you help me? I'm like, I have to go back and watch Salman's videos."

Nijmegen wrote: »

Leaving aside the issue of the iPad vs other platforms:

Why is it stupid that they do their leaving through the format they'll do most of their college and lead their working lives?

It's stupid in the context of maintaining the form of the leaving cert, which is rather out of date compared to the reality, where people use spell checkers and computers at their desks all through their professional lives.

The ability to effectively troubleshoot PC problems is now more important than the ability to handwrite perfectly.

Nijmegen

iPad's, laptops, other kinds of tablets - who cares? The fact is that kids who learn in dynamic, computerised schools with engaged teachers have better learning outcomes.

New research by economists Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches provides an answer: For many kids, computers are indeed more of a distraction than a learning opportunity. The two researchers surveyed households that applied to Euro 200, a voucher distribution program in Romania designed to help poor households defray the cost of buying a computer for their children. It turns out that kids in households lucky enough to get computer vouchers spent a lot less time watching TV—but that's where the good news ends. "Vouchered" kids also spent less time doing homework, got lower grades, and reported lower educational aspirations than the "unvouchered" kids.

Fittle wrote: »

but if this happens, we'll have raised a nation of 'text-speakers' who wouldn't know an apostrophe nor a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence, if it hit them in the eye:(

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

But would it matter, if we end up in a situation in which EVERYBODY communicates this way?
Opposing the evolution of language is pointless and petty in my view.

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