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Which Device Will Win the Tablet Battle?

May 8, 2012 | 10:49 AM | By

XO-3

By Frank Catalano

The future of tablets in our schools may not be coming from Cupertino. Or even the U.S.

Despite the craze around Apple’s iPad, it’s only been two years since the device was introduced, and that may not be enough time to separate fad from trend over the long term in education. And while the iPad’s presence – and promotion by the Apple faithful since its launch in 2010 – is hard to ignore, a winning tablet trend hasn’t been clearly established on a global basis.

It’s certainly true that tablets are on the upswing in K-12 schools and higher education. There’s no shortage of U.S. numbers to cite. Going beyond statistics of tablet penetration (in one case, most recently, 25% of college students and 17% of college seniors), it’s in the composition of purchases where the data can get interesting. For example, a Harris Interactive/Pearson Foundation survey released in March gave iPads the largest share among college students (at 63%), followed by the Kindle Fire (26%) and the Samsung Galaxy Tab (15%).

As U.S. education appears to be moving toward tablets in pockets here and there, other countries’ education officials are embracing them in bulk.

Another way to read those figures: It’s roughly a 60/40 split between Apple’s iOS operating system and all flavors of Android devices (“flavors” might be the right word, as Android has named its more recent OS versions Ice Cream Sandwich and Gingerbread). These relative rankings among popular Android tablets in education mirror the broader U.S. consumer market.

But the scope of some big decisions made by international government agencies – and the price of non-U.S. devices – could upset the apple cart.

Consider India. Last fall saw the launch of the highly touted US$50 Aakash Android tablet for education (subsidized to US$35). That initiative subsequently stumbled following reports the first models built by the UK firm DataWind were sluggish and fragile. The government has since decided to press ahead with a new version with improved specifications.

Yet the overwhelming interest in what was supposed to be a first run of 100,000 tablets has spurred the growth of a handful of new education-focused competitors. They’ve developed tablets that are more expensive, but apparently more capable: the US$100 ATab, US$150 HCL MeTab, Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, Apple, digital textbooks, e-readers, iPad, tablet

Did Apple Just Reinvent the Textbook?

January 19, 2012 | 10:57 AM | By

Flickr: wohnai

There’s been speculation for months now — at least since the release of the Steve Jobs biography — about Apple’s plans to take on the textbook publishing industry. And today at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, we finally got a glimpse of what the company has been planning since long before the death of its co-founder.

As Apple’s Phil Schiller noted in his opening remarks today, “Education is deep in our DNA… and has been since the very beginning.” And while that may be true, it was one of the company’s most recent inventions — the iPad — that took center stage today as the ideal learning device, with Apple touting kids’ (of all ages) love and desire for the tablets.

Apple boasted the adoption that iPads have already seen — some 1.5 million iPads already in use at educational institutions, with over 1000 schools having 1:1 iPad programs. Apple also noted the rich app ecosystem that’s been built around the iPad as a learning device — over 20,000 educational apps made specifically for the device.

While the mantra throughout the event was “iPad, iPad, iPad,” the focus of much of today’s event was on textbooks — digital textbooks — and Apple’s insistence that these are “not always the ideal learning tool.” Apple unveiled several new tools that it argued would move the “great content” found in textbooks into a new, interactive, durable, portable format — in other words, move the textbooks onto the iPad.

Reading: Apple introduced iBooks2, an update to its iOS e-book app (which sadly still isn’t accessible on Macs, let alone on Windows machines) that offers a new category specially for interactive digital textbooks. These new e-textbooks contain many of the features we’ve been more accustomed to seeing in interactive e-book apps rather than in the iBookstore — videos, photos, Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, Teaching Strategies, Apple, apps, digital textbooks, e-readers, iPad

A Tribute to Steve Jobs

October 5, 2011 | 5:41 PM | By

Flickr:Stefanoost

One of the many things I find fascinating about Steve Jobs’ textured life was his education. From CNET’s obituary:

He attended Reed College in Oregon for a year but dropped out, although he sat in on some classes that interested him, such as calligraphy. After a brief stint at Atari working on video games, he spent time backpacking around India, furthering teenage experiments with psychedelic drugs and developing an interest in Buddhism, all of which would shape his work at Apple.

Tributes to a man who, without question, changed our lives.

And finally, the seminal “Think Different” ad.

FILED UNDER: Apple, Steve Jobs

Can Apple Products Pave the Way to Personalized Learning?

October 4, 2011 | 2:19 PM | By

Lenny Gonzalez

San Francisco middle school students watch instructional videos on their school-issued iPads.

Apple held a press event today at its Cupertino headquarters, unveiling a variety of improvements to its line of iPods and iPhones, including an update to its mobile operating system and a brand new version of its wildly popular iPhone. As always happens around these Apple announcements, there’s a flurry of excitement — before, during, and after — about what the company will reveal. Other tech companies hold similar press events, sure, but few seem to garner as much buzz as Apple’s.

Some of that allure came from its former CEO. When Steve Jobs announced in August that he was stepping down from his position as CEO, there was a massive outpouring of reflections and analyses by the technology press about the impact that he and his company have had on technology — on both hardware and software. Indeed, it’s hard to understate that impact when you look at the role that Apple played in the development and adoption of personal computers, portable music devices, mobile phones, and tablets. By extension, Apple’s influence has helped usher in new opportunities for digital content in the entertainment and publishing industries.

And, of course, the company has had a huge impact on education. Apple has had a long history of pushing its computers into the classrooms. For many years, a child’s first exposure to a computer had been at school, and often that computer was an Apple. The company made a push back in the Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Teaching Strategies, Apple, differentiated instruction, iPad, iphone, personalized learning

Computer Science: Not Just for Geeks Anymore

June 13, 2011 | 3:47 PM | By

Flickr:RubyGoes

More college are being drawn to computer science degrees because of media’s glamorous portrayal of this traditionally geeky career path, today’s New York Times article suggests. Movies like “The Social Network” and Apple’s slick ad campaigns have created celebrities out of Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, and with tech company net worth numbering in the billions, choosing computer science is becoming decidedly more intriguing these days.

This year, 11,000 students will be receiving computer science degrees in the U.S., according to the Computing Research Association, the article states.

Universities are pitching the major as not just a practical skills path, but one that could lead to discovery and creativity.

To hook students, Yale computer science professors are offering freshman seminars with no prerequisites, like one on computer graphics, in which students learn the technical underpinnings of a Pixar movie.

“Historically this department has been very theory-oriented, but in the last few years, we’re broadening the curriculum,” said Julie Dorsey, a professor. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Apple, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs

Does Apple’s New iCloud Offer Anything New for Education?

June 8, 2011 | 10:25 AM | By

Apple is holding its big developers’ conference this week in San Francisco, and the event kicked off on Monday with a keynote unveiling some of the new products and features Apple has in store. This includes upgrades to both its Mac and mobile operating systems.

Apple also introduced a new product, iCloud that will store users’ music, photos, apps, calendars, and documents online and then push them to all Apple devices, whether they’re iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches, or Macs. The service includes 5 GB of storage for free.

Apple is hardly the first company to make a foray into online storage. But with the popularity of Apple’s products — with consumers in general and with educators in particular — it may be that Apple’s new offering will help popularize the idea of cloud computing, a term that’s familiar in tech circles but still unclear to a lot of consumers.

CEO Steve Jobs took to the stage at the World Wide Developers Conference on Monday to explain Apple’s new service, saying that iCloud was the company’s “next big insight.” Contending that the PC is no longer the “digital hub for your digital life,” Jobs predicted that with iCloud, the company will “demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device” and instead that our digital hub will be “in the cloud.” And if nothing else, iCloud offers a way to demonstrate what cloud computing means: it’s online storage, accessible anywhere from any device over the Internet. All that data will in fact be stored in massive data centers instead of locally on your hard drive.

But what does iCloud mean for education? Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, Android, Apple, Google, google apps for education, iCloud