The pace of change is accelerating everywhere and one of the primary drivers of that change is what I call the “digitization of everything.”

Every industry is being impacted – and most in some pretty significant and often severe ways. Schools aren’t keeping pace with this level of change – nor are they preparing young people for a world that is radically different from today (which is radically different from just a few short years ago).

Add to that the trends in mobility and you’ve got a perfect storm.

Here are a few of the key trends showing how these forces are impacting schools

 

• IT spending is up: The Center for Digital Education estimated education spending on IT reached $19.7 billion in 2010-11 and it’s expected to rise again in 2011-12. Despite school budget cuts, officials are spending more money on tech than ever before. Traditional educational publishers are devoting more attention and budget to the digital world and tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon are trying to push their devices into schools.
• Hardware spending is up: According to an Education Technology Market Watch report, there’s a clear move to channel funding into technology and the bulk of that spending (55 to 60 percent) in middle schools (K12) is on hardware.
• Digital textbooks taking off: Project Tomorrow reports that 27 percent of middle school and 35 percent of high school students use digital textbooks. On top of that, the Pearson Foundation reports that 58 percent of college students prefer a digital format for textbooks. Tablets and e-readers are the ideal windows for that content.
• iPad tests: In McAllen, Texas, public school officials have opted for iPads over desktop PCs and plan to distribute 25,000 iPads over the next few years. The total spend of $20 million in the McAllen district covers the cost of the iPads and also the Wi-Fi network and training needed to support their use. The program includes iPads for third grade and upwards and iPods for pre-kindergarten up to second grade. San Diego distributed 26,000 iPads to students this year and Chicago public schools have around 20,000 iPads.
• Worldwide adoption: Further afield in Scotland, the government recently announced plans to spend £60 million ($95 million) on tablets for universities, colleges, and schools. It’s fast becoming a worldwide trend.
• Bring Your Own Tablet: There is also a mirroring of the BYOD trend which is sweeping through the business world. Many students will soon have their own tablets or smartphones and will choose to use them for school work. Some educational establishments are looking at voucher systems to enable students to buy their own devices. Budgets in education are always tight and so any solution that can help reduce the cost is bound to be explored. If students were expected to bring their own devices, then those with parents who can’t afford tablets could be equipped from a smaller school-owned pool of devices.
• Promising case studies: A Learning Untethered case study offers a valuable insight into the pros and cons of tablet implementation in the classroom. The project involved equipping a 5th grade class of 27 students with 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab devices at a cost of around $200 per student. Though there were a number of technical issues the results were overwhelmingly positive with greater student engagement.

The iPad is playing a big role in this transformation – and with the introduction of the iPad Mini we should expect to see even greater adoption.

Here’s an article about mobile learning and how schools have to find a way to adapt to the mobile influence in our lives.

“Kids are the experts on the technology,” Soloway says. “Teachers are the experts not on the content but on the pedagogy and classroom management. The two have to live together. They have to learn together.”

 

…Mobile learning is not hype, Soloway and Norris assert emphatically, citing experience from their research in Singapore for the WeLearn Project. WeLearn gave Nokia Lumia 710 phones, running Windows, to a class of third graders at Nan Chiau primary school in Sengkang New Town, located in the northeastern region of the country. The goal of the project is to foster 21st century skills in these students by moving them from the traditional teacher-centric learning model to a student-centric approach that encourages collaboration and project-based learning.

Mobile That Works

And here’s an example of what’s happening in schools around the US:

A North Carolina school district will receive $30 million through a federal Race to the Top District grant. It plans to use the funding to provide tablets for its sixth- through eighth-grade students.

Guilford County Schools (GCS) is one of 16 nationwide recipients of the United States Department of Education’s Race to the Top District grants. The district won $30 million, with grants in the amount of $400 million distributed in total.

The Guilford school district will use the funding to buy tablets for its 17,000 students in grades 6-8 at 24 middle schools, provide training to students, families, teachers, and principals, and hire additional technology coordinators.

North Carolina District Wins $30 Million To Provide Tablets to Middle School Students

And here are some recent articles showing the iPad’s influence and impact in schools:

iPad program bears fruit in Wausau schools

A pilot program that has put iPads into the hands of about 1,000 Wausau School District students has students excited about learning and employing plenty of creativity in their work, educators say.

 

Most of the district’s teachers received the iPads this week (or will very soon), according to Ermalene Faulkner, MCS chief academic officer.

“The excitement is really building,” Faulkner said. “I am really encouraged about where we are so far in this process.”

The school board in January approved the use of $2 million in the Rainy Day Fund for all of the tech upgrades.

Fifth-graders tap iPad screens and punch computer keys during a St. Patrick School computer class, where students virtually venture across the Pacific Ocean to work with sixth-graders in Sydney, Australia.

Glenn Loayza, a St. Patrick technology teacher, launched a global collaboration initiative that utilizes Skype video chatting.

Summary: A new study investigating the use of electronic reading devices shows that using the iPad for reading brings the joy of that pastime back to those with vision loss due to disease.

District embraces technology with use of iPads by students

A hushed air hung over Rhea Heaton’s first-period Spanish class at La Center High School, as students took an end-of-the-week quiz Friday. Light murmurs of students asking questions mingled with the gentle tapping of fingertips on illuminated screens.

In front of each student was an iPad — a tablet-style computer with a touch screen. Questions were displayed in Spanish and answered with the swipe of a finger. The days of Scantron sheets and No. 2 pencils are being phased out of the La Center School District, as it forges ahead with bolstering its technological resources.

Finally, here’s a great way to think about the use of technology and it’s impact on school. Where are you on this continuum?

Source: http://ictevangelist.com/

There is a trend taking place throughout the corporate world that has the potential to significantly impact schools. The trends is being called BYOD – bring your own device. What’s happening in business is employees – everyone from the manufacturing floor, to secretaries, to sales people, to the executive suite and boardroom – are bringing their personal mobile devices with them to work. They are doing that because their experience – with smart phones and tablets – is one they are liking and getting value from.

People are now expecting to have the same kind of experience they have in their personal lives in their work lives with their technology. As someone I know recently said, “consumers want to be the Yoda of their technological universe.”

By bringing their own devices to work, employees are putting pressure on companies/employers to provide them with the same kind of experience to support them in getting their work done.

This trend is creating a significant amount of impact on IT organizations. Here’s a quote from a recent article about this:

A global survey of IT directors by CIO Barometer indicates that employees are increasingly taking control of IT, as 45 percent of respondents indicate that their personal hardware and software are more useful to them than the tools and applications provided by their company.

Also, while the consumerization trend is having a positive impact on employee morale as indicated by 88 percent of survey participants believing that the use of personal devices increases employee job satisfaction, lingering concerns still exist with 72 percent of companies citing increased security incidents from the use of mobile devices.

Additional highlights include:

• 33 percent of businesses surveyed state that their primary motivation for adopting cloud computing is the ability to offer greater access to information, with the second most important motivating factor is cost reduction.
• 57 percent of respondents cite that their top activity for making IT more environmentally friendly is to reduce overall energy consumption, with replacing PCs and IT components coming in as the second most cited activity for going green.
• 43 percent of respondents agreed that IT projects were the number one costliest element of last year’s budget, a dramatic rise for this factor, which came in at number 11 the previous year.
• 75 percent of companies are outsourcing more than a quarter of their IT services as compared to 30 percent from the 2011 CIO Barometer.
• 40 percent of companies are increasing their IT budgets despite a slow economic recovery in Europe and the United States.

This trend will no doubt have an impact on schools across the country. Employees and students will be bringing their own devices and expecting to connect to school networks and school applications and school data – and expecting to have an experience similar to what they are having in their homes (which is positive and adds value).

Schools will have to adopt – or, as has been in the past, continue to be out of step and disconnected from other aspects of life. Some schools already have cell phone policies. A few schools are embracing cell phones and taking advantage of them as part of the learning process. What happens when students start bringing their own iPads or other tablet to school? Will schools embrace them or take them away – or ban them?

What’s your experience? What’s your point of view?

Add to that trend the continual move towards workers working at home – and the tools and  technologies that support them getting better and better, and you’ve got another force that will significantly impact young people in their personal lives. This trend and it’s implications will spill over to the school environment.

If students experience streaming content to their big screen TVs and ever increasing any time any where access to information/content – they may have a harder time sitting in a seat in a traditional classroom listening to a lecture by a teacher using an overhead projector (they are still being used!).

What will all this mean to the school building? Will they survive? If so, what will they look like five years from now (what should they look like five years from now)?

From a recent article and study on the ever increasing move towards a mobile work force and a remote workforce:

Companies are catching on, building offices designed for employees to work remotely, with better systems for communicating with telecommuters (i.e. giant TV screens), fewer desks, flexible seating arrangements, and less floor space overall.

It’s a trend that’s good for workers’ psyches and the environment–more people working from home means fewer car trips, and fewer people in the office allows companies to scale down to smaller spaces that use fewer resources. And if you don’t like it, well, too bad–a new survey from Citrix Systems found that the movement is speeding up.

Citrix surveyed 1,900 “senior IT decision-makers” in 19 countries, asking about future trends in workspaces and telecommuting. Among the highlights:

• The IT executives surveyed believe that by 2020 there will be seven desks for every 10 office workers, reflecting the growing number of telecommuters.
• That ratio will be even lower–six desks for every 10 workers–in telecommuting-friendly countries like the U.S., the U.K., Singapore, and the Netherlands. It will be higher in cultures that place a high value on face-time, like Germany, South Korea, and Japan. But even those countries are adjusting. After the Fukushima disaster, “organizations realized that they could empower their employees to work from home. They began to learn that work can be done anywhere,” says Kim DeCarlis, VP of corporate marketing at Citrix.
• Approximately 29% of people in 2020 will work remotely–the majority from home, project sites, and customer/partner premises. Coffee shops, airports, and hotels will also be used while in transit, much as they are today.
• 24% of companies have adopted mobile work styles (“The trend towards fewer office-based employees … who use multiple computing devices to access corporate apps, data, and services from a range of locations outside of the traditional office,” according to Citrix). That number will balloon to 83% by mid 2014.
• 96% of organizations implementing mobile work styles are redesigning their workplaces to be more collaborative and flexible.
• 83% of companies plan to allow employees to bring their own digital devices to and from work instead of relying on desktops, with most or all of the costs being covered by the companies themselves.

There are generational differences, to be sure; younger employees who were weaned on laptops and wireless access are comfortable working from anywhere. “The idea that they would have to come to an office to do their job is really very foreign to them,” says DeCarlis. But, she emphasizes, there are many people who want to work remotely, and age has nothing to do with it. Maybe they live an hour from the office, have small kids at home, or simply work better in distraction-free environments. Regardless of the reasoning, telecommuting is about to get a whole lot easier.

I am often asked for references to schools in specific areas that are implementing iPads. My default resource for finding those locations and deployments is typically to do a search in Google and look for references or articles about those deployments.

Eric Lai, a writer for a technology publication called ZDNet, has created an interactive list of over 130 schools, school districts, colleges and universities deploying tablets to students for the first time this fall. Use this interactive map he created to find out more about these deployments.

View School iPad & Tablet Deployments, Fall 2012 in a larger map

The following infographic developed by creative media agency MDG Advertising, shows more than 1.5 million are currently in use by students, and schools bought some 47,000 in the first month-and-a-half after its release. There are currently more than 20,000 apps meant for education, and 80% of learning apps in the App Store target kids. Some studies even show that students who have access to iPads do better in school than kids who don’t.

All this information comes from sources including CNN, The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch and others to produce the following infographic. Check it out below for the fuller picture.

There is plenty of evidence the iPad is making larger and larger in-roads into schools. Just this past week there were the following articles:

Apple goes back to school with the iPad

by Jonah Loeb, Market Watch, Published September 12, 2012

Starting with business news, beyond Apple introducing the iPhone 5 and iOS6, MarketWatch has an article discussing how Apple is offering parents the option to buy a Mac or an iPad – both with bundled applications. Their take is that Apple isn’t offering enough – or rather, that the deal isn’t sweet enough (it’s good, but they say it could be better).

It’s a logical time for parents to buy their high school and college-bound kids a new machine, not to mention all the frantic retail bundling that happens in Best Buy Co. Inc.BBY  and Apple Inc. AAPL  stores. That’s why it’s interesting to see what Apple is offering to students this fall: A choice between a Mac and an iPad, the former with $100 worth of apps and the latter with $50 worth.

 

Glue, Scissors and an iPad
by Lauren Covello, That’s Money, Published September 13, 2012, FOXBusiness

Next up from Fox Business news  suggests that some point in the future the back to school season will have iPads on the ‘required’ supply list.

Thousands of public school districts across the country are taking serious steps toward making iPads an important tool in their curriculum – and at a rapid pace. Apple (AAPL: 691.28, +8.30, +1.22%) sold almost a million iPads to education buyers in the K-12 market in the third quarter alone, doubling sales from a year ago, according to an analyst at Needham & Co. By contrast, PC shipments in the education market reportedly fell 13.9% during the same period. While schools have been testing iPads for awhile, many of them are now looking to deepen their investment. A school district in San Diego recently spent $15 million expanding its iPad program, taking on 26,000 iPads in what was one of the biggest iPad deployments to date. The McAllen school district in Texas, which had only distributed 5,000 devices as of last April, will provide nearly 20,000 to students this fall.

Next we have an article exploring whether tablets should replace textbooks. I’ve argued that this is inevitable – it’s just a matter of time.

Patch Talk: Should Tablet PCs Replace Print Textbooks in School?

With the rising popularity of the Apple iPad and Google Nexus 7, should heavy print texts go the way of the buffalo?

“We are piloting tablet use at the primary, elementary, middle and high school levels and in content areas across the curriculum while developing our infrastructure and a solid method of assessing how tablet computers improve student learning,” said Dr. Rita Melikian, director of educational technology and staff development. “Our special education teachers and speech pathologists, in particular, have been utilizing the specialized applications available on the iPad.”

Then we have the following stories about schools moving to iPads.

Paul School Readies iPad Pilot Program

by Laurie Welch, published in the Magic Valley Times-News, September 13, 2012

Paul Elementary School in Idaho will be be piloting iPads this year. The article mentions the fact that Paul school is taking part in the iSchool program and references the fact that full deployment of what they call a “Smart School” on a single K-5 campus has been done in six states, including Utah and Colorado, and has been piloted in nine states. The iSchool Campus is headquartered in Park City, Utah.

About 450 K-5 students and their teachers will receive iPads as part of the project, which is funded through a grant and partnership between iSchool Campus and Apple Inc. The school was chosen to participate because it is an award-winning Idaho Leads Project school.

Students in grades 2-5 will be allowed to take the iPads home.

“The iPad is a technological tool available for the teacher to incorporate into the classroom,” said Immaculate Heart Assistant Principal Bob Baldonado. “Although we have a mandated curriculum to cover, the iPad provides many innovative and interactive ways to cover the curriculum while at the same time keeping the students motivated and engaged.”

As back to school kicks off in the U.S., new data claims that Apple’s iPad is outpacing traditional PCs in sales to students and schools for the first time ever.

Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Company, wrote to investors today that the iPad is now “cannibalizing” PCs in sales to the K-12 market, according to Apple Insider.

“Clearly, a significant portion of iPad sales represented an expansion of the market,” Wolf wrote, according to Apple Insider. “But in view of the fact that Mac sales held steady at around 520,000 units but overall PC sales declined by 265,000 units from 1.90 million to 1.64 million units, we believe the inescapable conclusion is that the iPad is beginning to cannibalize a material portion of PC sales in this market.”

Creating is “Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing.” -Source

Creating is at the highest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy for a reason. Creating allows students to internalize information in order to create products to display their learning and understanding of different concepts.

App creation is one of the potential ‘disruptive’ elements of the iPad in Schools. Not only is the iPad functional on so many levels but once young people are empowered to actually create the applications they use in school, learning will leap to a completely different level.

App creation is project based learning and holistic learning. Not only can creating apps inspire students to learn about computers, programming, and technical skills, it can also inspire them to learn about marketing and communication – and ultimately entrepreneurialism.

Here’s an article from EducationWeek discussing programs for young people (particularly girls) where mentors and coaches inspire them to build their own applications – learning the language, programming skills as well as marketing skills.

After-school programs geared toward mobile-app development offer appealing ways to academically engage students in technical and entrepreneurial exercises

And while each team has a teacher mentor, “we were really counting on students to take the lead,” says Oster. Students set up their own meetings and work through the curriculum independently, with support from a teacher mentor

Here’s an article from EducationWeek about student app creation to help communities.

In an effort to solve problems in their communities; learn more about programming, development, and marketing; and teach students leadership skills, students across the country are enrolling in programs to help them create their own apps.

Here’s an article by a teacher listing a number of online ‘apps’ that can be used through a browser that can also enable students to create.

—

When I talk about apps for schools, used in schools, developed by students, think about all the possibilities.  Every aspect of ‘running a school’ can be augmented or improved by applications running on a tablet or in a browser window.

The obvious apps for the classroom include classroom management applications (scheduling, task managers, organizers, etc.). Every teacher could have a custom made application for their classroom and their lesson plans. Students will probably learn more building the applications then they do in the actual lessons!

Apps for administrators can be anything from data dashboards to accessing records, to scheduling, to ordering products and services.

Since funding is an issue with all schools think about the possibility of having an app fair instead of a bake sale to raise money – or more entrepreneurially, having students building applications for local businesses as project based learning.

The possibilities are pretty much endless. What do you think the most interesting application of students creating apps could be?

The iPad is making a significant impact on the lives of learners of all ages and backgrounds.

It’s quite challenging to add anything to the existing body of knowledge growing around children with special needs using iPads for learning and communicatign – particularly people with autism.

In this article, recently published by Fox News, a group of youngsters create sophisticated music together using the iPad. From the article, here’s the list of apps they use:

Garageband: Apple iTunes.

Mobilewalla Score: 84 out of 100.

Download Animoog: Apple iTunes.

Mobilewalla Score: 77 out of 100.

Download MIDI Touch: Apple iTunes.

Mobilewalla Score: 14 out of 100.

Download Thumbjam: Apple iTunes.

Mobilewalla Score: 79 out of 100.

Download Trope: Apple iTunes.

Mobilewalla Score: 11 out of 100.

Download Bloom: Apple iTunes.

Mobilewalla Score: 83 out of 100.

Mobilewalla scores are based on a set of analytics, representing how successful — i.e. how hot — an app is at a given time on a given platform, with higher values indicating hotter apps

iPad band unlocks autistic students’ creativity

It’s been about 2 years now since the iPad was first realized and a lot has happened in that short time. Apple has sold approximately 64million iPads in two years. To put that into perspective, I believe, no other product of any kind has ever sold this many units in that time frame. And, at a price point of $400 or more that’s no small feat.

I’ve written before about how I feel the iPad itself won’t make the difference. What is truly needed is a rethinking of the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’ in schooling. Teachers must become much more learning facilitators and coaches – and the idea of singular subjects as curriculum just won’t cut it for 21st Century success. That said, the iPad is still making a significant impact on schools and schooling.

The following are only a few ways the iPad is changing schools:

• much like a computer but with a smaller and more accessible form factor, the iPad can be used for much of the same things computers have been used for in schools: to do research on the internet, take notes, write papers, create presentations, shoot and edit a video, or take advantage of the 100s of applications being developed specifically for learning.

California School District Uses iPads to Help Teachers Deliver Quality Physical Education Program to Students

Sweetwater Union High School District (SUHSD) uses the SPARK PE curriculum on iPads to optimize outcomes for their students.

 

• there are general applications – like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote – that can be applied in many different learning scenarios, and there are specific applications designed for particular subjects.
• there are also applications designed to support teachers in the managing and delivering content including the distribution and collection of assignments, grading, as well as feedback and improvement. Some applications also allow both students and teachers to access files on school networks – like ClassLink’s LaunchPad app.
• there is at least one iPad pilot program in every state in the US – including pilots in elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, and universities as well as hospitals and medical schools.

A sweeping vote by the Detroit Lakes school board Tuesday night launched the district into a new realm in education.

With what seemed to be cautious enthusiasm, the board approved the purchase of 244 iPads, which will go to every single 5th grader in the Detroit Lakes Public School Districts, as well as every 5th and 6th grade teacher.

Two additional carts holding roughly 30 iPads each will also be purchased for Roosevelt Elementary and the High School, which will be shared amongst classrooms. Rossman Elementary already has an iPad cart, and the Middle School recently purchased one as part of their budget.

The cost for this initiative is roughly $105,000. http://www.dl-online.com/event/article/id/67926/

 

• some schools are providing iPads to specific groups (grade levels or classrooms) while other schools are providing iPads to every student at the beginning of the school year. There are even a few schools making the iPad mandatory for all students

UTICA — Utica High School students are going to be connected in a new way next school year.

Every student will be given an iPad on the first day of school in the fall.

“I think it’s the way education is going,” Principal Mark Bowman said. “Myself and my staff are very excited, and my students are very excited. Any time you can get kids excited about coming to school, that’s great.”

The North Fork Local School District is leasing 560 iPad 2’s at a cost of $74,500 per year for four years, with the option to buy each for $1 at the end of the lease, Superintendent Scott Hartley said. Teachers district-wide also will receive iPads.

The devices are being paid for through textbook and Title I money.  Utica High School Putting iPads in Student’s Hands

 

• at some schools the enthusiasm for adopting and implementing iPads is overwhelming.

Farmington teachers line up to be iPad early adopters

190 Farmington teachers submitted applications to be among the first to have iPads in their students’ hands when the 2012-13 school year starts in the fall. The district hopes to roll out 1,730 of the tablet computers to students.

 

Here’s additional articles illuminating just a few of the many schools that are shifting to providing all students iPads:

Johnston School Board OKs Concept of iPad for Every High School Student
The initiative would provide iPads for each high school student starting the second semester of the 2012-13 school year.

 

Jefferson Elementary School in Oshkosh to buy iPad for every student

 

All Mansfield high schoolers will get an iPad

 

If School Superintendent Jim McIntyre has his way, what started as a pilot at Pond Gap and two other schools this year will be extended to every student in all 87 of Knox County’s public schools by 2015. That means procuring some 56,000 iPads or similar devices and installing a robust wireless network and other infrastructure in every classroom in the county. With a multitude of instructional apps to choose from, teachers would have some leeway in picking the ones that work best for them.

 

• New Zealand may be the first country to have all students have iPads in a 1:1 program that requires parents to provide them –  School iPad revolution may go nationwide
• many of these schools are shifting to using digital textbooks – taking advantage of textbooks created with Apple’s iBooks Author.
• some schools hire new technology support personnel while other schools use students to help support new iPad programs.
• Apple has even created an app that can be used to deploy and mass configure many iPads, iPhones, or iPods. Apple Configurator makes it easy for anyone to mass configure and deploy iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch in a school, business, or institution.
• in Britain there has even been, for the first time, a pilot of an exam administered on iPads

School trials iPad exam

The traditional pen-and-paper school test could become a thing of the past after a leading exam board successfully trialled the use of iPads for pupils sitting a mock GCSE.

 

• there are even significant experiences taking place using the iPad with special education and learners who have various disabilities or are challenged learners – in particular young people with autism.
• finally, this summer the largest education construction project – The American International School – will open in Asia

Stamford American The Most Advanced International School Ever Built – Coming To Singapore

See the future of education today. 1 to 1 iPad program, virtual lecture hall and more. $300 million investment – largest K-12 education project in the region.

These articles reflect only a small portion of what’s happening today (almost all of these articles were posted or printed in the last two weeks). In the future we’ll highlight some of the behind the scenes requirements of implementing iPads in school.

The following is a guest post is by Jessica Meyer.

The notion that “information wants to be free” has some startling connotations for the future of education as we know it. The Internet makes it easier than ever before to disseminate information widely. Many people share information online daily, and for free. The system of higher education is a multi-billion dollar industry that charges students for the promise of an accredited degree to launch their careers. Soon, that degree may become an accredited online degree and cost thousands less, or may even be free.

Attendance at online schools has grown rapidly over the previous few years. An ABC News report states that 4.6 million students, or 25% of all Americans in college, enrolled in an online course of some type during 2009. This represented a 17% increase over online course enrollment in 2008, according to the report. “Higher education only grew by 1.2%,” said I. Elaine Allen, research director for the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson College. “The 17% growth rate [of online course enrollment] really is what’s driving the growth of higher education.”

Some media outlets have discussed the possibility of a growing bubble in the higher education industry. Tuition costs have soared in the past few decades, and many graduates are saddled with more than $100,000 in educational debt upon graduation. Lower and even middle class students might find that total to be cost-prohibitive and worry about covering their education costs.

Accessible online education could put an accredited degree into their hands at a fraction of that cost. A US News and World Report piece from April 2009 discussed cheap online educational options that existed even a few years ago. Colorado State University-Global, the online version of CSU, began charging students just under $800 for its first courses. Lamar University from Beaumont, Texas, began offering online graduate courses at $412.50 each. Graduates could receive their Master’s degree for less than $5,000 total.

Currently, however, online education lacks the credentials of its more traditional brick-and-mortar counterpart. Many nonprofit organizations are in the race to make free education available to a wide audience, such as University of the People or Coursera. Many of these groups operate for a time without any formal accreditation. Accreditation is often expensive for these groups and would wipe out a lot of the cost savings. However, no formal accreditation means that graduates of these programs risk owning a diploma that employers consider invalid.

At day’s end, higher education levels in the United States would impact the country positively where the economy is concerned. The Wall Street Journal reported the results of a 2009 study by international consulting firm McKinsey & Co. on education’s impact on the gross domestic product of different countries. The study found that if American educational achievement was raised to the level of other countries, including Finland and South Korea, the U.S. GDP would increase 16%, or $2.3 trillion. The largest education gaps found by the study were between students of different ethnicities, with black and Latino students faring worse than their white counterparts.

Online education could go a long way in bridging this gap in student achievement. In the future, students might be able to enroll in accredited courses from various prestigious institutions. The opposition may prove difficult, but cheaper accredited education online has the potential to greatly improve our country’s economy at a time when we need it most.

Students are quick to figure out the steps to making a movie with their iPads. Pacific Elementary School, Manhattan Beach. Photo by Brad Graverson 2-15-12

The iPad is making significant inroads in schools. Just over a month ago when Apple announced iBooks Author software and the iBooks textbook distribution method, Apple’s Phil Schiller said that 1.5 million iPads were in use in education settings, leveraging more than 20,000 education applications. While that’s a small number compared to the total number of students in the US, there are a number of recent announcements that will add to those numbers.

The state of Texas likes to do things big. In an announcement today, McAllen Independent School District in the southern part of the state began distributing 6,800 devices this week — mostly the iPad tablet computers, but also hundreds of iPod Touch devices for its youngest students.

The school district is planning to provide every one of its more than 25,000 students in grades K-12 an iPad or iPod Touch over the next year. The district believes it’s the largest to try for complete coverage and while Apple would not confirm that, other districts the company noted as having made large investments have not made ones as big as McAllen’s.

The district hopes to transform teaching and learning, change the classroom culture (making it more interactive and creative) and close the digital divide. The district has a significant number of lower income students.

Zeeland Public Schools in Michigan gave 1,800 iPads to all of its high school students last fall and hopes to eventually cover every student in grades 3-12. Chicago Public Schools bought about 10,000 iPads and some individual schools in the district have bought more using discretionary funds, but it’s far from districtwide.

Texas District Embarks on Widespread iPad Program

A number of schools in the south bay Los Angeles area are experimenting with iPads.

“There is not a ton of debate about whether this is a direction the schools are heading,” said Annette Alpern, assistant superintendent of instructional services at the Redondo Beach Unified School District. “The question is more: How quickly will the future arrive?”

Leading the charge is Manhattan Beach Unified, which purchased 560 devices for a pilot project this fall. That’s one machine for every dozen kids in the K-12 school district – although many more students get a little face time with the iPads, as the devices are rotated from class to class, usually on a cart with wheels.

While 97 percent of the participating teachers in Manhattan Beach reported in November that the iPad makes class more engaging, that proportion had dropped to 86 percent by the end of January. The proportion of students who said so also dropped, though less steeply, from 81 to 77 percent.

This kind of drop in interest and excitement makes sense to me. Anyone who has experienced a new gadget will experience a similar type of drop in enthusiasm. That puts a tremendous onus on teachers to change the way they think about teaching and learning. I hope this kind of feedback spurs innovation and creativity in teachers to try new things.

South Bay schools on an iPad mission

A new research study shows that Kindergartner students using iPads scored better on literacy tests than students that didn’t use the device.

“The objective has to be learning, not just getting the technology out there,” said Muir. “We are paying attention to app selection and focused on continuous improvement — we aren’t just handing equipment to teachers.”

The study, conducted in Auburn, Maine, randomly assigned half of the districts 16 kindergarten classes to use iPads for nine weeks. In all, 129 students used an iPad, while 137 students were taught without an iPad. Each of the 266 students were tested before and after the iPads were introduced into the classroom.

“Too many innovative programs don’t prioritize their own research, and even if they collect observations and stories later, they don’t make the effort to do a randomized control trial, like we did,” said Muir. “We wanted to make sure we could objectively examine the contribution of the iPads.”

According to the literacy test results, classes using the iPads outperformed the non-iPad students in every literacy measure they were test on.

 ”We are seeing high levels of student motivation, engagement and learning in the iPad classrooms,” said Sue Dorris, principal at East Auburn Community School. “The apps, which teach and reinforce fundamental literacy concepts and skills, are engaging, interactive and provide children with immediate feedback. What’s more, teachers can customize apps to match the instructional needs of each child, so students are able to learn successfully at their own level and pace.”

iPad improves Kindergartners literacy scores

Fourth graders in teacher Kristie Mahin's class at El Camino Creek Elementary School use their school issued iPads. — Charlie Neuman

As mentioned earlier, Apple announced their iBooks Author software just over a month ago. There is evidence that schools are considering going digital for their textbooks.

School Districts in Southern California are purchasing iPads for their classrooms. The biggest roll out by far will be done by the San Diego Unified School District, which announced late Monday it will be purchasing close to 20,000 iPads for its fifth- and eighth- grade classes and select high school subjects this spring.

The shift to digital text books will however take time. Many school districts will slowly phase in digital textbooks while some will go all in. The US Department of Education would like to see the shift made within five years for all students.

Encinitas Union Superintendent Tim Baird said he’d like to see publishers break digital books into individual units so teacher can purchase a unit on photosynthesis, for example, but not have to buy the entire book.

“I think digital textbooks are an intermediate stopgap between where we are now with paper textbooks (and the future) but I think in this day and age, you don’t need something that starts on page one and goes to page 327. You don’t need a textbook model,” Baird said. “Ultimately, my hope is that the child will never have to take home a textbook again or it will be the iPad. … That ultimately we are textbookless and paperless.”

One of the hurdles districts will have to overcome is how to pay for these digital books. The State Department of Education in California is broke. So individual districts will have to use local funds to purchase what they want. That may slow down the adoption rate for some districts – while other, wealthier districts, may find the cash they need more readily.

Schools get in touch with digital books

My opinion is that this shift will happen. What’s your opinion about the shift to digital textbooks and the proliferation of the iPad in schools?

On January 19, 2012, Apple made a significant announcement that could change the educational landscape forever. There are several parts to the announcement – one is a software application that enables anyone to create a ‘text book’ and the other is a distribution platform for textbooks inside of the already popular iBooks application (a free download that runs on the iPad or iPhone.).

iBooks 2 is an upgrade to the iBooks application that is the primary reading application of iOS. The application allows for easy highlighting and annotation – and enables quick dictionary lookups for words that need defining. The application has the ability to display full-color, interactive, multimedia content which means audio, video, and 3D diagrams can be touched, rotated and explored. The application also adds a few additional features like, turning notes, highlights, and annotations into an interface resembling browsable index cards (flash cards).

iBooks Author is a free application that enables authors (anyone running Mac OS X Lion) to develop and publish their content and distribute it in the iBookstore. iBooks Author enables embedding Keynote presentations into books to become interactive elements and, for the more technically savvy, developers can build ‘widgets’ in HTML5 and JavaScript that can ‘run’ on a page in an iBook.

In my opinion, this announcement is both evolutionary and revolutionary.

Evolutionary

As I’ve already written, the iPad is a great form factor to change the nature of textbooks. The possibility of carrying around 100s or 1000s of books in one device is a compelling argument alone to consider getting textbooks to be digital.

Even though the iPad is only 2 years old, I think it’s a natural evolution for textbooks to move to a digital platform. Everything in our world is being digitized (or will be) and it makes sense for text  books to be able to be updated in real time (any time) at a cost that is virtually free rather than the investment it takes to republish and distribute millions of books every few years.

It’s also evolutionary for Apple to apply their talents for creating great software products to create a platform for authors and publishers to easily (relatively) create and distribute their work. With iBooks Author authoring and publishing an e-Book becomes something accessible to the masses.

Revolutionary

The revolutionary part is where things get interesting.

Not only does iBooks Author create the potential to engage everyone in the education and publishing industries (making everyone a publisher is a real equalizing and disruptive change to the status quo), it also creates the possibility to turn the learning equation on its head.

Because of the power of the iPad and all the other functions it can perform, I don’t think it will take long before we see textbooks incorporating elements of movies (drama), documentaries, multi-player role playing games, news casting, encyclopedias, dictionaries, language translators and more. For instance, embedding something like Google Earth into a book would allow for the power of Google Earth exploration within the context of a learning .

It makes sense to me that pedagogy and instructional methods will, at a minimum, evolve into a more interactive and dynamic activity. In the most extreme case I could imagine everything we know about teaching and learning being transformed just by the simple fact that a learner can have a device that enables not only a rich media experience of content but also serves so many functions at the same time (email, web browser, game console, video communicator, etc.) that the role of the teacher morphs into something completely different from what we’ve known or seen before.

We’ve already seen something like the Khan Academy flip traditional schooling upside down by having students ‘watching’ lectures on their own time outside of school and using the in school time for more collaborative and interactive activities with their peers (with teachers being more like coaches).

I can imagine this kind of thing happening more – but even different. The actual location where ‘learning’ takes place is no longer as important. But, as educators have been saying for a long time, meaning making (making connections) can shift to the group setting (like in schools).

At the same time as they announced iBooks 2 and iBooks Author, Apple also introduced a free application for the iPad called iTunes U. iTunes U used to be something that was accessible through the iTunes store and is a ‘virtual classroom’ in a sense. Until now it has offered classes from some of the leading universities. Now, it is also open to K-12 teachers and their students.

iTunes U – the application – now becomes something like a learning management app where teachers can post materials including syllabi, assignments, blog entries, updates, and anything they need to communicate with students AND, iTunes U incorporates both iBooks 2 content and iTunes U content.

This adds significant amount of content that anyone can have access to anywhere – as long as they have an iPad or an iPhone.

Challenges

Apple has some hurdles to overcome in order for this revolution to take hold. At the announcement Apple’s Phil Schiller said that 1.5 million iPads were in use in education settings, leveraging more than 20,000 education applications. That’s a great start but in order for the textbook revolution to become complete all students will need to have access to an iPad. I imagine the option to purchase digital text books at $14.99 (I neglected to mention above that the major text book publishers have agreed to sell their digital text books for $14.99!) will drive a significant amount of demand (pull) from students and parents. But someone will still need to purchase these devices.

It will be interesting to see what kind of creativity is applied to financing and/or purchasing in order to enable large numbers of iPads to get into the hands of young people. Some would argue that college age students will adopt and adapt faster than younger students since many of them can make purchasing decisions on their own. Younger students will need their parents, their schools, or some foundation/philanthropy in order to take advantage of this technology.

What’s your take? Is iBooks Author and iBooks 2 evolutionary, revolutionary or ??