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 ??

It seems that Apple was thinking about the iPhone back in 1983. This image of a 1983 prototype phone comes from the Apple Museum collection being housed at Stanford University.

After the recent book about the secretive nature of Apple it’s a treat to be able to have a small glimpse into some old product development models. It took a long time for Apple to figure out the touch interface and to figure out how to squeeze a phone. a computer and a computer operating system into a small space. But they did and now we have the luxury of using a device like the iPad.

I’m looking forward to what comes next. Some people are predicting it’s going to be a TV. Well just have to wait and see.

The following article has been submitted by Lindsey Wright. Lindsey is a writer and can be reached at lindseywright39 @ gmail dot com. I’ve posted my comments in the comments section below.

Can Technology Replace Teachers? 

What is the role of teachers in today’s technologically driven society? That is really the main question to ponder when discussing whether technology can take the place of educators in the near future. Within the past decade people have started to take online courses and master foreign languages through computer programs such as Rosetta Stone, so imagining robots taking over the education realm isn’t that far-fetched. Even though technology can do many of the same responsibilities as educators, there is one thing that  guarantees that technology can never take their place. Human relationships. A teacher does not just transmit knowledge; he or she guides his or her students. Teachers are mentors who encourage students to develop critical thinking skills and apply them to life. Teachers also pass on social skills and develop a moral compass to their students so transmitting knowledge is just a small part of what a great educator does.

Sugata Mitra is a revolutionary when it comes to educational technology. One of the most recent inventions that Mitra made is virtual classrooms where unsupervised children learn from one another. Despite the exciting work by professor Sugata Mitra however, teachers are still needed because machines have no supervision skills. According to an article from Fast Company, professor Mitra found that “children achieve only half of what their peers in face-to-face instruction can. Children, it seems, still need the encouragement (or coercion) of an adult to keep them from drifting off.” So even though technology may help children learn, it doesn’t help them stay on task during their studies.

Not only is it important to keep children on task, but it is also important that children are able to learn important life skills besides academics. A study from the College of Education at Michigan State University explains, “computers do not teach children to question, to discriminate among sources of information, to weigh perspectives, to think about consequences, to bring contextual meaning to a situation, to be creative, or to make careful judgments.” These are just some of the few crucial skills that teachers are able to pass on to their students. Technology doesn’t have emotions or the ability to think creatively so it would be impossible for students to attain important life skills from inside the classroom.

In Mitra’s study, adults set tasks for children to accomplish. Children need an adult in all educational situations so they can provide input and guidance. Without this input, it would be difficult for a group of children to find a positive direction because they would not have a superior to look up to or to ask for help once a problem arises. Technology will not be able to answer every question that a child may have or will not be a great communicator for the child when they get frustrated or confused during their study. Even though children can learn quickly from one another, they need a responsible person to guide them in their explorations in order to achieve a positive outcome.

Out of any role, one of the most important a teacher can have is that of a mentor. Motivating children to pursue their own goals and dreams is the responsibility of a great teacher. When children are learning in school they shouldn’t be surrounded by machines that can’t talk, cope or relate to them. Teachers are excellent adult role models that children can become inspired by  in addition to their family members. Technology isn’t something that will encourage a student and it definitely won’t be a role model for the child to inspire them.

Many new teachers excited about incorporating computers believe that they should let their students explore on their own with the machines. In fact, Kim Bochicchio claims “computers are one tool that supplements the careful planning and personal interaction from a good teacher.” Bochicchio, who has been teaching high school English for the past six years, further  explains that “technology is not always dependable. The Internet goes down, and only an English teacher can properly grade an essay and conference with a student afterward. Thus, in the past six years I have learned that technology can not replace the teacher and that students want to learn from humans, not machines.”

All in all, with the increasing social isolation of the modern world, educators must keep in mind that it takes a person to teach wisdom, socialization and morals to others. Educators are the responsible adults needed to teach these critical life skills inside a classroom as well as the basic academics. It is apparent that machines cannot take the place of people and hence, technology will never replace teachers.