The Post-PC era?

Like a lot of educators I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the future technology needs of students (and teacher) and whether Ipads or Ipad-style devices are likely to be the answer.

They’re relatively inexpensive ($529), remarkably versatile, instant-on, lightweight, with 10 hour  or battery life.

On the other hand, despite the increasingly sophisticated and purpose-built apps available for note-taking and writing, writing anything longer than a paragraph with a built-in keyboard is painful.

Or is that just me? When I see students at school texting away with two fingers at a bizillion miles per hour, perhaps it’s just MY limitation and MY yearning for a full-size keyboard that’s holding me back.

I still see these tablets (and I love my Ipad and use it every day) as an adjunct to a computer, something you plug in to another, more powerful device. With a keyboard. Although, the latest Apple Iphone, and it’s giant strides towards real and authentic voice recognition, might even change that context in the future.

One thing I am surer than ever about is that, with these devices priced as they are, and the centrality of the technology to the world, ideas and lives of our students, it’s harder than ever for schools and systems to dodge their responsibility in both providing them, and using them in high-stakes teaching, learning and assessment.

 

Teaching Paperless

It was a nice moment right at the end of the year this year with my Literature class. It was the second last lesson I think and we were sitting around talking about what they felt they needed to know in terms of any unanswered questions. I’d found a few online quizes and tests on Emma, Hamlet and Frankenstein and I’d put together my own little quiz on Gwen Harwood as a PowerPoint, just for fun really, and to confirm to them that they did indeed know these texts pretty well.

But when I asked them to get out a piece of paper for the quiz, they refused. After a year of teaching paperless they weren’t going to go backwards in the last lesson. So, rather than fire up the laptops, the phones came out and they wrote down their quiz answers. I’d been telling them about our paperless experiment but that was ages ago, so it was nice they remembered, and wanted to end the year in that fashion.