Tablets are quickly getting accepted as an extremely popular and powerful mode of imparting education in our schools. Beyond the benefit of keeping the students engaged, they can improve education's efficiency and standards.
Tablets are quickly getting accepted as an extremely popular and powerful mode of imparting education in our schools. Beyond the benefit of keeping the students engaged,
they can improve education's efficiency and standards. However, many institutions are raising questions over the cost involved and discarding them as an unnecessary and expensive experiment. However, numerous surveys reveal that the tablets and iPads are being used successfully in schools and colleges across the nation. I have tried to compile a comprehensive list of functions in an educational institution where iPads can be a handy tool.
IPads have been helping teachers in teaching algebra to the students in an easier way. The benefit of iPads is that they don’t just reveal the answer, but show the step-by-step process to the solution. While the study material is same, they help students through video apps, gaming apps, which make algebra an interesting subject.
Few teachers are using iPads to poll students on what they know and don’t know. This helps them to give more time teaching, rather than wasting time in polling the students manually.
Often, not every student can go for every outdoor educational trip. IPads and tablet apps help them by making a virtual trip to important places possible. Recently a teacher from Martinsville, Virginia took her students on a virtual trip to the Royal Museum of England. The integration was so advanced that students were able to interact with museum guides and clear their queries.
Few professors at the University of Alabama are using iPads to record student's attendance and participation in the lecture sessions. The app related to this is believed to be still in the developmental stages at Apple's lab.
Few teachers in Ashland, Kentucky are using iPads to convert boring teaching session into an engaging learning experience. The apps used by them are capable of turning words into raps and converting study material into comic strips.
Because of the advent of iPads and Apple apps, many schools across the US have gone paperless. Students there now don't need to carry binders, textbooks and notebooks. In these schools, teachers also conduct their daily teaching activities on iPads.
Teachers in an Australian school have revealed that tablets are the most efficient way to coerce disconnected students to stay in classrooms and participate actively.
Tabs and iPads allow teachers to create slideshow presentations, with features like texts, images, videos and surveys. This helps teachers to be more detailed in his/her subject. Numerous teachers across the country are using iPads to teach students how to graph data and look for correlations.
Using Dropbox, a file sharing app, teachers of even smaller grades like sixth and seventh are posting home assignments right into the iPads of the guardians. Students can finish their tasks and drop them in the same Dropbox for teachers to collect them. Students from various institutions across the nation are using iPads for taking notes, recording lectures and annotating PDFs.
These smart devices have been helping teachers and students in exchanging lectures as there are few apps designed for this very purpose. A remarkable feature of these apps is that they archive data in the database and users can dig it anytime and learn at their own pace and convenience.
I mentioned about a section of educationalists above that is against the use of tablets in the education sector; for them, here is the last benefit. Oklahoma State University has revealed that use of tablets and iPads have helped them reduce a significant amount of money, as they don’t have to purchase textbooks and notes to impart to their students.
CONCLUSION
I am having intuitions that I am leaving this list incomplete, as there are many other functions in an education system where iPads and tablets can cause a makeover. However, my question to those who oppose implementing tablets at our educational institutions is, why can't they ignore the drawbacks when they have so many benefits to look at?
