iPads Should Take Over Textbooks (if they haven’t already)

Tablets help students learn more material faster. Technology-based instruction can reduce the time students take to reach a learning objective by 30-80%. They don’t have to worry about textbook shortages or buying new material every year.

81% of K-12 teachers believe that “tablets enrich classroom education.” A survey of technology in the classroom by also concluded that 77% of teachers found technology to “increase student motivation to learn.” It’s a new and interesting way of grasping concepts! (specially boring ones)

Tablets can hold hundreds of textbooks on one device, plus homework, quizzes, and other files, eliminating the need for physical storage of books and classroom materials.The average tablet contains anywhere from 8 to 64 gigabytes (GB) of storage space. On the Amazon Kindle Fire, for instance, 1,000 books take up one GB of space. It’s extremely eco-friendly!E-textbooks on tablets cost on average 50-60% less than print textbooks. According to many reports, school districts spend more than 8 crores per year on textbooks. E-textbooks can save schools between 2-3 lakh rupees per student per year. Tablet prices also continue to drop, making them increasingly affordable. It’s a long term benefit we are looking at.

Tablets contain many technological features that cannot be found in print textbooks.Tablets give users the ability to highlight and edit text and write notes without ruining a textbook for the next user. Tablets have a search function, a back lighting option to read in low light, and a built-in dictionary. Interactive diagrams and videos increase student creativity, motivation, attentiveness, and engagement with classroom materials.

Print textbooks are heavy and cause injuries, while a tablet only weighs 1-2 pounds.Pediatricians and chiropractors recommend that students carry less than 15% of their body weight in a backpack, but the combined average weight of textbooks in History, Mathematics, Science, and Reading/Language Arts exceeds this percentage at nearly all grade levels from 1-12.

Tablets help students better prepare for a world immersed in technology. Students that learn technology skills early in life will be better prepared to pursue relevant careers later in life. The fastest growing and highest paying jobs globally are technology intensive. Employment in “computer and information systems” is expected to grow by 18% between 2010-20.

On a tablet, e-textbooks can be updated instantly to get new editions or information.Schools will not have to constantly purchase new hardware, software, or new physical copies of textbooks

Tablets lower the amount of paper teachers have to print for handouts and assignments, helping to save the environment and money. A school with 100 teachers uses on average 250,000 pieces of paper annually.With Earth already in shambles and losing so many of it’s useful materials and resources, we should be thinking of alternatives for everything natural around us.

Tablets allow teachers to better customize student learning. There are thousands of education and tutoring applications on tablets, so teachers can tailor student learning to an individual style/personality instead of a one-size-fits-all approach. There are more than 20,000 education apps available for the iPad alone.

Files on one tablet can be downloaded onto any other tablet, increasing flexibility and convenience for teachers and students. E-textbooks and other files can be stored on “cloud” servers and accessed on any equivalent device. Users can sign into an account on a different device and access all of their information.

Students who own tablets purchase and read more books than those who read print books alone. The average tablet-owning student reads 24 books per year on a tablet compared with 15 in print for those who do not own a tablet.

Using a tablet is so intuitive that it makes learning fun and easy. In two isolated rural villages in Ethiopia, the One Laptop Per Child organization dropped off closed boxes containing tablets pre-loaded with educational apps, taped shut, with no instruction. Within five days, elementary school-age students without prior education were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs, and within five months they had successfully hacked the tablet’s operating system and customized the desktop settings.