An iPad in Every Classroom
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/09/maine-ipad2-kindergarten_n_846948.html The above link is to a story about a school distract in Maine that is trying to get an iPad for every Kindergarten kid . I think this is the future; textbooks are antiquated can not provide the type of scaffolding for ELL and other students and individualized curriculum for more advanced students that places like CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) are currently developing. We have a computer that is about 5 years old in my pre-k class and during the first week of this school year one of the little girls kept touching the screen and nothing was happening and she turned to me and told me our computer was broken. Children pick up technology pretty quick because they know of no other reality other than one where everyone carries around little touch screen devices and things like that so to them this is how it has always been. Furthermore, there is a lot research about how computer and video games (even the ones that are not considered "educational") are very well designed in terms of an educators perspective. Video games are created in to be desirably difficult for the player; meaning that they should not be too hard that the kids get frustrated but not too easy so they get bored. Studies have found that in education, that students learned best when the curriculum is desirably difficult for each student. The hard part is in a class of 20 or whatever it is hard to differentiate the curriculum so the each student is in the desirable difficulty. Things like ipads can help do that. For example, lets say you are reading Roald Dahl's Matilda in class. An ELL student or a student with a smaller vocabulary might benifit by reading it on an iPad where they can instantly look up words that they don't know. A student with strong reading skills might get bored reading it so for them you could maybe include links into the text to further extend their learning such as a link to a website that compared Matilda's family to Harry Potter's the Dursley family that he had to stay with at the start of the book and stuff like that.
Here is a good article about how video games are a good template for improvement in education: http://www.academiccolab.org/resources/documents/Good_Learning.pdf
It is very interesting. I am a teacher at the school. And I notice that the children quickly adapt to innovations in teznike. They perceive the world differently. That's what century of progress!
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