If you’re the progress-adverse type, I suggest you avert your eyes immediately because this kind of tech-spurred change is going to upset you. A Sydney high school called St Andrew’s Cathedral School has told parents that all students from years 7 to 10 will be required to own an iPad. The cost of the product will NOT be subsidised by the school, however it will be used in replacement of hard copy text books – thereby removing that cost, as well as the peripheral costs associated like contact paper and stickers of Jason Priestly.
I have to admit that my initially reaction to this news was outrage: Schools are INSISTING that parents have to pay for an expensive (almost $600!) and quite breakable luxury item and they won’t offer any financial assistance?!!? Someone get A Current Affair on the blower!
But once I had been calmed by a paper bag and glass of warm milk I could see some of the positives in making this transition, like environmental implications. Let’s consider the pros and cons.
PROS
– Paperless learning. A school can make a major dent in its carbon footprint by eliminating text books and notepads. Think of the tress saved? #Sustainability
– A chiropractic win. School bags piled with text books can potentially screw your back for life. Or at least inspire fellow students to yell “TURTLE” when you walk around wearing a backpack twice your size (FML). iPads are slimline and lightweight. Less back problems and far more convenient storage options are required.
– Knowledge access. Working online with an iPad, students have access to the biggest (although not necessarily the most reliable) pool of information from all around the world. Connectivity!
– The Future. Pencils and books are Dickensian. The whole world is online, we all work online, so why shouldn’t students learn online! This is our reality so why shelter school kids from it?
CONS
– Kids these days have terrible penmanship and awful spelling. Painting with a broad brush, but seriously: ‘scissors’ does not have a ‘z’ in it, mate. Spelling is an important basic part of LIFE education and the dependence on Spell Check is interfering.
– The expense. It’s a bit rich (excuse the pun) to demand that parents buy the most expensive tablet on the market without offering subsidy or a payment plan.
– Running on power. The battery life of an iPad drains pretty quickly when you’ve got apps, programs, social media and so forth open and on the go. Schools would have to accommodate this with a whole lot of power boards and electricity capacity. Maybe it wouldn’t be that sustainable after all…
– Memory suffers. When information is so readily available it impairs our recall ability. And if you think I’m making up false facts, empirical research found that that people are more likely to remember things when they think they won’t be able to find them using a computer and vice versa. The study was conducted by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow who found that “Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read.” Recall is basically just another word for ‘learning’.
– Fear of distractions. How can teachers properly monitor which kids are really doing school work on their iPads as opposed to browsing Facebook and getting in a Wikipedia hole of serial killers?
– Romance. Call me a sentimentalist, but there’s something about that tangible experience of flicking through books and illegally marking pages and sticking post-it notes with coded self-reminders that forms a special part of the high school experience. Or maybe I am just a sentimentalist.
What do you think?
Via Sydney Morning Herald
Photo by Patrick Hertzog for AFP via Getty Images
