This post from the K12 Education Technology blog tells the whole story.
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Tablet computers appear to be having a transformative impact on K-12 classrooms across all grade levels. They certainly offer the promise of empowering students to achieve more and learn with ever-increasing enthusiasm.
It’s important to distinguish between the types of tablets in the market. There are “slate” tablets—like the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet or the Apple iPad—and “convertible tablets” such as the ThinkPad X220t, which provide a combination of laptop and tablet features. In this post, I’m going to be focused on slate tablets.
Tablets have dynamic touch screens and, in some cases, digital pens. Slates in particular offer longer battery life than most PCs, they boot up faster and users enjoy an ever-growing number of applications. Most importantly, they provide extreme mobility. Their small size enables students to move between learning spaces without difficulty—whether those spaces are in school, at home or elsewhere.
Researchers agree. “In the past year, advances in tablets have captured the imagination of educators around the world,” according to the 2012 edition of Horizon Report (PDF), which looks at emerging technologies in K-12, published by the New Media Consortium. “[Tablets] have come to be viewed as not just a new category of mobile devices, but indeed a new technology in its own right, one that blends features of laptops, smartphones and earlier tablet computers with always-connected Internet, and thousands of apps with which to personalize the experience.”
As an example, Forsyth County Schools in Georgia launched a Bring Your Own Technology program in 2010. Today, more than 80 percent of the district’s students use their own tablets and mobile devices to work on projects at school and at home. Their NOBLE Virtual World Project is a project born from this high adoption rate, and is designed to use mobility to facilitate great cooperation between students and with their teachers.
Interestingly, tablet computers appear to be delivering meaningful results for K-12 students of all ages, despite their relative newness to the market.
Frank Ganis, a general partner at the Gilfus Education Group, believes tablets work better for young children than desktop PCs or laptops. “The reason tablets are so important, especially in the lower grades of K-6, is because if students at that age have to use a keyboard it interferes with their ability to absorb and retain information,” he says, pointing out that students’ motor skills and mental facilities are not synchronized enough at early ages to permit effective typing. “By removing the keyboard from the learning applications, the tablets are more effective than a laptop or a PC.”
Tablets are also proving valuable to older students. One recent study conducted by the Pearson Foundation, found that tablet ownership quadrupled among college-bound high school seniors in the past year with 17 percent now claiming ownership of one of the devices. In fact, 69 percent of high school seniors said they believed tablets would replace textbooks within the next five years.
Considering these trends, it’s not surprising that tablets would be central to the larger movement toward 1-to-1, mobile-based learning.
“People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to,” adds the New Media Consortium report. “Life in an increasingly busy world where learners must balance demands from home, work, school, and family poses a host of logistical challenges with which today’s ever more mobile students must cope.”
Tablets meet that growing demand for convenience and speed, the report suggests. “A faster approach is often perceived as a better approach, and as such people want easy and timely access not only to the information on the network, but to their social networks that can help them to interpret it and maximize its value,” the report continues. “The implications for informal learning are profound, as are the notions of ‘just-in-time’ learning and ‘found’ learning, both ways of maximizing the impact of learning by ensuring it is timely and efficient.”
All that being said, we don’t think tablets will be replacement devices for a notebook or PC anytime soon. Tablets are typically more suited for content consumption than content creation. While students can create content on a tablet, they are better suited as a companion device to a PC. Tablets simply are not yet on par with a notebook when it comes to computer power, which limits their ability to create rich content.
What do you think? How are you using tablets — either slate or convertible — in your classrooms? We’ll be talking more about trends in mobility tools in upcoming posts and welcome your feedback.
Source: http://www.k12educationtechnology.com/2012/05/30/tablet-time-12-students-find-learning-advantages/
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