Students Released From Overweight Packpacks

Students will at long last no longer have to live with the threat of having shoulder and neck pain, back, strained muscles, headaches, poor posture, poor spinal alignment and nerve damage, through over weighted backpacks. The day has come at last when a school packpack will simply contain a tablet iPad computer.

Apple officials say they are aware of over 600 districts in the United States that have launched the ‘one-to-one' program, where at least one classroom will receive iPads for every student.

"Woodford County High will become the state's first public high school to give each of its 1,250 students an iPad", said Kentucky's education commissioner and superintendant of schools in Woodford County.

"The iPads are a better long-term investment than textbooks," says Patrick Larkin principal of Burlington High School. Where possible the school will use electronic versions, though traditional texts will still have to be used in some courses. "Textbooks are pretty much outdated the minute they're printed and certainly by the time they're delivered. The bottom line is that the iPads will give our kids a chance to use much more relevant materials."

The cost of textbooks will be around the same amount as the iPads, but do not include graphing calculators, dictionaries and other accessories that are available on iPads.

Education authorities feel there are many more benefits using iPads, such as allowing the students to interactively problem-solve maths. The tablets can also be used for note taking and bookmarking, not to mention the ability to immediately send homework to teachers. The students are also able to view tutorials or videos, besides learning foreign languages.

One school has estimated that instead of buying 300 textbooks for a freshman class, buying iPads will save them almost $4000.

Teachers from special education services have discovered the iPads particularly useful for children with autism spectrum disorders and learning disabilities. Instead of just listening to teachers talking they are able to learn quicker through visual images.

Mark Warschauer, an education and informatics professor at the University of California-Irvine, whose specialties include research on the intersection of technology and education says "There's a saying that the music is not in the piano and, in the same way, the learning is not in the device. I don't want to oversell these things or present the idea that these devices are miraculous, but they have some benefits and that's why so many people outside of schools are using them so much".

Companies publishing textbooks, which account for $5.5 billion annual sales to secondary schools in the United States alone, are racing toward developing curricula specifically geared to iPads. The new era of digital learning is well and truly here to stay.