Well based on my experience of having an iPad,I find it great for consuming media,but not for producing content ie I couldnt imagine writing an essay on the iPad,so id imagine kids will still need access to a computer.Also how much of the curriculums exist in eForm on the iPad? A step in the right direction perhaps, but still an iPad for everyone wont necessarily improve the education system.Well at least Angry Birds will improve their physics :)

Where’s the option for “Depends on the parents”

Good idea but seems badly implemented. I never dropped my school bag and thought “I hope I didnt crack my school books”. I also never tried to use the excuse “I couldnt do my homework, the battery in my book was dead”

Would it not have been better to provide the material online and allow the students to access it from any device including a home PC and not just an iPad?

The dog ate my iPad!

If Ireland is going to have a well educated population then the use of technology is vital in schools. However, there is a danger that some schools will be left behind and a National Programme of some sorts will have to be implemented to ensure equal IT access to all. Ireland’s education system needs major overhaul and this is one positive step in the right direction if done right.

Any device that will break the obscenely priced cartel
of Irish educational booksellers will be a
boon for the students, teachers and parents!

I ate the dog that ate my iPad!

I am 20 years old, am in crippling back pain and have been diagnosed with a herniated disc in my lumbar spine.
Every day for 6 years of secondary school I carried a school bag with text books for 8 classes, not to mention note pads, folders etc etc… We are now putting this down as one of the possible causes of my back pain and I’m sure I’m not alone.
My future career in healthcare is now at risk as I am no good without my back, something needs to be done in schools!
We had limited lockers available, and I was one of the unlucky ones that had none. I lived too close to the school to justify driving or getting a bus, however the walk there and home was enough to cause horrible strain on my back .

While there obvious flaws to this idea, (cost, implementation, young kids with €700 worth of ICT in their school bags) it is something that needs to be looked into.
I agree with Declan, things could become available online (similar to “Blackboard” used by most universities) and accessed both in school an at home.

We are going to have a generation of people in 10 years time requiring intense physiotherapy and spinal surgeries putting a massive strain on our health service if kids continue to carry heavy school bags to school everyday and something is not done about it.

This is a step in the right direction.

Has any child ever been mugged for his/her well-thumbed copy of the works of Shakespeare ?

When you think of a child in First Year having to drag the weight of school books compared to the weight of an iPad then makes great sense.

Good on ya, Mayo!

I think a lot of people are missing the point here. The iPad will only replace some of the curriculum books, they’ll still need copy books etc. to write in, work equations out etc. So the art of handwriting shouldn’t be lost. Anything that reduces weight in your schoolbag is a good idea. Also, instead of lugging heavy bags from class to class, why can’t students be allocated to a room and have the teachers walk from class to class? Would help the strain on students and reduce the amount of students being late between classes. Just an idea… Flawed no doubt!

in my fathers school they use a laptop that u can flip the screen and it turns into a table i use it for my school work and find it brilliant

An iPad is a bad idea. A kindle would be better suited given it’s glare resistant screen and less ways they could get distracted by it ;) I wouldn’t recommend electronic devices for technical subjects just yet. They all prove a pain with mathematics and other courses where you really have to be looking and flicking through far away pages.

To throw my two cents into this, it’d be better to teach the kids maths and use school computers to give introductory programming classes instead of an ECDL if you want technically minded students.

Giving them an IPad will make them more comfortable with technical consumerism, it won’t do much to make them better developers.

The IPad has a number of drawbacks in itself. It ties the student to a proprietary platform, it is difficult to read in sunlight and has a plethora of distractions. ( Recall days of gaming down the back of Excel 101 )

No, schools shouldn’t use tablets, they should use actual computers. €700 will buy you a decent laptop AND a Kindle so you can both read and write for a reasonable amount of time. Writing a 1000 word essay on Hamlet is bad enough now but if I had to do it on an iPad it would be a nightmare.

Other than the weight issue (which isn’t €700 worth of annoying), having a shiny overpriced device isn’t really going to benefit students in any way.

It’s a great idea but they shouldn’t focus on the iPad its way over-priced also they already probably have a windows/linux desktop and laptop or two. A laptop with 2Gigs of ram will only set you back 400EUR and comes with a keyboard and usb ports for backing up your work.

You can use a program like Xournal (in Linux) to take notes in a pdf document, I’m sure there are similar programs for windows/mac.

AS the books are digital they should be half the price of existing paper ones.

And I agree that laptops are a better idea than tablets. They can do a lot more, including running simultaneous programs, and they’ll cause kids to develop important typing skills before going to college. It’ll even make for faster progress in the classroom as typing is a much faster way of taking notes than handwriting is.

Yes, so long.. as you know, the taxpayer isn’t forced to pay for it.

Sweet,

Now we are going to end up with kids having headache induced by glare and an increase of wrist related problems from the banging on a glass surface for 3 or so years.

I am all for upskilling but this is ridiculous. The idea should be to teach kids about tech as a tool not trying to hide the issues with our school system via the latest shiney shiney.

Lots of people work in industries where they have to learn a vast amount of information on the go but you don’t see them lugging books all over the place. A kindle and a better environment for teachers to nurture our kids rather than helping the pass some arbitrary exam would have been a better alternative.

YES YES YES!! I tore ligaments in my back in secondary school because of the stupid amount of books we had to carry around all the time! It’s insane – we have all this technology designed for the very purpose of convenience in reaching the information we want – but here we are still destroying young people’s backs and posture with books of which they only need a page or two per day! The cost of a tablet would be little different from buying a pile of books, yet it would save people’s bodies from avoidable pain and injury. It’s ridiculous that this kind of technology is not being embraced more quickly by schools, especially considering how essential it is to have IT skills in almost every job these days.

Cheaper in the long run for parents, more environmentally friendly, and easier on students. Win win win.

I assumed this was a joke! Are we really thinking saying some kids can bring in a €500 gadget instead of books is a good thing?
I really wouldn’t want to be the kid who’s parents couldn’t afford one so still has to bring books. And I wouldn’t want to be that kid’s parent either.
The idea that a child would be perfectly happy with one iPad through 5 years of education is nonsense and debunks the tenuous idea that this is cost saving. We’d have at least three versions in that time period – each one trying to convince you the previous version is now useless.
I do see the point of a low cost reader such as the Kindle but surely the parents would still have to pay to download the books. Last time I looked books weren’t free just because you could download them.
I have an iPad (and I love it) and my 3 year old kid worked out how to use it in one day – I’m not really too worried about technology fear!

i am highly suspicious of Apple as a company. my guess is they’re doing some very shady dealing in Africa regarding that rare mineral mentioned before, coltan. plus technology is not a good thing when we throw so much of it away. it ends up getting dumped in third world countries. again, Africa.

Here’s to all u iPad haters if u have wrist injuries your OBVIOUSLY not using it rite….
Eejits nothing annoys me more than people who spend money on first class tech..
Dont have a brain cell..
Then complain..

Definitely Agree this is a good idea.

I’m a tech head, I’ve generally got to have the latest gadgets, but im a little worried were going to have a generation of people that when their battery dies on their tablet and they need to write a shopping list that they’ll spend 3 hours looking for the charger instead of getting a pen and paper… are we going to see the old “the dog ate my homework” become “my iPad crashed?”

I love how the question of “should schools allow students to replace text books with tablet devices?” has descended into select people bitching about iPads.

Any excuse hey lads?

Those saying laptops are better
#1 it’s Macs are better not laptops macs..
#2 tablets are meant for casual use not serious usage…
#3 my generation rule

Mayo trying to modern lol. There probably diesel powered Ipad’s :P