Apple's education event will focus on textbooks for K-12 students - report - Page 2

So, ruin it, in essence. An 8GB tablet? Why do so many people think this idea is anything but laughable?





One Apple ID per institution, parental controls to prevent unauthorized purchases. Simple.

I would like to point out something. Today wikipedia used Java Script to block access and display their political views instead of the online Encyclopedia.

Remember when decent Encyclopedias were very expensive and required a yearly update subscription?

Well using Safari it was easy to unblock Wikipedia by opening PREFERENCES, going to the SECURITY TAB and deselecting JavaScript. No more Wiki blocking on the Mac or Windows!

On the iPad it was slightly more difficult but I made an interesting discovery with relates to this thread. There is a really well done iPad app I found called Offline Wikipedia for $4.95. It took about 24 minutes to download the entire text to something like 84,000 Wiki entries so in effect I have an Encyclopedia on the iPad that needs no connection to the Internet. And it totally free of those Google ads you see all the time on the Android! I hate that exploitation by our Internet Overlords when studying or teaching.

$5 bucks to an Android user is outrageous but I don't have time to dink with all the little things of finding and installing an Android app that may be riddled with malware or a trojan.

Apple just makes everything so easy. I picked the app on the Mac in iTunes and a few minutes later when I picked up the iPad from its fancy audio dock I noticed the app was already in place there too. No connection to a computer was required to put the app in place!

$5 is nothing compared to the money I spent on heavy bulky 'dead tree' encyclopedias over the years. I think that for $0.99 (I will pay towards server costs) every six months or so that the ability to completely download a complete update from A to z to be a bargain.

Can you picture how much space all that data took up in the fifties and sixties? Would you even dream of carrying more than one of those books with you to class?

This app even allows you to automatically add images and the latest data if you have a connection when you access the stored data. It then caches the new data as an update to your Encyclopedia so you still have it when no access is available.

With iOS 5 multi touch gestures enabled it is quite natural to use four fingers to swipe the Wiki page to the left to expose my Notability notes or even additional books in iBooks, GoodReader, Kindle Reader, or iSilo.

Copy and paste seems so natural just as moving these things around on a desk in normal study.

But there is one really killer iPad feature. I can select text in any of them and have the iPad read that selection aloud in a strong clear female voice while I rest my eyes or follow along meditating on the material.

I can do this in bed, at the desk, sitting in the living room easy chair, waiting in the car, or on a bench in the shade.

My contemporaries all carry a huge catalogue type case filled with books and documents, I carry an iPad!

I can find points faster and more accurately to back up memory when speaking. Each day the iPad becomes a more natural must have tool.

I seldom carry a book bag anymore, I have several of them in my trunk, but I carry the iPad everywhere. If I need more I now carry a Mac Book Pro which compliments the iPad and I still am carrying only a fraction of the weight of the old way.

Students everywhere can relate to the change once they experience it. It simply makes no sense to carry a dead tree anymore.

In summary look at the costs, $5 for a simple 3 GB encyclopedia and reader app, $1.00 a year for complete updates. Free automatic incremental updates of the data you most frequently access compared to the hundreds of dollars of the old way.

Textbooks may not drop that perceptibly at first but they will drop eventually in annual cost and be a better more up to date product supporting our educational system.

Thanks for completely missing the point of the voluntary blocking of the website.


84,000 ≠ 1,000,000+


Wait, Wikipedia has ads, but only on Android?

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Well said.

Sheesh ... I missed Wikipedia today!

Let's hope sanity prevails and the Pirate sites are stopped and the owners arrested by traditional feet on the ground not simply blocked by damaging the Internet.

That's not totally true. You can't do it over a network but you could totally set one up, make a back up and restore the rest off of that.


if they are owned by the school then they are totally within their rights to turn on restrictions, put it in the code of conduct that you can't restore the iPad etc. Code of conduct can also be used for things like no Facebook in class time etc. Then teachers can actually get up off their butts and move around the class and monitor that kids are following the rules.

Actually it makes a lot of sense. Colleges are already buying in. Grade schools aren't really.

Simple in theory but currently you can only have something like 10 devices using an Apple ID for apps etc. So unless Apple is going to set up special institution IDs, they won't be able to use the simple route

Junior high is 7-9 in most places, while 6-8 is middle school.

My cousin teaches in Texas and she hates the curriculum. I asked her why they haven't voted out the people make the decisions on the curriculum, she said that most of the board members are not even educators and educators have no say in what goes into a textbook. My cousin also said that she cannot deviate from what she is told to teach, that's just sad.

I have yet to meet an educator that will let you use wikipedia as a source for anything other than a good read. Until wikipedia locks down editing and adding articles to educators and researchers, it will not be a useable source.

Because so few have information that it usable.

Now explain to us why an educator would be updating a page on, say, the history of iOS version history instead of something more relevant to their field and why it being on Wikipedia means it's not useful despite have 98 citations pointing to additional sources for the available data on this single page?

What are schools going to do when a child breaks, has stolen or loses his/her iPad? Force the parents to buy another and will the school do if the child's parents cannot afford another? Would the school have the students leave the iPads in class? My cousin is a teacher in a poor district, her elementary was unable to get parents to buy a replacement books after their child lost theirs. Her school now has keep books in the classroom and then send the kids home with photocopies of what they are to study and work on at home. I am not saying that the iPad is a terrible tool for the classroom, I feel as though it is a great tool, but should be used by the teacher in the class to help educate.

I never said that information on Wikipedia was not helpful, insightful or meaningful. Wikipedia is not accepted source by the educational community for use in papers or research due to many educators. I should have stated that the pages should be updated or created by verified sources, but locked to the public from editing.

I know educators that use WIkipedia and have no problem with students using Wikipedia. That doesn't mean they cite Wikipedia as their source but as I stated before Wikipedia pages are often well cited to back up the information they present. This makes Wikipedia a great resource, hence it's extremely usable.

As for your comment that the site should be locked down to keep the ignorant "public" from editing you clearly don't understand how or why Wikipedia's design make it such a great resource tool for anything one can imagine.

I'd even argue that Wikipedia (and the internet, in general) has given today's students a tremendous lead over previous generations in the ability to think by forcing them to discern good information from bad unlike previous generations were likely to assume everything in a printed and bond encyclopedia was undeniable truth because there was little recourse to search any deeper without extensive effort.

PS: I'm proud to have added to the uselessness of hundreds of Wikipedia articles over the years.

I dunno. I think an 8GB tablet is a bad idea for general sale, but for a specific use as a school book? It would probably work out pretty well. How big are ebooks? Not very. Even if it was a music class and you needed to add a symphony or 2 to your iPad, so long as it wasn't Wagner's Ring Cycle, you should be fine These would be semi-locked down and kids would not be installing every app they wanted on them. These would have on them what the school wanted there to be. 8GB should be fine for that specific purpose.