Submitted by acohill on Tue, 02/02/2010 - 09:36
The iPad continues to generate enormous discussion on the Intertubes; while I have seen a lot of commentary about how it might be used in higher ed, I have seen very little about how it might be used by kids. The most obvious higher ed connection is as a replacement for textbooks, which are murderously expensive. A college student with an iPad can carry around an entire library of textbooks and should be able to save a lot of money at the same time. Textbook costs ought to decline over time, not to the $15 dollar level, but perhaps by 50% from $60 to $30 (and many technical textbooks are pushing $100 or more).
But the iPad strikes me as the perfect computer for middle school and high school. Smaller, lighter, no moving parts, much less to go wrong, and with plenty of horsepower to handle routine school assignments, which are mostly typing essays and papers. And you could do a lot of interesting basic math with a program like Apple's Numbers spreadsheet application. Apple is selling its three productivity programs for $9.99 each (word processsing, spreadsheet, presentations), about a third of the price of the cost of them for a laptop. With the dock and keyboard and wireless printing to a shared printer, kids have everything they need for school at much less than you might spend for a bare bones Apple laptop. I know there are very inexpensive Windows laptops available, but they still come with all the drawbacks of a laptop--heavy, moving parts, more susceptible to viruses, expensive software, etc.
Like the iPod, the iPad is going to change the way we do a lot of things. And like the iPod, it will create a lot of new business opportunities.
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