Ever since the late Steve Jobs took to the stage and announced the iPad, we’ve been thinking the tablet is the digital textbook of today. That tablets everywhere can replace textbooks, however, for a long time hasn’t been true. Up until now, tablets have been unable to match the same sort of learning found in textbooks. Now though, things have changed, and the tablet really is the textbook of the future. And thanks to the Internet, it’s more flexible than anything before.
Digital Textbooks Are Available and the Government Is Pushing Their Adoption
When talking about tablets, it’s hard not to talk about Apple and the iPad. The company conveniently offers textbooks through its iBooks service, and with the newer iPads’ Retina Displays, they look great. It’s easy to get hold of textbooks on the iPad, and Apple has always been a big name in education. However, it’s not enough that Apple spearhead the adoption and sale of digital textbooks, the US Government is involved, too.
The FCC has an initiative to help K-12 educators create their own brilliant textbooks. Ones that are relevant to the students today are being promoted, and the Obama administration has already said it wants digital textbooks to be commonplace within the next five years. With the Digital Textbook Playbook, a program from the FCC, educators are enabled to create great experiences for students of K-12 public schools, and there’s a lot of advice on offer.
Tablets Offer So Much More Than Just One Text
What makes these devices so compelling in the classroom and at home is they can not only offer two textbooks on one device, but hundreds. As well as that, they’ve gotten excellent at browsing the web in the last couple of years. With thousands of excellent Flash games and resources on the web, this makes the tablet an incredibly versatile tool.
Students can do what they want with their personal tablets, which makes them form a sort of attachment to these devices. High-schoolers might be drooling over the 2015 Mustang Specs on their lunch break, but then using the tablet to learn about the impact Henry Ford had on American later in History class. This flexibility excites students to use their iPads or Surfaces to learn, and in a lot of cases, they expect to be able to use them in the classroom. They’re undoubtedly excellent for note-taking, and bringing the textbooks to their tablets is a great way of putting all their information in one place.
Tablets Are Affordable and Offer a Window to the Entire Web
Thanks to tablets like Google’s Nexus 7 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire, it’s possible to buy a tablet for under $200. This makes these portable devices incredibly affordable and easy for all students to get their hands on. Thanks to their falling prices, the Internet has been adapting to these form factors, leading to a World Wide Web that looks great in two hands. Most importantly, unlike traditional textbooks, these tablets offer students everything.
There’s a whole wealth of information out there on the Internet through sources like Wikipedia and news sites. Tablets like the iPad offer children the ability to do weeks’ worth of research in under an hour. These opportunities in the form of a hand-held screen have empowered students more than anything else ever has.
The education sector has only just started accepting these devices in the classroom over the last few years, so this is only the beginning of tablets being used in place of traditional textbooks and providing students with vast accessibility to necessary and inspiring information!