Young people prefer standard textbooks. After a 5-year experiment, this was the ultimate finding of one school in Australia, so they’ve begun phasing out the experimental iPads in favor of utilizing paper textbooks once again.
For the last 5 years, a private school in the Sydney suburbs called Reddam House has been mostly learning with e-books. They switched everyone over to tablets except the year 11 and 12 students, with one important question to answer: Do e-books facilitate learning?
By leaving the 11th and 12th-year students with paper textbooks, by the time people reach the later years of their basic education, they have a strong basis for comparison. Very consistently, student feedback has been that they prefer the tactile experience of pages to slick, bright screens of iPads. So, back to plain old textbooks they’ve gone.
This makes perfect sense to Principal Dave Pitcairn, whose stance is that people learn better when they are using more of their faculties. (1)
It’s not that they are shirking technology completely. They’re just putting it in its place, so to speak. They’ve moved forward with a bring-your-own-electronics model, with a strong preference for laptops as the technology of choice.
Screens can be extremely distracting, as anyone who uses a smartphone can attest. You can fly through tabs, in and out of screens, app to app, and really look like you’re getting some stuff accomplished. But in fact, you’re not doing much of consequence at all. Great for the doctor’s office waiting room, terrible for a learning environment. Not to mention all the notifications… emails, IMs, and texts, oh my! Honestly, an iPad’s factory settings have a lot of things that don’t matter to the learning process. Truly, they would seem to hinder it.
iPad Learning Vs. Textbook Learning
In spite of the fact that there’s been a ton of research on the effect digital screens have on our lives, at the end of the day we really don’t know that much yet. Technology health risks are a relatively new discussion; it might be hard to believe but the iPad has only been around since 2010. So there have been a lot of studies, but simply not enough time yet for a true pattern to emerge.
So, at this point in our journey, what we have is technology research that’s all over the map. We know tablets can make a student more independent, but they can hamper math skills at the same time. (2) One Journal of Education and Practice study found that e-Book learning provided a “significant improvement on students core curriculum achievements.” (3) But one popular opinion against this type of learning is that the cost outweighs any perceived learning benefit. That the need for technology to be continually upgraded is a huge expense that schools can’t and shouldn’t have to bear. (4)
iPad Health Risks Aside, Teachers Need Teaching
No matter what study you’re looking at, or what opinion you hold, one point of view seems to be somewhat universal: Teachers need training on how to use tablets in the classroom.
Few would argue that technology is not a great source of potential for growth and learning. It is a fact that with a tablet we are just an internet search away, from whatever we want to learn about. That’s great, but that simple fact can be a huge distraction too. The sentiment is echoed over and over again, in studies big and small: Tablets are powerful, so let’s get smarter with using them. Let’s give teachers the tools and know-how to be effective with them. Let’s create factory settings for learning environments too. Then perhaps we can better harness that power, and enable our future stars to really shine brightly.
