Should schools allow students to use modern tech like iPads in classrooms? For example, instead of wasting paper, they could use great apps like Evernote to take notes in class and whatnot.

The current school I go to is putting iPad and iPod into test to see if they are going to purchase them in the following school year. We are allowed to bring our personal Tablets and iPods to class and use them to take notes and to read. They have even intergrated Aerohives all through out the build.

My middle school allows students to bring in their own computer or use a school issued netbook. We do a lot of multimedia projects using our computers and school video cameras. We still use a lot of paper, but most students take notes in OpenOffice or Microsoft Word. It's opened up a whole new way of learning for my school. It's really nice to be able to use the internet in every class to access online encyclopedias and other resources. Having technology in the classroom also helps with organization. Instead of carrying hundreds of papers, we can store everything neatly in folders on our hard drive.

In addition to laptops and netbooks, a few teachers have 4th generation iPod Touches that they have loaded educational apps onto. They also use them as video cameras for multimedia projects.

Negatives: I have seen quite a few students playing games (usually a pirated version of COD or Minecraft) in class, and they've moved the math classes online. Math online is a terrible idea. That's something that you need paper for.

Another problem I have with it is that the technology department isn't the greatest, and I end up providing tech support for everybody. I've been called out of class countless times to go fix a projector or perform data recovery on a computer with a bad hard drive. Now with many students getting their own laptops for Christmas and using them instead of school issued machines, I'm getting ready to help setup all the required applications for school since the technology department won't help with that.

We are not allowed to bring any electronic devices into the classroom. I think we should be able to. For taking notes.

I heard a lot of schools especially universitys are using things like iPads and iPods. My high school ,however, has strict rules when it comes to "electronics". You can get suspended if your caught using them more than once. They think were all just using them to cheat. They even take them if were using them during lunch. Is it possible to cheat in lunch?

I think devices like the iPad will eventually replace textbooks, provide a more visually enhanced studies, open the pathways to learning in ways we probably never imagined. I think with all advances in technology there is the chances for being used in ways not intended for the betterment of the classroom but if we were to stop all advancements that could be used in ways not intended we would never advanced from the wheel or fire would we?

My School District has issued Macbooks to every High School student in the county, and I would say that having them has been both a blessing and a curse. As they are a very good learning tool, you find many student's grades declining from lack of paying attention in class. They just sit there playing any game that they can get their hands on, or trying to hack through all of the blocks that the District Tech Department has installed. I would like to add, that even with the MacBooks in the schools, the amount of paper documents that we use has about stayed the same. I am a Freshman, and even MY grades have fallen by a few points from having that distraction in front of me during class. It also costs an arm and a leg to get them repaired if you break them, and that's on top of the $40 insurance fee that you have to pay to be able to take it home after the school day ends.

math is one of the few things that needs computers. The math that people learn is school is largely useless after elementary school.

After basic adding and subtracting and general multiplication and division concepts, math needs a computer.

While some will say crap like "what will you do when the computer isn't around?" well ask them, lets see you design that 2 billion transistor CPU without a computer

or lets see you design design a diaphragm for a microphone that will be as thin as possible while still being able to handle 20hk-20khz with an even amplitude across the frequency range while simultaneously being able to tolerate frequencies as low as 1hz and as high as 80khz without having a resonance that caused noise to be generated by the mic in the 20hk-20khz range?

math tends to have a very steep requirement range where after you go bast basic math, it skyrockets to a point where in the absence of a computer, work involving the more advanced math will stop as due to requirements in the market place, the level of accuracy and complexity involved is far greater than a human can do on paper.

Think about it, most things that get maid are designed on a computer, and before the parts are built they are stress tested on the computer. With out a computer, can you design a product then based on each material and the interaction between the materials, calculate the max stress that every square 0.001mm can handle as well as see exactly which parts will break when certain parts of the device receives impact?

before computers became used to help in designs and simulation, a huge portion of a projects budget would go to trial and error because the only way to see if a product would work, would be to build it, then put it in a chamber that tried to simulate the environment the product would be in, then you will see what breaks and re design it and test it over and over until it doesn't break.

when computers took over, all of this was done in the computer and when building you just needed to make sure that your source material met the specs of the expected material in the CAD. The real world testing was then used as a stress test of the final product before sending the same product into the field. (the best example of this is with modern devices made by NASA. In the past when they tried new complex designs without the help of a computer, they spent most of their money building test models, now that is all done on a computer and the real world test is mainly to spot manufacturing defects and not really design flaws.)

The goal a class in a specific subject should be to teach you the content enough so that you may perform a desired task. The more advanced stuff should be left to people who want to learn it but for most people, even with highly advanced technical fields, people will spend years learning very advanced math (and roughly 80% of the time is spent learning computation and not the math it's self). Though when they leave college and start working, all of what they learned is not needed as a computer does it for them. and if that computer was to ever go away, they wouldn't be doing that work because they wont be able to match the performance. Remember, a computer can do billions of calculations per second but human brain cant. No one is going to pay you 60-100K a year to spend 1 year doing something that with the help of a computer, can be done in about 1 second. (eg stress testing a product on the microscopic level by taking into account hundreds of different factors)

for more info check out

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_math_with_computers.html

and

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover.html

and probably best said in these videos, math is not computation, it is so much more. Computation is not an end in it's self but a means to an end. Computers perform calculations far faster and more accurately than any human can (ask a human to calculate the trajectory to send a probe to Jupiter and calculate all numbers to a billion decimal places while taking into account planetary rotation, gravity fields and their changes due to planet alignment and their changes in distance from the sun due to their orbit A human may make it their life's work and never complete it, while a computer may spend 3-6 months crunching numbers to come up with a flight plan)

The main reason that schools don't allow students to bring there electronics like Ipads and Laptops because of theft, usually when something gets stolen the students go to the teachers and the teachers don't want to deal with that sort of stuff. Its cheaper for the school to spend $700 on paper than replace someones stolen Ipad.

It's already being done. The following is news footage from back in April 2011.

Tacoma school switches from notepads to iPads in the classroom

http://www.king5.com/news/local/From-notepads-to-iPads----Tacoma-school-integrated-tablets-into-teaching-119885559.html