Schools test iPads in classrooms

Before, during and even between classes at Hillbrook School this fall, seventh-graders have been spotted on the Los Gatos campus, sometimes burbling Spanish or Mandarin phrases into the glowing screen in their hands, other times staring into it like a looking glass.

iPads -- the Apple of almost every adolescent's eye -- are being provided to students at several Bay Area public and private schools this year, including Hillbrook, which claims to be the only K-8 school in America using tablet computers in class and sending them home. This has led to a lot of 12-year-olds swanning around the wooded hillside campus, talking to their iPads.

Summoning up a virtual keyboard recently, Sophie Greene quickly typed a note to herself in iCal, a calendar program, then played back an audio file in which she was speaking Spanish. "We record a conversation, e-mail it to our teacher, Señorita Kelly," she explained, "then she critiques the lesson in Spanish and sends that back to us."

For the 28 seventh-graders entrusted with iPads at Hillbrook, the pictures that flash across the device's screen open a window to a wider world. The iPad allows them to take daily excursions across time and space to such exotic ports as ancient Mesopotamia and modern China.

 

So we can expect a massive increase in the collective grade point average, right? And California to soon lead the country in the brightest happy camping kids of all ages? Right?

Not that I believe they're using the entry-level iPad, the $500 one, but hell, that's still cheap because its been proven time and again that all one need do to send test scores through the roof is to throw money at the schools.

Right?

And while alla them swanning kids might be falling in lust with ancient Mesopotamia and China, this is going to be a dynamite way to teach American History as well, right?

And since the entire state of California is soon to be bankrupted by the incredible liberal spending sprees that are coming home to roost, what's another $1000 $500 per child  expenditure amongst friends, right? After all, it isn't as if the companies that sold them the devices are going to ask for them back when payment stops. 


That's sooooooooooo capitalist.