Why Tablets Are Failing Miserably In Higher Education

[Deleted whining member 223597]

Reminds me a lot of Graphing Calculators. Maybe 20% of the kids who have them actually need them, for the rest of the kids it is like a portable game console that you can get away with using at school.

It's a shame really because tablets, laptops, even cellphones could have many legit uses in the Classroom but it will always be easier for a teacher to take the easy way out and simply ban all devices than actually do their their job and give the kids who don't fuck around all day a chance.

I'll be honest, the graphing calculator is just a tool that helps save time. Especially in high school, it was really hard to fit in calculus tests in a 45 minute window, so we used the calculators to do the useless integrations (Without knowing the concept it wouldn't do anything).

As an engineering student, I really don't see many uses for a tablet. It is still much easier to draw a diagram/take notes with a pencil and paper. Maybe for other majors that require more writing and less drawing it makes sense. But 90% of kids are not going to be able to use a tablet effectively.

 

[StoleMyOwnCar]

How does that relate to 19th century French poetry

Try writing 19th century French poetry as opposed to just reading it.

Either way you're trying to put in one outside case to disprove a general study, while disregarding that there are such things as "learning styles". If everyone learned best by reading... ugh it's just such a stupid notion I'm not even gonna bother. Note how many people online lack all form of reading comprehension...



Anyway if I had my Surface Pro in college I would have totally used the crap out of it. It's an excellent, highly portable productivity station. Alas I was stuck with a big, heavy, clunky ASUS "gaming" laptop with utter crap battery life. I suppose this article is talking about more traditional tablets.


Actually skimmed over it. Yeah it is.

 

[heatlesssun]

It is still much easier to draw a diagram/take notes with a pencil and paper.

This is big reason why some like Windows tablets with pen digitizers. Taking notes with a digital pen in OneNote I think is overall far superior to pen and paper.

 

[StoleMyOwnCar]

I'll be honest, the graphing calculator is just a tool that helps save time. Especially in high school, it was really hard to fit in calculus tests in a 45 minute window, so we used the calculators to do the useless integrations (Without knowing the concept it wouldn't do anything).

As an engineering student, I really don't see many uses for a tablet. It is still much easier to draw a diagram/take notes with a pencil and paper. Maybe for other majors that require more writing and less drawing it makes sense. But 90% of kids are not going to be able to use a tablet effectively.

Graphing calculators are useful for people planning on going Calc and then an engineering college (like me) past HS anyway. Saves time in HS and you're gonna go into college anyway. I didn't have one of the models that could do integration though, I had to do that manually.

I remember in HS I did play a lot of games on my graphing calculator, esp during Calculus. During trig I was also graphing cars and smily faces using piecewise functions for fun. I remember having like paragraph long math functions with inequalities all on the other side of those limited number (I had one of the lower end Texas Instrument models) of Y[k] lines. And then I'd delete one and there goes half the wheels and the bottom of the car...

That being said as an engineering student you should know better than to pull statistics outta your butt. =P

 

[Henri108]

It has been said before, but the one and only reason tablets don't work for education (any education btw), is because it is terrible for creation.
You need a keyboard and a standard to work in to be able to create. That's why Ultrabooks work in education and tablets don't. I am currently studying at university amongst 600 others in this room and I see 2 tablets (people using fb), 15 Ultrabooks (mostly touch-capable), 6 Surface Pro's (all with keyboard) and 11 laptops (a few macbooks, and some other +- 15" laptops). And then 100 or so with pen and paper. Programs used are Onenote and Word, some powerpoints from people that don't know you can import that stuff in Onenote.
This is in the Economy department during the classes Micro-economy and Law.

 

[iDylan]

Reminds me a lot of Graphing Calculators. Maybe 20% of the kids who have them actually need them, for the rest of the kids it is like a portable game console that you can get away with using at school.

I get the point you're making but I disagree -- a graphing calculator is actually useful. It serves a purpose, and does its job better than any reasonable alternative. A tablet in the academic setting is just the bastard child of a laptop that is missing a few chromosomes or something.

 

[Ashton]

2. Full screen apps = Poor multitasking.

If you are writing a paper, or does any sort of school work, being able to easily have multiple windows (with reference material visible) allows for productivity, having to constantly page through apps to find info is tedious and counter productive.

I have had to do emergency server and website maintenance on phones/tablets (don't ask) and existing solutions are weak at best. I have to have a fullscreen editor, then full screen ftp, then full screen browser, then fullscreen email...If I could have had the email in one window, and the editor in another, side by side, I could have easily worked on the issue, but always swapping between them made it a real pain....doable but a pain...especially from a park bench at the zoo.

Might have already been said, but check out Samsung's Galaxy Note series, they support windowed apps and pack both a decent battery life and a powerful quad-core processor to handle it.

 

[Freebo]

Iv'e been saying it for years, tablets in classrooms are a waste. All the kids do is facebook, youtube and play games.

 

[NoOther]

Reminds me a lot of Graphing Calculators. Maybe 20% of the kids who have them actually need them, for the rest of the kids it is like a portable game console that you can get away with using at school.

It's a shame really because tablets, laptops, even cellphones could have many legit uses in the Classroom but it will always be easier for a teacher to take the easy way out and simply ban all devices than actually do their their job and give the kids who don't fuck around all day a chance.

I agree with the premise that not all kids need the graphing calculators, but disagree with the statistic. I would like to see some facts on that statistic. When I was in HS, the only people required to get graphing calculators were those in Trig or higher. I had a programmable graphing calculator for a good bit of high school and used it all the time for Math, Science, and my Computer classes. I did play games on it, mostly ones we coded ourselves. I also did all my graphing work on it, my calc/calc 2 work, linear algebra, etc. Also had programs to help me figure out molecular reactions and solve equations for chemistry and biochem. I realize I am probably an outlier in all of that, but I knew quite a few people that did the same and I remember that hardly anyone outside of those in calculus even had the more advanced HP graphing calculators that we had. Many people had TI-88s, but those were fairly cheap at that time since they were bought and sold in bulk.

 

[StoleMyOwnCar]

You don't really need a super advanced graphing calculator like a Ti-89. Like I said I used a Ti-83 throughout college, which included Calc 2-3/Linear Alg, DiffEq, DSP, etc.

And honestly for anything else you need, there's Wolfram Alpha or Matlab.

 

[CreepyUncleGoogle]

Alas I was stuck with a big, heavy, clunky ASUS "gaming" laptop with utter crap battery life.

I don't see how a personal decision to buy poorly suited hardware somehow invalidates everyone else's ownership and use of more practical computers. Not everyone buys laptops with awful battery life and wasteful graphics processors for college classes. Many people put a lot more thought into what they use in college. Like, I prefer using spiral ring notebooks and pencils since they have far better battery life and can survive being dropped.

 

[Deleted whining member 223597]

You don't really need a super advanced graphing calculator like a Ti-89. Like I said I used a Ti-83 throughout college, which included Calc 2-3/Linear Alg, DiffEq, DSP, etc.

And honestly for anything else you need, there's Wolfram Alpha or Matlab.

Matlab? Oh god, that garbage. Maybe my instructor taught it badly, but damn I never wanna see that shit again.

The best part of the graphing calculator is actually the ability to store everything. If you do a really long problem and need to store intermediate answers, it's much easier to just do sto -> A than write down the entire answer or worse, round it off. And of course programming certain equations in (Looking at you quadratic)

 

[StoleMyOwnCar]

I don't see how a personal decision to buy poorly suited hardware somehow invalidates everyone else's ownership and use of more practical computers. Not everyone buys laptops with awful battery life and wasteful graphics processors for college classes. Many people put a lot more thought into what they use in college. Like, I prefer using spiral ring notebooks and pencils since they have far better battery life and can survive being dropped.

... I don't even see how the hell you read my post like that. I wasn't talking about anyone else, just lamenting my experience... slightly. And as an FYI I would have easily taken the Surface Pro over even lighter laptops of that age (this was about 5-6 years ago when I bought that ASUS laptop).

I didn't really regret buying the ASUS laptop... not at the beginning, anyway. It was a better gaming machine than my desktop at the time, and I got to put it on my tuition. With all of the scholarships I had, I basically got a 14xx$ machine for free. That's why I got the most expensive thing I could. Then I could game on it at LAN parties and crap, and it worked a heck of a lot better than my friends' craptops for the purpose. I also used it to play games during classes (to the dismay of everyone around me >.>).

Back then, competitive, GOOD portable laptops weren't really out anyway. Nothing I found worthy anyhow. Now though? I probably would have bought a Surface Pro 1/2 without any hesitation. The pen is great so note taking when so many of the things I have to write down include mixed content such as calculus equations (and Laplace transforms...), and it's very light and portable. Much moreso than any simple laptop which assumes you NEED a keyboard at all times. Not to mention it CAN actually play games fine. Integrated GPU has actually gotten to that point.

I only started not liking it later into my college years when I actually managed to save up enough money to build a computer and then I was like "well, now I have this huge clunky, deteriorating laptop that I don't even use for gaming anymore".

Matlab? Oh god, that garbage. Maybe my instructor taught it badly, but damn I never wanna see that shit again.

The best part of the graphing calculator is actually the ability to store everything. If you do a really long problem and need to store intermediate answers, it's much easier to just do sto -> A than write down the entire answer or worse, round it off. And of course programming certain equations in (Looking at you quadratic)

Matlab was my first experience with a programming language (the second being C). It serves its purpose quite well. It makes it very easy to do DSP calculations and all kinds of complex math processes on various subjects pretty easily... just not in real time because its processing speed sucks.