News - Intel reveals 7-inch and 10-inch 'Intel Education Tablets'.

[HEXUS]

These are two new Atom powered Android tablets aimed at the education market.

Read more.

[synaesthesia]

Nice, I'll be keeping an eye out for this. However, there isn't a person working in educational IT in this country that wouldn't shudder at the thought if they named this "Digital Blue" to go with their other utterly, utterly diabolical attempts at educational hardware.

[RussiaForever]

Why not just get the best seven inch tablet for schools, the Nexus 7?

[sirtrouserpress]

I don't understand what kind of 'enterprising businessman' thought our schools needed graphic tablets for the children's use, for example it shows it being used as some kind of data logger above, come-on! Get your self a raspberry pi and save money then teach children how to use linux, would kill two birds with one stone

[jim]

I don't understand what kind of 'enterprising businessman' thought our schools needed graphic tablets for the children's use, for example it shows it being used as some kind of data logger above, come-on! Get your self a raspberry pi and save money then teach children how to use linux, would kill two birds with one stone

Because that would be really useful in a 60 minute biology lesson.

[sirtrouserpress]

Because that would be really useful in a 60 minute biology lesson.

But the cost of all this hardware is unthinkable when applied to most schools, besides synergy between subjects can allow for less stubborn time restraints. EG Linux could be taught in ICT instead of spreadsheets and word-processors which i'm pretty sure are self explanatory enough...

[DanceswithUnix]

I don't understand what kind of 'enterprising businessman' thought our schools needed graphic tablets for the children's use, for example it shows it being used as some kind of data logger above, come-on! Get your self a raspberry pi and save money then teach children how to use linux, would kill two birds with one stone

The Pi requires case, screen, power supply, keyboard, storage, probably a mouse. For home use that's fine, you probably have it all available, but for kitting out a classroom?

For a little more than a Pi you can get a cheap Android tablet. It will have a faster CPU, more memory, already has a screen, WiFi to minimise cabling, will come with a PSU but has the ability to run from its battery. Some schools already teach Android app development.

So really, I don't get the Pi in education. If you want to teach Scratch or Linux, there are probably plenty of PCs around that can boot into Linux for that.

[jim]

But the cost of all this hardware is unthinkable when applied to most schools, besides synergy between subjects can allow for less stubborn time restraints. EG Linux could be taught in ICT instead of spreadsheets and word-processors which i'm pretty sure are self explanatory enough...

Not really. Secondary school science lessons currently rely (as far as I know), on large stocks of laptops which can be allocated to whichever room they're required in. They're not cheap. Reallocating that money towards tablets shouldn't present a problem.

Your suggestion of the Pi is little better economically, because even if that's cheap, you still need an external kb, mouse, psu, memory and monitor - all of which need to be paid for.

You might think that spreadsheets and word-processors are self-explanatory, but very few people (in my experience) truly understand how to use spreadsheets unless they've been specifically taught about them. Certainly more complicated functions like IF statements, and I dread to think about macros and lookup tables - there is just no way.

I agree that teaching linux could be a good thing in schools, but it's simply unrealistic to think that it presents a viable, economical method to supplant much simpler and easy to use technology. Teachers want to teach the kids about their subject, not somebody else's. And, furthermore, most teachers I know haven't the faintest about how to troubleshoot anything. It's bad enough with Windows laptops, it would probably be better with tablets, and it would be absolutely horrific with linux machines. It's already hard to recruit suitably qualified teachers who are experts in their area - adding IT to everyone's list of required knowledge will only make it worse, and it's frankly unnecessary.