Many U.S. schools adding iPads, trimming textbooks

From USATODAY.com

I got to be Santa Claus this week, handing out 11 iPads, a Kindle and a Sony eReader to students participating in pilot projects here at Messiah. We're exploring the utility of these technologies in the learning environment. At Educause last year I heard about several school districts forgoing textbooks in favor of iPads and digital resources; according to the article there are now at least 600 schools districts that have launched programs which provide at least some of their students with iPads for use in school.

Image Source: getliquid.com

I'd love to see this at my kids school, if for no other reason than to save their backs from the enormous backpacks full of textbooks :)

For incoming freshmen at western Connecticut's suburban Brookfield High School, hefting a backpack weighed down with textbooks is about to give way to tapping out notes and flipping electronic pages on a glossy iPad tablet computer.

The iPads generally cost districts between $500 and $600, depending on what accessories and service plans are purchased.

By comparison, Brookfield High in Connecticut estimates it spends at least that much yearly on every student's textbooks, not including graphing calculators, dictionaries and other accessories they can get on the iPads.

Python Cloud IDE

Our incoming students might be interested in this - PythonFiddle.com is a cloud-based IDE that lets you write and run code in your browser. Both apps and data are migrating to the web, but apps have lagged. There are plenty of ways to store almost any data in the cloud, but there are still many kinds of apps that only run locally (and many apps that do have cloud-based versions are still far behind their local equivalent. Working with students on their code over the years, I've been desperate for a GOOD cloud-based IDE, so that wherever we are I can sit down with them and run their code in the same environment in which they've been running it (it gets old really fast to have them email me their code, often missing some files, then download them, import them into Eclipse, compile, run, debug, comment, and then reupload the files for them...

Let me know if you know of other cloud-based IDEs that you like, especially any for C++, Java, Prolog, or any of the Lisp variants.

Stanford offers free CS courses

From DeviceGuru

Last year at Educause, I heard Neil Gershenfeld (of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms) speak on a shift away from a scarcity-based model of education. A significant point was that technology has the potential to radically revolutionize the business of education. In the past, access to ideas was limited by access to physical resources: books, laboratories, faculty members. When resources are digitized, the nominal cost of reproducing them becomes insignificant.

In the latest of a series of similar examples, Stanford University has announced that it will be offering a series of 10 free online computer science courses, including their introduction to computer science, artificial intelligence, and robotics. As of a couple of days ago, more than 120,000 students had signed up for the courses.

'Sputnik moment' needed for Computer Science

Bill Gates: "'When I think about different areas of activity, really to me other than some neat stuff in biology, it's hard to think of a domain that's going to change the world one-hundredth as much as advanced software will in the decades ahead.'"

I'm convinced that one of the reasons that CS programs have seen declining enrollment in recent years is because students aren't properly seeing how computing technology will continue to transform almost every aspect of our lives. Medicine, Economics, Politics, Entertainment, Education, Manufacturing, and even Construction are all undergoing radical changes because of developing technologies.

Declining CS enrollment might also be linked to the perception that CS majors develop technical expertise at the expense of 'soft skills.' Employers increasingly look for candidates with a broad education: effective writing skills, leadership, public communication all contribute to job success. The solution then isn't to avoid technical majors, but rather to transform their curricula to develop a broad set of skills. "Humane Computing" might be an apt term.

The perfect place to develop these new models for CS education is at colleges and universities that have a strong foundation in liberal arts and general education. The computer scientists who will lead in the future should not only have the technical skills to design and implement new technologies; they should have a solid foundation in history, sociology and ethics, so they can evaluate the impact of such technologies on individuals and societies. They should be well grounded in sociology, art, and psychology, to design humane interfaces that are accessible and pleasant to the people who use them. And they should be broadly educated in a variety of disciplines, so that they can find applications for technology that they are both knowledgeable and passionate about.