Tablets are becoming a more common sight in Beijing classrooms as students use them not only in place of bulky textbooks, but also to replace notebooks and other study aids. The tablets are being piloted in schools thanks to a half-a-million dollar grant announced by the Beijeing government to be used to create a so-called “e-bag,” where everything a student carried that used to require paper will be digital instead.

Haite Garden Primary School was one of the first to benefit from the government’s largesse when it decided to completely overhaul its teaching practices to make use of the digital tool. Each first and second grader was issued a free tablet with a touchscreen to be used in classes like Chinese, mathematics and English.

Li Jiangnan, a teacher with the school, explains that students use the tablets in three classes — Chinese, math and English. The technology enables vibrant interactions in classrooms.

In Li’s class, students follow the teacher’s guidance on drawing Chinese characters on their touchscreens. If correct, the strokes turn red, while incorrect ones remain their original color, turning the dull writing practice into a vivid online game.

Coming in the wake of the technology’s surging popularity, the tablet roll-out is a trial designed to discover new ways to inspire children to learn, according to school head Wu Youying.

The Haite program is supposed to be a pilot, and it lives up to the name. According to xinhuanet.com there have been a number of teething troubles including getting the school’s network to work with the devices and a lack of funding to purchase the e-textbooks required in classes where tablets are being used.

There are also downright low-tech issues as well. The school is short of places where students can reliably and quickly plug in to charge a dying battery.

School administrators are working with representatives from the Beijing Academy of Educational Science to iron out these and other problems.

Meanwhile, educators are looking at the Haite Garden Primary School experiment closely for signs that they’re pioneering the future of Beijing’s — and even China’s — primary schools.

The authorities should study whether using tablets would have this impact, and that it is irresponsible for the government to take action without such due diligence, according to a post by Internet user Wang Jiafu.

Parents also fretted that the youngsters, lacking self control, will log onto instant messaging tools or games as soon as their teachers’ backs are turned.

“Allowing pupils unlimited access to the Internet is likely to distract their attentions as well as deprive them of imagination,” said one parent on condition of anonymity.

These concerns echo the same cries critics in the United States and the rest of the world have put forth regarding education technology in schools. There’s broad agreement that tech has tremendous potential in the classroom, but will hasty, poor implementation do more harm than good — and with a hefty price tag?

Education expert Liu Yongming, notes Beijing’s attempt to incorporate high technology into traditional classes follows current worldwide teaching trends.

“We should treat the tablet as a supportive tool because the essence of education lies in learning and thinking through reading and writing, and this should not be shattered and changed,” Liu adds.

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When debating programs that see students issued with personal pieces of digital equipment for use in school, many district leaders are considering tablets instead of more traditional laptops or personal computers. And for many, “tablet” means Apple’s popular iPad — yet for the first time other players are now in a position to compete for providing education’s most popular digital tool.

Avi Asher-Schapiro, writing for DistrictAdministration.com, lists the companies that are lining up for a chance to take Apple’s mantle as the king of education technology. Among them are “heavy hitters” like Google, Samsung and Lenovo, along with many others. But the challenge facing these companies is daunting.

It might feel like the iPad came out of nowhere to take over classrooms not only around the country but around the world — however, looks can be deceiving. As a company Apple has been laying the groundwork for this takeover for more than a decade with a strategy that courted the education market from kindergarten to university and beyond.

Not only was Apple’s Macintosh computer a familiar presence in school computer labs, but a substantial number of colleges boasted Apple proto-stores where the company’s products were sold at a discount and where Mac enthusiasts were always on hand to help or just evangelize.

This is the kind of institutional advantage that Apple’s competitors are now seeking to overcome.

Still, it won’t be easy toppling a leader, especially one as popular as the iPad, which has hundreds of applications for K12 education and a range of lessons available through iTunes U, more than any other tablet. Hardly a month goes by without a new wave of school districts announcing iPad initiatives. “The iPad aligns perfectly with Maine’s statewide 1:1 technology goals,” says Rick Lyons, superintendent of District 22 in Hampden, Maine where the New Hampden Academy high school recently bought 840 iPads—one for every student and teacher. “Students and parents are already familiar with the device and we are getting great feedback.”

Still, slowly but surely inroads are being made. Google, for example, recently landed an order from the Rocketship Charter Network for its Chromebooks – lightweight computers that run on the company’s Chrome operating system. As Asher-Schapiro explains, the machine has a number of advantages over the iPad: the price and the sheer simplicity.

Langan’s pitch resonates with Mike Teng, technology team manager at Rocketship Education, a California public charter network that serves 3,800 students across seven schools in California and Wisconsin. Teng acknowledges that choosing between the iPad and its alternatives can be difficult. “There are major tradeoffs when considering iPads, Chromebooks or any technology device,” he says.

But when Rocketship began to move toward 1:1 last fall, Teng and his team ultimately went with Samsung Chromebooks, rolling out 1,300 devices across its seven campuses. And price was a major consideration. “If you are choosing between 1,300 Chromebooks or 600 iPads, you have to go with what gives you the most instruction per student,” he says.

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Global internet traffic from tablets has outpaced the traffic from smartphones for the first time, CNet reports. According to Adobe Digital Index, tablets are responsible for 8% of all internet traffic now compared to 7% of smartphones.

Tyler White, who works on the the Digital Index for Adobe, says that even the analysts were surprised at how quickly the tablets gained in popularity. In a blog post accompanying the Index’s release, he noted that the bigger screens make tablets a better browsing tool. The user preference must be very pronounced, since tablets gained on and surpassed phones even though the ownership rates on smartphones are higher at present.

To get these numbers Adobe tracked 100 billion visits to more than 1000 Web sites worldwide since June 2007. While both smartphone and tablet traffic are on the rise, global desktop Web traffic is still king — driving 84 percent of all online use.

What’s interesting about tablet traffic taking off is that the devices are fairly new on the scene. Adobe only added them to its category list three years ago and the first Apple iPad was introduced in 2010, while the first Kindle Firewas released in 2011.

The rate of adoption of tablets hasn’t been uniform worldwide. Although they have been embraced in the US, Germany, France and Canada, among others, it is in the UK where the technology has been embraced most eagerly.

Between January of 2012 and 2013, traffic from tablets across the UK grew by more than 130%. In the US, the growth was a more moderate 90%.

Of the countries whose internet traffic was examined by the company, Japan and China were the only two where the use of smartphones was still dominating over the use of tablets for web browsing.

While smart­phone traf­fic in the UK is sim­i­lar to that seen in US and Canada, tablet traf­fic is much higher, espe­cially when com­pared to the rest of the world. Inter­net users in the UK are much more likely than their French and Ger­man coun­ter­parts to browse via both tablets and smart­phones. In Japan and China, how­ever, smart­phones remain the mobile brows­ing device of choice. This is not sur­pris­ing given the smart­phone capa­bil­i­ties that have existed in Japan for years and the high costs of tablets and high speed mobile access in China.

In total, traffic from tablets world-wide doubled over the past 12 months, with a remarkably steady growth rate from month to month. Adobe is not expecting the trend to reverse over the course of 2013, and predicts that tablets will not only increase their lead on smartphones but will also take a bite out the PC traffic.

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The shift from traditional textbooks to e-books and tablets continues to pick up speed in American schools, Yahoo News reports. Districts are becoming increasingly enamored with the new medium which they say not only allow quick updates and more interactive learning, but also brings down the costs of academic materials per-student.

The former New York City school chief Joel Klein is one such technology evangelist, saying that digital tools revolutionize the way students learn. Introducing tablets instead of textbooks allows teachers to personalize learning to the individual needs of their students, as opposed to sticking to a one-size-fits-all solution offered by traditional texts.

Klein is not a disinterested party in this debate. Since leaving his post in NYC, he’s joined the educational efforts of the company NewsCorp, which recently announced a launch of its own tablet Amplify that will come complete with a suite of software published by the company’s education arm.

News Corp. introduced their Amplify tablet during a breakfast Wednesday at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. Priced at $299, the 10-inch unit runs on a school’s wireless Internet system and comes with software for teachers to watch each student’s activities, offer instant polls and provide anonymous quizzes to gauge student understanding.
Orders placed by June 30 will be ready for the start of the school year in the fall, officials at Rupert Murdoch’s company said, adding yet another platform for schools to consider.

Merely a decade ago, a tablet for every student might have seemed like an unrealizable dream – but that was before the dramatic price drops that brought such technology within the means of many school districts. Google, which sells a stripped down notebook running its Chrome operating system priced at only $199 per unit, has already formed partnerships with several localities that put the Chromebook in the hands of more than 20 million students.

The more advanced the courses, the more likely is technology to play a part in them. According to a Pew Research Trust study, 40% of AP classes and National Writing Project classrooms use tablets, smartphones or laptop computers regularly in during instruction.

In coming years, growth seems to be the norm. Christine Quinn, the speaker of the New York City Council, has suggested replacing textbooks — they cost the city $100 million a year — with tablets. Schools in Los Angeles last month allocated $50 million to start buying tablets for every student; the project is expected to cost $500 million by the time it is completed. Schools in McAllen, Texas, distributed 6,800 Apple tablets last year at a cost of $20.5 million.

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After teasing it at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show, NewsCorp is now releasing their new tablet Amplify which will be a centerpiece of the company’s push into digital education publishing, GigaOM reports. The tablet will debut during a panel at the technology conference SXSWedu which kicked off this Monday in Austin, Texas.

The tablet comes as a result of work done by Wireless Generation, a company acquired by NewsCorp in 2010, and will feature a 10 inch screen running the latest version of the Android operating system called Jelly Bean. It will come with a suite of apps created by NewsCorp as well as with preloaded content from education technology titans like Khan Academy and CK-12. It will also include the Desmos graphic calculator for free.

The goal for the tablet is to bring it into the classroom as quickly as possible and, according to GigaOM, it is optimized for use in an education environment.

“Simply giving kids hardware or another computer, I think, is not going to change what’s going on,” Joel Klein, Amplify’s CEO and the former New York City Schools Chancellor told reporters on a press call. “That’s why we focused instead on creating a rich, robust learning platform for the school space.”

Amplify’s tablet, which comes ready for student use out of the box, lets administrators and teachers distribute content across an entire class or grade level, allows teachers to control the content on students’ screens and gives students different digital ways participate in class. To enable those features, the company said, it couldn’t just run its software on any device, it needed to get deeper into the operating system.

Teachers will be able to use the tablet’s software to monitor students’ progress through their schoolwork and will have complete control over the tablet operation of each student, up to and including blocking it from the internet or shutting down a particular app. Amplify also comes with a tool for two-way communication between students and teachers such as quick surveys and reports on kids’ progress generated on the fly.

Since the tablet utilizes Google’s popular mobile operating system, it will also have access to some apps sold on the app store Google Play.

Although the product doesn’t launch with analytics dashboards for teachers, over time apps running on the tablet could give teachers and schools a clearer picture of achievement at the individual and broader levels, the company said. Using various apps and services, schools could enable teachers and students to do some of what Amplify’s tablet can do on regular iPads and Android devices – classroom clickers and startup ClassDojo, for example, provide classroom management tools, social education startup Edmodoprovides a platform for sharing content and collaboration and Pearson  and McGraw-Hill Educationoffer digital textbooks that aim to personalize learning.

The tablet is priced competitively to make it attractive to cash-strapped schools and school districts. The basic model , which comes with WiFi built in, but doesn’t have cellular access, will be priced at $299. The Amplify Plus will cost an additional $50 but will have 4G build in and will include 2 years of mobile internet valued at $179 per year.

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Even students who have had very little experience with technology seem to embrace mobile digital gadgets like tablets quickly and with ease. In the words of Grace Wumbui, a 14-year-old from Nairobi, Kenya, “one minute” was all it took to understand the basics of how to operate these gadgets.

It was an exciting day for Grace and her classmates when the shipment of tablets first arrived at her school – a small tin shack – and transformed the classroom entirely. Where teaching at the Amaf School used to be done with chalk and a blackboard, now five students each share a tablet, taking turns manipulating its touch screen and delving into the details of the Kenyan curriculum that is preloaded on the device.

The tablets at Amaf School are an exception; they are part of a pilot project run by eLimu, a technology start-up. But if it and other firms are right, tablets and other digital devices may soon be the rule in African schools: many are betting on a boom in digital education in Kenya and elsewhere. Some executives even expect it to take off like M-Pesa, Kenya’s hugely successful mobile-money service.

This embrace of technology comes at a time when the number of students struggling to land a place in a school is falling due to the expansion of access to education nationwide. Still, the school growth is not expected to keep pace with student population growth, so figuring out how to make resources go farther is a priority for education officials in the country. Technology could fill that gap by allowing students to move through the syllabus without as much input from a teacher.

The school system in Kenya is suffering from more than just overcrowding. Like many other systems across the world, it is constantly seeking to balance a very limited budget against students’ educational needs. And like in many other countries, officials are long past ready to try radically different solutions.

And for something radically different, lawmakers and education experts turned to the company that brought about the last Kenyan digital miracle – the mobile payment system called M-Pesa.

Safaricom, the Kenyan mobile operator that pioneered the M-Pesa service, hopes to repeat its success in digital education. It is developing classroom content, from videotaped lessons to learning applications, that any of Kenya’s 7,000 state secondary schools will be able to access online.

However, should the education tech sector take off in Kenya, Safaricom shouldn’t expect to keep the market to themselves for long. Already, companies like Amazon have dipped their toe into the African region, seeing the sales figures for its digital reader – the Kindle – steadily rise. It is already improving its technology for the African market and won’t be content to stay in second place.

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Joel Klein, former Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education and current executive vice president at News Corp, has announced ambitious expansion plans for “Amplify,” the company’s education division. Klein, who also heads Amplify, sees the division becoming aggressive in the sector by releasing products meant to appeal to the current crop of students and their insatiable hunger for everything tech-related.

Over the course of a presentation made during the UBS Global Media and Communication Conference, Klein outlined plans to release an open-source tablet that will run the company’s optimized educational software. The included applications will not only be Common Core Standards-compliant, but will also include an extensive analytics component that will aid teachers, schools and districts in feeding increasingly popular and extremely data hungry academic assessment systems.

Klein’s point is that U.S. K-12 education is a “broken model,” with shockingly low graduation rates, “we spend a lot on education and do not see the results.” To change all this, Klein said, “the private sector’ has to be involved and that “technology will forever change how we teach students.” Klein said, “kids use media and technology of all kinds but they’re told they have to turn them all off when they get to school.”

According to estimates unveiled during the presentation, Klein views the education market as lucrative, with over $700 billion up for grabs. Seventeen billion of that is available in the K-12 market in which Amplify expects to compete most aggressively.

To take a chunk of that market, the division is prepared to invest heavily in development. So far, the costs of the product design is pushing $180 million – a large number considering that the unit is reporting about $100 million in yearly revenues. Amplify has already contracted to provide its software and hardware services to over 200 school districts around the country.

Amplify is focused on changing American education with a program focused on Amplify Insight, teaching software tied to a prototype Amplify tablet device designed to collect and mine “big data,” in other words, use data analysis to drive teaching. He also pointed to Amplify Learning, customizable “gamefied” educational content—the digital textbook in a new form—tied to national core curriculum standards and designed to appeal to young people’s love of digital technology and multimedia.

Klein hopes that products sold by Amplify will not just transform the way kids are taught, but will completely overthrow the current 9-3 school day paradigm. When academic materials are available around the clock online, and instructors are easily reachable via forums, social media and email, learning doesn’t need to stop when kids leave the class or even the school building.

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The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board weighed in last week on the plan by the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Superintendent John Deasy to put a tablet in the backpack of every LAUSD student — and the verdict of the editorial board is that Deasy is getting ahead of himself.

Praising the officials overseeing the money raised by the recent district-initiated bond issue, the LA Times editorial says that the board members were right to vote down Deasy’s $450 million technology plan, if only because it was too vague and poorly considered.

Although the decision – which went against Deasy by one vote – isn’t binding, and the final disbursement could still be approved, Deasy has already waved the white flag by saying that he would not bring it forward again. The Times says that LAUSD should by all means bring technology into its schools, but before it does so, both the superintendent and other district officials should make sure that they are moving forward in the most efficient and frugal way possible.

The purchase of personal computing devices for 650,000 students within a couple of years is the sort of proposal that attracts big headlines and makes school officials look like cutting-edge leaders, but it could easily turn into a boondoggle of extraordinary and unforeseen expense.

According to the editorial, the proposal had already undergone several revisions between being made public and being put to a vote. Initially the plan called for a purchase of a tablet for every LAUSD student from K to 12th grade. The first revision saw an all-tablet version dumped for a mix of tablets, laptops and smartphones — but how many of each and for whom was left as a detail to be determined later.

There were other indications that the tech proposal wasn’t as thoroughly analyzed as it ought to have been. When, prior to the vote, Deasy was asked how he was planning to handle the not-at-all unexpected issue of technology theft, he had no answer to offer. He was likewise unsure if the issued gadgets would be taken home by the students every night or were they to be left on school property once the last school bell had sounded.

It remains unclear whether the purchase would be an appropriate, or even legal, use of school bond money. Bonds are intended to pay for capital expenditures — construction, purchase and renovation of land, buildings and durable equipment that will last at least somewhat close to the 20 years or more of the bond program. Bond expenditures have been approved in the past for classroom desktop computers, but it’s unclear whether tablets or laptops would be as durable, and usually, bonds may not be used to buy equipment that students take home. Textbooks, for example, may not be purchased with bond money.

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Thanks to a $200,000 federal grant, this year Western Hills University High School principal Stephanie Morton took a step that is becoming more common as a growing number of educators embrace technology: she purchased for each of her 1,200 students a Nook Color tablet. Not only will the light-weight device replace the bulky school textbooks Western Hills students have grown used to, it will also provide a way for them to access academic materials and school resources online both in and out of school.

Morton said that allowing kids to get their hands on technology is especially important when they come from low income families, as do 73% of Western Hills students. The Nooks they get in school could be the only opportunity they will have to play this with kind of a gadget, without which they could drop behind their more affluent peers. In addition, Nooks obviate the need for a library or a computer lab whenever kids need the internet for a school assignment. With a Nook in their hands they can do their school work anywhere they can find a WiFi hotspot.

Switching to digital textbooks is a core recommendation by the Maryland-based State Educational Technology Director’s Association, which supports efforts to use technology to improve education. It says 22 states have changed state law or launched initiatives to make it happen.

“We’ve been watching trends,” association Executive Director Douglas Levin said. “Every day we see ways school districts look to technology as a way to supplement or replace the textbook.”

The pace of digital adoption is spiking, but the use of such technology in the classroom is still far from universal. Yet, there is enough desire to bring digital tech into schools that manufacturers are committing resources to get as much of the market as they can capture.

At the moment it is Apple, with its popular iPad tablet, that is the king of the educational technology hill. The company was one of the first to recognize the growing importance — and revenue stream — of the education market, and has been laying down the groundwork to succeed in that sphere for many years. For many districts and schools considering purchasing tablets for their students, the iPad is still the most popular first choice. Yet like Barnes & Noble’s the Nook, other providers are increasingly making inroads and chipping away at Apple’s market share.

 Several local schools have issued laptops, tablets or other devices. But so far the Cleveland City school district is the only other district in Ohio to give students take-home Nooks on a school-wide scale, according to Tom McMillen, digital sales manager at the Kenwood Barnes & Noble.

For a school district as cash-strapped as Cleveland, going digital makes fiscal as well as academic sense. Equipping each student with a full set of textbooks they will need to learn costs nearly $400. This makes purchasing a Nook, which costs closer to $200, with a case and screen protector included, a bargain in comparison. Sweetening the deal is the fact that publishers typically price their e-textbooks offerings at half the price of the paper ones. As self-publishing software becomes more widely available, there are also an increasing number of free textbooks to be had — and some of them of remarkably high quality.

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The honor of announcing the launch of the first Aakash tablet in the fall of 2011 – the $35 miracle that was supposed to finally bring internet connectivity to the most remote parts of India – fell to Kapil Sibal, the country’s minister for both human resource development and communication and information technology. For the tablet’s second iteration, DataWind, the company tasked with creating the Aakash 2, aimed a little bit higher. Calling it the “Tablet of the nation,” announcing the gadget’s imminent launch fell to the Honorable President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee.

A heavy burden of expectations followed the announcement of the very first Aakash tablet in October of last year. Billed as the cheapest tablet in the world at the time – the cost of each was $35, and the government gave away the first 100,000 for free – the hope was that the low price of the device, which was in part subsidized by the Indian government, would go a long way toward erasing the technological divide between the country’s richest and poorest communities.

Efforts to create the updated version, however, ran into problems manly due to DataWind, who won the contract by submitting the lowest bid despite lacking experience in a project of this magnitude. At the time, there were even some concerns that the Aakash 2 might die before it was ever born. Thankfully, that didn’t turn out the be the case.

Although the tablet is only slated to become generally available starting this month – the updated version boasts a better screen, longer battery life and an operating system bump to Android 2.0 – the commercial version, called UbiSlate 7Ci, has already garnered positive reviews from TechChrunch. They called it a tablet that could connect the world after having a chance to play with it earlier this year.

The goal of the cheap computing device – it is anticipated that the gadget will sell for $35 – is to give every child in India, regardless of income, an affordable way to connect to the internet. But it isn’t only the tablet that is raising excitement; it is the commitment behind it. With its launch, the Indian government is also making a promise for a prompt build-out of internet infrastructure that will bring access to even the most remote parts of the country.

For all the positives, the first Aakash tablet didn’t impress many among its target audience. In addition to being criticized as being too big, too slow, and possessing too short a battery life, the main complaint seemed to have been with its build quality: it was simply too fragile to operate well in the environment for which it was destined.

Aakash 2 not only solves the issues of speed and performance, but is also hardier by employing sturdier materials for both body and screen. Its ecosystem has also been substantially enlarged thanks to IIT Bombay’s Open Source Development Lab, which created a number of applications for the Aakash including a C++ compiler, a 3D modeler, some assessment tools and even apps that allow for easier collaboration between users.

The Subrao Nilekani Chair Professor at IIT Bombay, Dr. Deepak B. Phatak, heads the project at IIT Bombay with the support of C-DAC.  Professor Phatak stated “I’m not only confident, but sure that Aakash 2.0 is here to stay.” In the first phase, DataWind is to supply 100,000 units of Aakash 2 to IIT Bombay, which intends to distribute them to Engineering University and College students. NME-ICT Director, N.K.Sinha said, “We envision all 220 million students across India to be enabled by low cost Aakash devices in the coming years.”

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