Recently I was sitting around with a few of my friends, and threw out the question to them, “what do you think about iPads being used in education?” My friends are not teachers, however without any background in teaching, they all had a lot of interesting things to say. One of my friends told me that in speech school she has learned a lot about how iPads are being used in special education, such as for voice boards.
There is an interesting app for iPads called Proloquo2Go. According to the website, Proloquo2Go is an ACC (augmentative and alternative communication) solution for people who have difficulty speaking or cannot speak at all. It is a form of text-to-speech and educators as well as speech therapists find it a cheaper version of the more expensive technologies. There has been a lot of research on how children with autism have excelled with iPads for many reasons, one example being the ability to drag items on the screen instead of the difficulty of using a mouse.
http://www.districtadministration.com/article/ipad%E2%80%94breaking-new-ground-special-education
Another one of my friends felt that iPads could be useful in a classroom because they “gamify” everything. Students always want an incentive, such as being allowed to play a game, but now just being able to use the iPad for a lesson can be the incentive. It adds a “game” aspect to all of the work because it is on an iPad.
A third friend thought that schools could potentially save a lot of money by giving out iPads to all of their students. The cost of textbook, and replacing the textbooks for the whole school whenever a new addition is put out, is exorbitant. Schools could potentially save a lot of money by doing away with textbooks and instead buying the books online having the ability to them on all of the iPads.
