Comment Get them interested (Score 1) 349
The problem with modern public education is that from a young age any child going through school is disenfranchised from it by having to do things they already know, dont know, or having difficult social circumstances with classmates, etc.
Whatever it is, the problem is that 90% of kids dont want to be there. They dont care, they dont want to learn because they dont care to learn. That is the massive gaping wound in public education. It is also a factor of the factory like public schooling we have - in this "information" age, students should be learning what interests them from a young age. If you foster creative sparks and teach what the student wants to know, they will actively participate and things like ipads become accessories to learning to help promote it, not the other way around.
Real world example. At my high school we had macbooks when I graduated. Standardized test scores dropped by 30%, 60% of students grades dropped, 20% stayed the same, 20% went up. The 60% whose grades declined were using the laptops to ignore the classroom and not engage in something they didnt want to do. The 20% whose grades went up used the laptops in class to accelerate learning. The other 20% did some of both. The net result is that a huge fraction of a student body doesnt want to be there, and has no interest in learning, and you try to force feed them material that wont stick or have lasting impact but then try it again the next day, the next year, and for 13 years straight. It is a broken system by that mark.
You need to get every young person interested in education, get them something that they would want to learn, and move away from the factory farm public school system we have today. Technology allows more specialized per child education, and it really needs to happen. The technology has encroached everywhere else in their lives except in schools in any meaningful way - just throwing ipads at a disenfranchised populace only gives them more tools to ignore the class.