The teachers are confident that that learning outcomes are better as well...
Wait, the opinion of these people:
In maths and science, teachers often can't answer and don't understand the questions they have to set their pupils.
So, they have incompetent teachers and they think replacing textbooks with tablets is going to fix that.
Nope. This school isn't one of those. The teachers here are good, and underpaid. They already get above average results from the school at matric and have a relatively low dropout rate. The question is, can what they do here help those other schools? Again, it comes down to costs - textbooks cost a fortune, if you can reduce the price of books to a tenth of what they are currently in the schools that are fully state funded (where parents don't have to buy books), that's a lot more money in the system for teacher training.
The one thing that the school insists on, however, is that each lesson starts with a five minute test completed on the tablet screen which is based on the last lesson.
Back in my day, we had a quiz every class and we got the results the next class. Then the teacher would go over any material that the class didn't learn - or we would go over the answers in class and another student graded. This was all uphill - both ways - in the snow! And the only "tablets" we had were our Flintstones vitamins!
It became a competition and most of our grades went up.
This was all paper and pencil - you know the shit brown recycled paper that we used to get in public schools.
I tell ya, technology is not a panacea for education - although, it sure helps the bottom line for the tech manufacturers.
Yep, and when my dad was at school he wrote with a piece of chalk on a piece of slate. Things change, y'know.
