NO CHILD LEFT UNTABLETED

A few months ago, I would have been 100% opposed to the idea of tablets in school. Because of this class, however, I am now aware of the learning power that personalization brings to the table. This factor alone gives the "tablet program" some merit in my eyes. Not to mention that I will instantly gravitate towards any system that manages to break away from its more "standardized" or "generally accepted" counterparts. With this, I do remain skeptical of some aspects of implementing tablets in school. My chief concern is the monetary cost, and whether or not that cost is worth it. Especially considering that, as you (Dr. Preston) have proven, internet access is the only true required basis for setting up a highly interactive, highly personalized learning system. Personally, I CANNOT be okay with hundreds of thousands of dollars from an already tight school budget being unnecessarily spent. Furthermore, as addressed in the article, there is a margin for failure. If teachers do not embrace the change and properly tailor their lesson plans to this new system, it will be redundant at best, and a complete and total disaster at worst. All of this is of little relevance to the true matter at hand anyways. Let's face it, truly helping individual students learn (learn, as in accumulate useful knowledge) isn't the primary concern for most school officials. All they really want is to increase our stats to make the U.S. look more imposing. They're after superficial test-score "learning", not learning in the true sense of the word. In either case, a radical reinvention of the schooling system would be required to yield any real results. Shoving the same bland, generic busy work down student's throats year after year and expecting positive results is nothing short of lunacy. Not only do these current methods create a complete lack of interest/motivation amongst students, but they also create legitimate problems for those students who do apply themselves, but simply do not operate well under the tyranny of whatever "learning" system they're stuck with. Not to sound like a fanboy, but open source learning is BY FAR the most viable solution I have encountered in my limited experience. I predict that the results will speak for themselves, and that such teaching philosophies will spread like wildfire and blitzkrieg the school system.

All in all, I believe that tablets in school could work but aren't necessary/worthwhile, and, more importantly, that the focus should be on the bigger picture of learning in general versus gimmicky "quick-fixes".