Tablet questions and thoughts
5Is there a decent tablet out there that is durable? I am thinking easy to charge, will last at least 9 hours of active use in a day. Could be long periods with no use. It does not need much for storage or speed. No need for online access and that would need blocked for security. Solid brand for support and fast replacement if needed.
I teach a class that has a pass/fail test at the end. The book I am required to use has a ton of outdated material. I am constantly having students cross out and fix the text or at least warning them that the real world is different. I do not have access to the test so I am required to teach the material in the book without knowing if the test has been updated. I want to suggest changing to a tablet. So, that is the background for the questions.
Thoughts that have crossed my mind so far…
If students are allowed to take the tablet out of the classroom, how much of a security risk? It is company info that the student gets a paper copy now. I am thinking tampering or if lost or stolen.
How distracting would it be and or learning curve? Is it easy to allow highlighting to a document? I don’t want to be stopping class to help a student mark information or have them try to handwrite everything.
How long would be reasonable to expect them to work before needing replaced?
TL:DR Are tablets a good tool for education or do they pose more problems?
- 9 comments, 26 replies
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@speediedelivery
Have you ever considered a chrome book? Some of our local schools use them.
https://edu.google.com/k-12-solutions/chromebooks/
@therealjrn It is a possibility. We are not a school so the cost is higher per unit and an annual fee of $50 per device if we use the programming support.
Our school district uses iPads & Chromebooks. Most parents choose the chromebook because the replacement cost is less and are more durable.
As far as the textbook, scan & save as a pdf in chapters. Release to students as needed. Be aware of copyright laws. At this point you will have readable pictures of each page. If you have a program to convert to text(OCR), do it.
Some of these programs are quite expensive.(I.E. A full version of Adobe Acrobat, not just reader as most people have installed.) Such a program will allow you also to annotate text a needed.
@rtjhnstn The book is owned so no worries on the copyright. I think I have a digital version available. I will have to check for sure and see what format. I think we have Adobe.
This is why I decide to post here. I know there are a bunch of helpful people with a wide range of expertise. I know enough to be dangerous. I plan to create a list of questions for IT. Then I can create my case for the expense.
Unless you wrote and/or published this book, you do not own the copyright(however, if the copyright has expired, that is a different thing).
@rtjhnstn if the copyright has expired, this could explain the outdated text.
@rtjhnstn @djslack The book (maybe better termed manual) is written by employees. It is a rules and regulations along with a how to do your job. My thought is to use the electronic version instead of ordering piles of paper ones that nobody updates regularly. Current version has some sections updated and not all. The OCD in me wants to burn those things and get some decent presentations together. “Here is the training information for your new job, oh, umm, this part is wrong and that changed a few years ago.” Drives me crazy everytime.
I am not allowed to know the test questions to make sure I teach all the material. They don’t want people memorizing just the answers. If we could impliment the electronic version, all old outdated terms could be changed along with the test. I might need a little more prep time to see the changes but most information I get as it happens. Then my next class I have to explain to the students. Example of a change, this product was called old name and now is known as new and improved. If you see either one on the test, it means the same product and this is the definition.
@speediedelivery Now I get the whole picture.
Tablets are good for education in general, but for this use unless you could develop something more interactive than the book, you’re really only creating electronic paper. That’s not a compelling use case.
Perhaps an annual or periodic review/update of the materials (manual and test) combined with producing the books on demand would be a better workflow. I don’t know the size of the document but you could do anything from printing them in house and using a rollabind or 3 ring binder to having batches printed and bound or spiral bound. Print a year’s worth at once and then they should be reasonably up to date.
Even though I’m a tech guy, I don’t like doing things like electronic paper. While you can annotate a PDF file, it’s way clunkier than writing notes in the margin and using post it tabs or dog earing pages.
If you absolutely want to get away from print and your only use case for the devices is this manual, I’d look at loading your documents onto a basic Kindle. The potential for abuse or likelihood of walking away is low, cost is low and the battery life and reading conditions are better. You’ll just have to invest the time in marking up your document for great presentation on the device.
@djslack The notes and highlighting on paper vs electronic is the biggest drawback I have thought of so far.
I just had a class last week that pushed me over the edge. Most of the problem was attitudes but some of the critic was acurate.
I don’t know why the process now is so clunky. The current book is spring of 2014 but not all parts were updated at that time.
@speediedelivery I think you’re on the right track, the process is the problem. If you’re not allowed to see the test, that’s fine as long as they are generating the test from the materials that they give you to teach. If they’re not, they’re setting you up to fail.
The biggest cons of electronic devices is the cost of both entry and maintenance if you’re supplying the devices. Textbook publishers love ebooks because it cuts all their material costs but they still sell the book for a fair percentage of the price of the physical book while the student brings their own device. But if you have to provide the tablets, keep them up to date, repair them when broken, etc you’re bearing all that cost as well.
I’d guess that it’s going to cost you at least the price of 10 classes worth of printed materials to get into the e-device game. If the classes are annual, do we think the devices will last 10 years? (If the classes are monthly, your payoff is far quicker).
Also with printed materials, do the students get to keep their manuals for reference later in the job or are they collected because they contain proprietary information? If they get to keep the manuals, consider that they won’t get to keep the tablets.
Another point on Kindle, “highlighting” is easy. Notes, not so much, though. No idea about resetting them for the next class but that shouldn’t be too bad.
@djslack They keep the book but I doubt many touch it again. I would use for this class maybe 15 times a year. I can see other divisions using them for presentations at other times. Currently there are about 500 pages but we only use about half that in class. The first half has been turned into computerized courses which are also out of date. The first half is not tested but still required information.
depending on how many you want, samsung does a ton of customization at low cost. My nook is a samsung base and cost 50 dollars (it was a promo, but still)
There are a ton of low cost androids out there and battery life, as always, depends upon what you are using it for. wifi or wan …
And a ton of publishers, depending on the topic, already offer the pdf versions to places who use them for educational purposes, some chapter by chapter. I used to teach health care administration on a college level and we did no books, all ebooks and we only assigned the chapters we used.
Price wise that is what i would like at.
@Cerridwyn I am thinking a low cost basic tablet. Mostly just having a print version for students to follow along with the power point and classroom work. Little wifi or wan. Just enough to download the material and stay current.
@speediedelivery
https://tabletunderbudget.com/best-tablets-under-50-dollars/
If you are teaching a class where the students buy these, a manufacturer may agree to partner with your classroom. If these are to be the property of the school or training center, you prob want to talk to the IT department about what configurations can be suitably locked down.
When schools have proceeded forward in this without thinking thru security, sometimes the tablets or laptops were hacked or used for unsavory purposes, or they walked off.
If you are using an older textbook or source material under copyright, you can’t (I think) legally distribute corrected copies or copies in another (digital, for instance) format.
What you can do is distribute by print or digital means a list of proposed corrections. I suppose you can, anyway. Check copyright law. This is not necessarily simple.
You can contact the publisher to see if they offer the original or corrected text in an e-book format, as many here suggest.
@f00l I do plan to talk to IT. I am forming a list of questions. I want to have a plan basically together that has a chance of working. I may be out in left field and daydreaming.
If tablets are not the answer, I want to explore looseleaf binder or print to order.
@speediedelivery
Look at chromebooks. I know they are very popular in many classrooms.
You need to talk to @snapster about refurbished Chromebooks.
We have bought 8 of them here, all priced between $100 to $170. They all have battery life of 9 hours or more, unless you burn it faster with full screen video; they maintain themselves; they have keyboards. They also have Google Docs, which lets the owner of a document edit it and distribute it through the cloud (like Office 365, but without the subscription.)
There is the potential for a security problem because they all have USB ports and memory card slots, I don’t know if they can be disabled. But at least they don’t have many games that they can play.
@2many2no I would need at least 20 to start maybe up to 60. Depends on whether I can put a decent proposal together and get it approved. After some time to work out any issues and prove concept I don’t know how many more but quite a few. So far this is me searching for a better way.
I think tablets are a decent educational investment. I agree w/ @f00l that talking to your IT department should be near the top of your to do list. If the infrastructure is in place (mobile device management (MDM) service of some sort) and an IT individual who is willing to support the service and the devices, you can keep the tablets pretty secure and limit control of what your students would have access to (games, settings, sites, even the wallpaper). If you were to go w/ that option, you’d definitely want wifi on rather than off. That will help w/ tracking, securing, and pushing updates (apps, OS, files, etc) to the device as needed. In terms of usage, at the company I work for, we still have users using iPad mini 2s so it isn’t unreasonable to expect at least five years usage out of a device. We have older iPads (not the mini 1 but the big clunky ones) that still work however we don’t use them anymore because the MDM software we use doesn’t support their latest OS anymore. The most frequent issue we’ve had with them is physical damage so definitely invest in decent cases as well.
tl;dr - I think tablets are a good educational tool when a decent tech support team is in place. Learning curve isn’t very steep in my opinion.
@elimanningface The IT department maintains several different types of systems. Most of the support is over the phone. If something needs replaced, they send it and we make the switch.The security is set up in other places so it shouldn’t be a problem.
My thoughts are on if I allow the tablets out of the classroom, how difficult is it to hack cause havoc with the system. Unlikely problem but I am trying to think and plan ahead. If it is a big concern, maybe I should stick with paper to give students. For theft of the device, we can have a document signed to take replacement value out of the paycheck.
@speediedelivery to some degree, any piece of technology is hackable but in terms of difficulty for a tablet, from easiest to hardest: Windows, Android, iOS. With an MDM in place though, you can enable physical location tracking, force encryption, security locking (passcode is usually the default w/ mandate of changing it every 45 days), and network check-in. If the device thinks someone is trying to hack into it (i.e. remove the MDM as a device administrator, someone puts in the wrong passcode five or more times w/in a certain time frame), you can force wipe and restore to the default profile loaded onto the system as long as an initial profile was setup on the device. With that in place it wipes the data off the device and once the first network location check-in occurs, you know where the device is physically so it can be retrieved by your school or the police.
My expertise is in corporate adult learning. I have setup 3 major corporations by putting all their handbooks online so that paper books are no longer needed. Prior to that, they would receive daily updates to their book and the associates would need to extract old pages and insert new ones all the time. The problem was that some people were lazy and didn’t do their updates to the book or read the updates so they were performing their job based on old procedures.
The manuals were stored on company servers and employees would access them through their regular computers – all employees had use of a computer for their job.
Our classrooms, designed for new hires, were focused on showing the employees how to find information in the intranet and our tests included questions that are never taught and must be looked up to find the answer. I also wrote the program for them to take the tests online. These classes were 6 to 7 weeks long and had between 20 and 30 tests throughout their training. They needed to have a passing grade to be certified and get released from training to begin doing their job.
My first iteration of this online manual used interleaf as the document viewer. Was a long time ago before the World Wide Web but still used our internal intranet. Once Netscape became available, we converted the entire site to HTML. All subsequent projects and for all other companies continued to use HTML and we never used anything else since.
In the real world, people are allowed to look up information so the tests allowed for them to look up information (open book) but couldn’t ask anyone for help. They were timed so you needed to finish and pass in the allotted time.
@cengland0 I wish I could hire you!
My current class is 3 days and the students vary from brand new to very experienced. There are many other classes that could use the technology using electronic versions but I am not as familiar with them.
The not updating a looseleaf issue was one of my pros for an electronic version. I would keep up but would everyone else.
Not all employees have access to a computer. Now I am thinking beyond the classroom. I might be able to show a good case for a tablet at workstations. Then I would need to teach how to use them in class.
Very interesting to think about. I can dream about an ideal world, right?
@speediedelivery I teach online a lot. There are LMS’s out there that you can upload materials (word, pdf, excel, power point, etc.), videos, and etc. for students to see and/or download, create quizzes that are timed, etc. Of course then you need the internet to get to them (I’d suspect there’s a way to put this in the intranet too), each individual student has to log in… They can be used on phones, tablets… No idea what the cost is but you can buy only some of the features (where I work right now they did not buy the feature that locks a thread but still allows the student to read it which is a PITA as then students can post late and despite the time stamp they then argue with you).
If you buy a tablet for each workstation to keep people from screwing around you’d have to block the internet and prevent them from uploading anything or accessing a flash drive. And of course make the docs read only. Your other time consuming issue would be updating all the tablets as you make changes if you are parking the stuff on the actual tablet rather than on the intranet.
As a side note I HATE reading things online that I will be responsible for knowing. Research documents that it is faster to read paper and skim through paper. I find it easier to mark up paper in ways that work for me. Of course the search function helps you to find some stuff faster electronically but given a choice, if I need to learn something, I prefer paper.
Good luck figuring out how to solve your problems as it sounds like you have some dinosaurs in the office responsible for the content. In this day and age it is stupid they are set up in such an outdated way that you can’t quickly and easily update the manual and quiz. What a PITA.
@speediedelivery In today’s corporate environment, it’s hard to imagine people doing a job without access to a computer. I’d think even the simplest of careers like a stock boy, lawn maintenance, etc would require a computer. But it is what it is in your environment.
If you can get them access to some sort of computing device regardless if it is a tablet, chromebook, laptop, or desktop, I would still recommend putting the information on a server instead of on the individual devices. You can keep it updated this way and you wouldn’t have to worry about corporate secrets going out the door if one of the devices was stolen.
Having computing devices is a better management tool as well. Even if you forget about the training benefits, sending out daily tasks to employees and communicating to large amounts of employees is so much easier done with electronic devices versus daily meetings. You can hand out schedules, reminders, meeting agendas, presentations, plan for holidays or other company events like pot-lucks and people’s birthdays.
How can a business run today without everyone having access to a computer? How do they clock in and out or submit paperwork for their paycheck? Where do you keep the team’s schedule so you know you’re not letting everyone take the same vacation week? How do people enroll in the healthcare plans and select their options (single, married, married with children, etc)?
@cengland0 Supervisor has access and prints piles of paper. It creates a mess that most people do not look through. I cringe when I think of the problems that this causes. Some locations never check or update anything unless someone higher up yells.
I agree with server level for information. I can see them not getting updated otherwise.
@Kidsandliz We have LMS for some training classes. We find very little is retained and students just click past screens without reading them.
I like paper for many applications but I have seen too much paper that is hard to search and find answers. I realize there is no perfect solution since people learn differently.
@speediedelivery LMS is great for training delivery but that alone cannot verify they didn’t just click past screens without reading. That’s the whole purpose of a follow-up exam and most LMS tools have exam functionality.
As someone that is required to take about 20 training classes a year and it’s the same compliance crap every year, I hate those page flipping web based training packages. I sometimes wish I could just take the quiz to prove I know the information. Nothing changes in the “Sexual Harassment Prevention” training year after year so it gets very boring doing the same training for 20+ years. But it’s the company’s legal obligation to verify everyone has done the training and acknowledged it so it’s easy to fire or prosecute them if they violate the policy.
@cengland0 I have the same thoughts on LMS. Many of ours have questions throughout the course. Some are so cheesy that you look at the awful presentation instead of the content.
@speediedelivery Those questions that are displayed throughout the course serve two purposes. Prevents people from just clicking next over and over again and does a quick “paying attention” check.
Studies have shown people like interactive training so courses have been developed to require clicking something before you can continue. “Click on Mary to see what she has to say about Money Laundering” is an example.
I really hate it when a developer embeds a power point or a PDF to the LMS and considers that the completed course. I also dislike it when it requires you to listen to someone reading the words on the screen. I can usually read faster than someone can talk so it just prolongs the course even longer.
I’m sure it’s possible, but I’ve never seen it done, where the interim questions are logged and then you get a final grade. That takes more programming knowledge than a typical curriculum developer has (even when using programs like Lectora) so they use additional assessment tools that give you a quiz at the end of the course. Those are then logged and can be used to provide certification or, at a minimum, a course completion record.
@speediedelivery Yeah I know that phenomena of clicking past… One place I used to work we’d have the same 60 min training we’d have to do yearly. Sprinkled in there were questions you’d have to answer to advance. We’d mostly run it in the background while doing something else, noticing when it would stall to click the answer and then it’d move on.
@cengland0 I go looking for the transcript, read that, and finish faster that way, if it lets me. Like you I wish they’d start with a pretest. If you aced it you are done.
If the bucks are available these are pretty indestructible ( https://www.xploretech.com/xplore/ ). They are used a great deal in hospitals for patient hnipp admin. They are not cheap. You can find used motion touch screen tablets on ebay, they are also ruggedized. xplore bought motion a few years ago.
@cranky1950 Somebody higher than me will make the purchasing decisions (and everything else for that matter). I am going to create a estimated cost and benefit to show the need. I think durability is worth the extra expense. Extending the life because it doesn’t smash the first time it falls is worth something.
I was eyeing the cases aimed at preschoolers. Maybe I should find out if anyone has any of those neoprene cases left.