By Kelly HodgkinsVancouver Washington City Council adopted iPads in January in an experiment to test out the effectiveness of a paperless workflow. After two months, the touchscreen tablet is an early success as the Council has seen a 40 percent reduction in number of printed pages it uses for meetings. It does more than just save paper, too.In a statement, the City Council describes how the iPad lets council members easily view documents stored on a local server. They can also visit websites mentioned during a meeting. Despite the high up-front cost of the iPad, it's saving the city money, too. Vancouver was paying US$71 per month for each BlackBerry and is now paying $43 monthly for the iPad. Between printing and data costs, the city could save up to $500 per year by switching to the iPad.
Data is in demand on college campuses, and it’s putting a strain on shared school networks. The iPad is partly to blame, according to University of Missouri-Columbia IT director Terry Robb (via The St. Louis Post-Dispatch), but it’s mostly acting as a gateway drug for the real culprit: online video.
The report from the Dispatch describes slow or severed connections that students at the University of Missouri-Columbia experienced when coming back to classes this September. At that U.S. school, the number of wireless devices active on the network at any one time maxed out at 900 last year. Already in 2011, it’s hit 8,000 devices actively using the school’s connection at once.
The iPad is the biggest change in terms of the mobile connected-device landscape in recent years. Apple’s tablet still owns the market for that category of device, and it’s an optimal device for consuming streaming video, since it features a much larger display than smartphones, but is much simpler to turn on and hold than a cumbersome notebook computer. The iPad alone was already equal to Android’s share of online mobile video consumption back in May, and Apple’s other devices occupy a huge slice of the pie, too.
While Apple’s iPad may have multiplied the problem, iPhones and other smartphones have already significantly affected demand for Wi-Fi on college campuses. Students now expect strong on-campus Wi-Fi as one of the perks associated with going to school–it factors into their feeling of satisfaction over what they pay in tuition. Washington University’s Andrew Orstadt, who is the associated vice chancellor for information services and technology, says the demand for high capacity should be met within reason, no matter what students end up using the bandwidth for. He told the Dispatch that since students live on campus, schools should “make sure they are doing what they want to do” with their recreation time, too.
The challenge now is for schools to be able to meet the growing demand for reliable Wi-Fi with a growing population of connected devices with increasing technical specs. Next-gen devices will be able to stream higher-quality video to and from the web, and do more than one task at a time without as much of a cost on battery life or processor power. Students two years from now could likely be streaming one full HD video to their tablets while downloading another two equally high-bandwidth files in the background.
Apple’s devices may only be fuel for the fire that is demand for college Wi-Fi Internet access, but the iPad’s success and the rise in connected-device usage seen by the University of Missouri-Columbia in the wake of its introduction is a good sign that as far as fuel goes, it’s the rocket-powering kind.
By Steven SandeBooks Author was announced last month to a lot of hoopla, but left many ebook publishers wanting a textbook authoring tool that would streamline the entire book publishing process and have more features. Today, Inkling announced their new online ebook publishing tool -- Inkling Habitat -- that is designed to speed the workflow for textbook publishers.Inkling Habitat is currently on a limited distribution, but users who are accepted into the Early Adopter Program have a chance to try out the robust features of the tool. Habitat is a cloud-based tool, so authors, editors, and artists can collaborate on textbooks simultaneously from anywhere. There's infinite rollback, so every addition, change, or edit is saved. When it's time to publish the ebook, Habitat creates content for every target platform and customizes the layout for every device.Inkling notes that they're trying to treat content more like software, "shifting the industry from a page-based model to a software-based model that benefits from decades of computer science advances." There's automated error reporting built into Habitat, so any time content is published it is run through a gauntlet of tests to make sure that everything works properly.Inkling is no newcomer to the electronic publishing world, having published over a hundred electronic textbooks to date. The company was founded by Matt MacInnis, a former Apple educational marketing manager.There's no word on what the cost of Inkling Habitat will be, or if the company will grab a portion of the proceeds from each published textbook. From the company's website, it's not even clear if Habitat creates standalone apps or traditional ebook files that are compatible with existing bookstores. In the meantime, if you're a publisher, writer, or educator, you might want to sign up for Inkling's Early Adopter Program.
European readers who visit with their doctors have a good chance of seeing an iPad in use during their appointments. According to a new survey of physicians, 26 percent of 1,207 practicing physicians in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the UK said that they own an iPad and spend 27 percent of their work online time using the iPad.Manhattan Research carried out the Taking the Pulse Europe study in the fourth quarter of 2011, and found that 40 percent of doctors surveyed plan to purchase an iPad within the next six months. The adoption rate of iPad usage is the same for primary care physicians (general practitioners and doctors of internal and family medicine) and specialists (ophthalmologists, rheumatologists, etc...).What are all of these doctors using their iPads for? The survey showed that they're using them primarily to browse medical articles on the web, watch videos, and look up information. The European doctors are also showing a lot of interest in "using iPads to manage and educate their patients."An article in pharmaceutical blog PMLiVe noted that some large companies like AstraZeneca, Jannsen, and Vertex have created iPad-specific apps targeting healthcare professionals, but that Pfizer had to pull an iPhone app last autumn when errors were found in its Rheumatology Calculator. The situation brought up the question of whether or not pharmaceutical apps should be considered as medical devices, which could slow down the development of new and useful apps in the future.
By Mike SchrammApple is pushing for iPad use in education, and several schools have taken up the charge. Now, a study of kindergarteners in Auburn, Maine has shown that students who use iPads score better in every literacy test than those who don't. The study focused on 266 children whose instruction featured the iPad. Those who used the device scored higher on the literacy tests, were more interested in learning and excited to be there.There are caveats to these results. Many schools don't have the budget to distribute iPads to all of their students (Apple has education programs, however, and third-party programs are getting better all the time). Additionally, the students' excitement could be attributed to access to an iPad. When I was a kid, our school boasted brand new Apple IIes, which fostered a lifetime's worth of interest in computers, technology, and the written word for me. But that's likely because they played Oregon Trail and Prince of Persia.Still, the iPad can be a powerful tool for learning and comprehension, especially for literacy. Interactivity can make for a very engaging experience, definitely at a young age. It's reat to see these kindergarteners doing better in school no matter what the reason, and hopefully we'll hear more stories of Apple's technology benefiting students.
While we were in San Francisco for Macworld | iWorld, I noticed that the wait staff at Mel's Drive-in were using iPads to take orders. I hadn't seen that before, but apparently the folks at Mel's have used iPads for a while. Now an even bigger restaurant chain, Buffalo Wild Wings, is planning to deploy iPads to its nationwide locations, should an initial pilot programs fare well.Instead of issuing iPads to servers like Mel's has done, Buffalo Wild Wings will embed iPads in tables around the bar. Customers can use them to browse select apps like Facebook and Safari, or place an order. Those behind the initiative hope customers will eventually interact with ads, play in-store games, and find a new source of in-restaurant entertainment in the iPads.The company is reportedly going with Hubworks for installation, a company that makes rugged iPad cases meant for public use. The restaurant first implemented the system in Toronto, and is now testing the setup in Minneapolis. Perhaps you'll see one at your location soon.
By Steven SandeAlthough they haven't exactly explained how school systems or parents are going to pay for iPads or other tablets for every student, the US government is pushing a new initiative to move from standard printed textbooks to digital textbooks within the next five years. While it's good to see that a focus on digital textbooks is finally at hand, it's going to take more than a press release, five years and a "playbook" to make the transition happen.According to an AP news release, "Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski on Wednesday challenged schools and companies to get digital textbooks in students' hands within five years."In an interview, Duncan asked, "Do we want kids walking around with 50-pound backpacks and every book in those backpacks costing 50, 60, 70 dollars and many of them being out of date? Or, do we want students walking around with a mobile device that has much more content than was even imaginable a couple years ago and can be constantly updated? I think it's a very simple choice."To school systems that are battling drastically decreased budgets and trying to replace or repair crumbling infrastructure, it might not be such a "simple choice." Likewise, there doesn't appear to have been much (if any) thought on how parents or schools systems are going to replace equipment that is broken or lost by students, or how to pay for digital devices to be refreshed every three to five years.Wednesday's announcement comes just two weeks after Apple's education event and the launch of iBooks textbooks. The company is perfectly placed, both in terms of the iPad hardware platform and iBooks Author creation tool, to benefit from a move to interactive and easily updated electronic textbooks.The government released a 67-page "playbook" promoting the use of digital textbooks and offering guidance to school systems who want to make the move. At the current time, about US$8 billion is spent each year on traditional textbooks for K-12 school kids. With an Apple educational discount, that could pay for more than 17 million iPads each year. If Apple, as rumored, brings down the price of entry into the iPad market by selling the iPad 2 alongside a future model, more devices could make it into the hands of students across the nation.On the other hand, switching to digital textbooks means more than just acquiring hardware and buying textbook apps. In many cases, the curriculum provided by a school district and even the methods used by instructors to teach students must change as well. The educational five-year plan is a noble goal; it's just not very realistic.
A total of about 1,400 iPads are heading to schools in Madison, Wisconsin during 2012, indirectly paid for by none other than Microsoft.The Wisconsin State Journal reports that the school district is acquiring iPads as they are less expensive, easier to use, and more portable than the usual computers purchased for educational use. Bill Smojver, the director of technical services for the Madison School District, referred to Apple's recent educational announcements about iBooks Author, iBooks 2, and digital textbooks as a "significant development."Deputy superintendent of schools Sue Abplanalp said that Madison administrators found that students using tablets were more engaged in the classroom, as evidenced by a demonstration they witnessed in the Chicago Public Schools.The school district will get the iPads through a traditional Apple educational discount for about $479 each, with the final tab being paid for with part of a nearly US$80 million settlement between Microsoft and the state of Wisconsin. That 2009 settlement was the end result of a lawsuit that alleged that Microsoft cheated consumers by overpricing its software for years.
