If you share my positive views of innovation and change, then there is a high chance that you consider living in this time period of endless technological advancement an absolute privilege.
My mother was gifted an iPad several days ago by a college friend of mine who is currently living at our house for the summer. Now I’ll be honest, although my project this summer deals entirely with tablets, I still don’t necessary find any specific “need” for this product (I do think there will be a need down the line and I could spawn a whole post about this but not now). Regardless, it’s an amazing piece of hardware with one of the best user experiences I have ever seen. I had just watched Toy Story 3 for the second time in theaters (absolutely amazing movie; Pixar really knew how to strike that childhood sentiment chord) so one of the first applications I downloaded from the App Store was a Toy Story visual book. Thinking that the application would be a 2-D book similar to any digital book you’d read on an e-reader, I opened the application only to find a rich interactive visual experience. Each page of the book was wonderfully animated with pictures that panned in different directions as the narrator read the book aloud to you. Words would highlight yellow as the narrator read, so you could follow along, and you could even touch a page which would instantly turn the page into a black and white stencil that you could color in. Heck, there were even short movie clips and mini-games that you could watch and play in between reading.
My description might have been a little information overload but the point I am trying to make is that several years down the line, I can envision myself sitting in bed with my child reading this visual book and playing toy story minigames on a touchscreen device. Interaction with content is one of the main forms of engaging students and there will eventually be so many more educational uses for new technologies such as the iPad. I’m still going to make my kid read REAL books and I will still read tangible books to him/her but technology has come such a far way that we would never have envisioned ten years ago.
“Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.”