The future of written media is definitely going to be quite different than the written media I was used to while growing up. When I was in elementary school, written media consisted more or less solely of physical copies of books, workbooks, and maybe some magazines from time to time. My mother works at an elementary school, and today, kids there do at least half of their work on iPads. Each child is given their own iPad and taught how to use several programs on it They use iPads for everything from storing and reading books to doing math exercises.
I think it’s awesome that children are becoming familiar with new technological forms, but I also think this will have some drawbacks. On the plus side, iPads save the schools from having to buy and transport books. In the long run, they’re probably saving money. Having everything on one little iPad that can easily be taken from place to place is more convenient for everybody involved. However, I believe that swapping reading from books and writing with pen and paper to reading from a screen and writing on a screen with a stylus will make a difference in the long run.
Schools have been cutting the amount of time given to teaching cursive and penmanship for several years now, but the introduction of such heavy iPad use to the curriculum means that students will be practicing writing less and less. In addition, growing up in a world so filled with jargon and abbreviation everywhere hasn’t exactly led today’s students to believe that things like writing cursive and addressing formal letters are important. They have no incentive to want to learn these things.
Things are changing whether we like it or not, and it’s undeniably a good thing that the younger generations will be prepared to take on these new digital technologies. However, I think it’s also important to look at what is being sacrificed in this trade-off.
(Apple iPad, Wikipedia)
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