Rising generation of iKids slipping iPads in school backpacks and heading on home

Bruce Newman:

Before, during and even between classes at Hillbrook School this fall, seventh-graders have been spotted on the Los Gatos campus, sometimes burbling Spanish or Mandarin phrases into the glowing screen in their hands, other times staring into it like a looking glass.

iPads -- the Apple of almost every adolescent's eye -- are being provided to students at several Bay Area public and private schools this year, including Hillbrook, which claims to be the only K-8 school in America using tablet computers in class and sending them home. This has led to a lot of 12-year-olds swanning around the wooded hillside campus, talking to their iPads.

Summoning up a virtual keyboard recently, Sophie Greene quickly typed a note to herself in iCal, a calendar program, then played back an audio file in which she was speaking Spanish. "We record a conversation, e-mail it to our teacher, Señorita Kelly," she explained, "then she critiques the lesson in Spanish and sends that back to us."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 22, 2010 3:03 AM
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