We can all agree that being tech-savvy in this life makes things a lot easier, especially for college students who always need to research something.
Some feel that maybe integrating tablets with elementary school students is a good investment.
But how can we afford a $520,000 investment when the educational board has cut 12 programs this past year? The answer is yes, tablets are a waste of money.
The ’90s kids were taught the same teaching methods in elementary school. We used colored bears to count, letter outlines to master cursive and rulers to teach us measurements.
What seemed to us as child’s play during the counting of bears and such was way more than that. We were creating skills, or what one psychologist would call “making kids smarter.”
Dr. William R. Klemm, D.V.M in Memory Medic states that today’s students in primary school are no longer required to know cursive, but instead “keyboarding” has become a part of common core standards. Some schools have even dropped all teaching of simple cursive; it is now referred to as “an ancient skill.”
Some are amazed by the work tablets allow students to do, taking away penmanship and replacing it with double-taps and typing in the margins. Things like this will lead us to regress in our interpersonal skills. We will be more at ease communicating via email or comments rather than face-to-face in reality.
Such things like real-time communicating should be left alone. Writing paper letters have almost become a thing of the past, should we not stop there?
Let’s talk money; where is it all coming from?
Phillip Elliott of the Huffington Post says this investment is far beyond the schools needs. Each tablet costs roughly $199, in a regular school district like the ones on the East Coast, which have 200 teachers using this tablet system which cost them more than they can handle.
This industry we are buying into is about $35 billion dollars and the fall semester has not even started.
Los Angeles Times reporter Howard Blume says that paying for the tablets is where the schools are having issues.
If L.A. Unified School District spent $400 million for the tablets then price readjustments would be considered. That means that the school would spend $520,000 just on iPads.
Visual learning is what we all start off with; most things that are taught in grade school are introduced as visual or tangible. You could argue and say that tablets are a great step in education; they are visual and match up with other styles of learning, just like with anything it can be argued back.
Kinesthetic learning- this learning style requires the student to participate in physical activity when learning a new task instead of listening or watching the activity being done.
According to Terry Farwell, with FamilyEducation.com on visual, auditory, kinesthetic learners, those of us who are kinesthetic only make up about 5 percent of the population. Textbooks would be kicked out and lessons would be replaced with a 9-by-7 inch screen.
Reading, math- each day in elementary school we covered each subject.
If tablets become a main source for learning, how are we supposed to generate all subjects to be compliant with the new tablet system?
Educators of all ages will lose their jobs to electronic computers and teachers will be gone because tech-support will solve and create trouble-shooting for the students and staff.
Teachers and parents will have a different way of communicating; parents may be unable to help the students with assignments. Are they going to fund workshops for the parents to become savvy with the tablets or will that have to come out of pocket?
In order to keep the cycle of learning and save our future generations from isolation of interpersonal communication, we must give our students the access to tangible items, like textbooks, pens and paper.
If we push tablets into the elementary schools we are risking more than just the students learning opportunities.
We are changing lives, losing jobs and causing debt. Keep tablets out of primary schools like we have for years.

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