What will the tablet of the future look like?

Dominic Norrish

Dominic Norrish is a former history teacher, school leader and educational-technology consultant, and is currently the Group Director of Technology at United Learning, a national group of over 50 maintained and independent schools. Prior to this he worked for an academy trust where he implemented a 1-to-1 strategy and is now involved in similar projects in several United Learning schools, utilising iPads, Chromebooks and Android tablets. He has written a book on the subject in collaboration with other UK expert practitioners called ‘Educate 1-to-1’.

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Edtech is progressing at an incredible speed, and it can often be difficult to see what’s ahead. Dominic Norrish, group director of technology at United Learning takes a look at what we can expect for tablets and 1:1 learning.

Innovate My School asked me to write about ‘the classroom of 2017’ a while back, and I responded with a thousand words of wild speculation and unfounded assertion. It was a lot of fun to write, and when 2017 finally rolls around, what a laugh we shall all have (from astride our hover-fridges) at some of the stupider sentences. And apparently their appetite for the barely-credible knows no bounds – this time they want to know what the future holds for tablets in education…

Early lessons learned?

The ubiquity of the iPad in our schools has meant that the very word has become the accepted term for ‘tablet’ – it’s the Hoover and Tannoy of its day. I don’t think this will change quickly, but it will change (more on that later).

Schools are making use of (mostly) 10” varieties of the product, with the 16GB wifi iPad2 probably the modal choice historically due to the fire-sale price Apple gave it in the 12 months before they finally stopped making it. Here’s the first prediction; schools will stop buying the bottom spec device and will be a bit savvier about their funding options:

  • The iPad2 is effectively obsolete now – it will run the newly-released iOS8, but about as well as Eric Pickles runs the 110m hurdles. Lesson: if something is being pensioned off, it’s probably because it’s no longer fit for purpose.
  • 16GB really isn’t enough storage, either in a 1:1 model or (worse) a shared one. The size of the OS alone is deliberately pushing users up the spec sheet, and a Year 1 saving of £70 isn’t really a saving if you have to spend another £300 further down the line. Cloud storage is starting to mitigate this slightly, but at the end of the day, pupils want to keep their photos, videos, music and work on their device. Yes, even their work!
  • iPad2 has shown that these things have an effective life of three years, no longer. Does it therefore make sense to buy and own them if they can be leased over the same period for less than their full price? Not a lot.

Conclusion? The future of tablets in education is that mid-spec devices, owned by someone else but operated by the school, will become the norm.

Form factor flip-flop?

The iPad Mini (and other 7” tablets) have made some headway in the classroom for a couple of good reasons – price and portability. The Mini is a popular choice for the early years because it is so light, and as a device for consuming and interacting with content (reading, watching, playing), it’s brilliant. What many schools have found, however, is that the reduced screen estate forces too many compromises when it comes to creating work (long story short: it’s a bit fiddly), and it’s the ability to be creative that gets teachers and pupils excited. This form factor will continue to play a role for the foreseeable future though, mostly because it makes a 1:1 approach in deprived areas achievable in financial terms; it’s a little smaller but a hell of a lot cheaper.

You will not have missed, though, the emergence of a new screen size option, with Microsoft, Samsung and (it is rumoured) Apple producing tablets with huge 12” screens. These devices are squarely aimed at the business customer who wants to be the kind of thrusting young go-getter that uses a tablet but also needs to have their spreadsheet open alongside their word processor. Obviously, these things weigh proportionately more than their smaller siblings and are bulkier. I’ll inch out onto a limb here and venture a second prediction: the iPad Plus (or whatever they end up calling it) won’t become a regular sight in schools.

Larger screens and business-level performance means premier pricing, for one, but the main reason is the delicate balance the standard iPad strikes between being big enough to be useful and light enough for the average pupil to agree to lug it around all day. This is a very serious point – I’ve yet to come across a 1:1 programme in a state school which used laptops (or any similarly heavy device) which didn’t have serious issues with children just not being willing to bring the things in. One of the reasons the iPad has had such penetration in education is because of its perfect blend of screen size, weight, battery life and performance.

The Microsoft Surface 3, joy that it unquestionably is, won’t feature heavily either and for the same reasons. It’s also compounded by a price point that would make owners of Premier League football teams pause and take a second look at what Dell are offering. While we’re in this particular corner of the John Lewis Electrical Department, however, let’s consider whether keyboard covers are going to be an important future feature of tablet-enabled learning.
Microsoft have made a big deal of their type-cover (which doubles as keyboard and screen protector when closed) and some people must be convinced, as they’re paying £100+ for it.

My third prediction is this: children will continue to cope with on-screen keyboards and we won’t see the return of physical ones. This isn’t just because their schools are too cheap to provide an alternative, but because their typing speed isn’t actually damaged by this. It turns out that it’s what you’re used to that matters – I’m typing this on a charmingly recherché 105-key black Dell keyboard, because that’s what I grew up with and my muscle memory ensures I can touch-type with it. But that’s just not the case for the vast majority of children. Don’t believe me? Then take a look at the results of some research carried out by a colleague of mine at his school.

Single Platform or Single Browser?

The most dramatic change I predict we will see is one of student choice over device. At the moment, to stand any chance of producing sustainable change, 1:1 schools generally impose a single-platform decision on their users, with everyone getting the same OS and usually the same device. This ensures that teachers know how things work for every student, and that they can rely on them all having access to the same tools. There are also benefits in terms of management, of devices and behaviour with them. The downside is that making single-platform a reality means that schools have to pay for all this kit, although some have become very adept at recovering a great deal of the cost from students’ parents.

In the near future, this will cease to be the only route to success, as schools will standardise at the level of the browser and let pupils use any tablet (or other device) that they already own. In this model, everything that the school needs its learners to access will be delivered through the browser rather than being an app installed locally on the device.
Chrome isn’t quite there yet, but you can bet that it will get there first – the announcement at the start of October of the availability of Photoshop for Chromebook being a very important milestone along the route, and you all know about Google Apps for Education/Classroom already, right?

The benefits are easy to imagine – leveraging student-owned kit that’s always on them and always charged, the removal of any need to provide or manage the hardware, freeing up school resources to focus on bridging the digital divide. But there are an equal amount of challenges, such as the need for school internet connections of currently unimaginable bandwidth and a compromise solution to device management for behaviour and e-safety reasons that both parties (owner and institution) can accept.

So there you have it, another almost certainly imperfect vision of the future, unencumbered by facts of any kind, in around 1300 words. Hopefully next time they’ll ask me to write about something that actually exists.

How does this sound to you? Let us know in the comments.

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