Rolling backpacks are lame.  There, I said it.  No one wants to be that kid rolling into class, crushing people’s toes and running into desks with their weapon on wheels.  On the flip side of that coin, no one wants to be the kid in the back brace either.  But textbooks are heavy, and there’s really no way around them, or is there?  Trinity College in Melbourne Australia recently conducted a study to find out – they dispatched iPads to a small group of students and teachers at the start of term, and monitored how the new technology affected the classroom.  The results of their study – called the Step Forward Pilot Project – were recently published online and outline a few of the pros and cons of iPads as a learning tool.  Trinity College isn’t alone – schools around the world are incorporating iPads into their daily routine and changing the way students of all ages access and learn new information.

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A friend recently went to a business meeting. He prepared by pulling his laptop out of his bag. All of the clients responded by taking their iPads out of their briefcases.

These were not gadget freaks or latte-quaffing Hoxton-based web designers, as some imagine iPad users to be. They were a large group of senior civil servants and bankers, in a country well beyond Europe and the US. To them, the iPad wasn't a status symbol; it was a device they had chosen to use because it enhanced their ability to do their job.

A year on from its arrival, Apple's iPad tablet computer still divides opinion. A large group of people insist it is an "overpriced toy" with limited functionality -- no keyboard, doesn't run Microsoft Office, can't play Flash video, can't expand its storage. But a growing number believe that, on the contrary, the iPad represents a new frontier in computing. And they simply don't care what the first group thinks. They're getting on with using their machines.

We have lived with the PC paradigm for around 30 years now, since IBM introduced its first personal computers and pushed them into businesses in the early 80s. Until the launch of the iPad last year the only comparable change in the market had been the laptop, which led to the emergence of an army of travelling salespeople whose most urgent need was always to find a power point where they could charge their machine's fading battery.

The iPad seems to be different -- a third stage of computing. Horace Dediu, a former analyst with the mobile phone company Nokia who now runs his own consultancy, Asymco, argues that "the definition of a new generation of computing is that the new products rely on new input and output methods, and allow a new population of non-expert users to use the product more cheaply and simply".

That certainly sounds like the iPad. It shows that it is possible to have something that does all the computing functions you want with a big screen that also has long battery life and weighs almost nothing, certainly compared to a laptop. It is portable and durable, and the touch screen adds another dimension.

Though it has the most prominent tablet in the market, Apple isn't the only player. Dozens of companies are using Google's free Android software to power tablets, and Google is helping them along with a custom version called "Honeycomb", designed for iPad-sized Android tablets. An estimated 17 million tablets -- from Apple and others -- were sold in 2010, and that number is likely to keep growing.

But is it really changing the way we work? We interviewed a range of people in different professions to see whether the iPad is all hype -- or whether in future we will all keep taking the tablets.

Read what these various professionals have to say here 

After traveling a long, tortuous road, the much-anticipated e-book revolution has finally arrived. Any doubt that the future of the book is digital has been laid to rest. Kindles and iPads sold like hotcakes during the 2010 Christmas shopping season, and Forrester Research expects the recipients of those devices to spend more than $1 billion on e-books in 2011, and $3 billion by the middle of the decade.

So where's the revolution in the e-textbook market? According to theNational Association of College Stores (NACS), digital books currently account for less than 3 percent of textbook sales. NACS expects that percentage to reach 10 to 15 percent by 2012, while researchers at Simba Information predict that e-textbooks will account for more than 11 percent of textbook sales by 2013. But even this relatively swift growth rate represents a trickle compared to the flood of e-book sales on Amazon.

"To state the obvious, academic publishing is slower to change," says Vineet Madan, vice president of strategy and business development inMcGraw-Hill's Higher Education group. "But so is the market we serve. There's a lot at stake for students. The money they spend on a textbook is an expense related to an outcome -- a grade, which gets you to a credit, which gets you to a degree, which, hopefully, gets you to the job you're looking for. As long as the online experience doesn't offer significant value over the print experience, I believe the preference in consumption will still be toward print."

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Dublin Schools Using iPad As Educational Tool

DUBLIN, Ohio — A Dublin elementary school is turning to technology to help some children with development disabilities.

Only a few weeks into the school year, and 8-year-old Johann Bast was making short work of his alphabet, with the help of an Apple iPad, 10TV's Andy Hirsch reported on Tuesday.

Bast, a special needs student at Deer Run Elementary, is learning words and intervention specialist Jamie Leinberger credits the iPad for the progress.

Applications help with everything from counting to learning letters and word association. Leinberger said she is "wowed" by the impact the technology is having.

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450 U students hit iPad lottery, to learn

All freshmen in the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development will get free iPads soon. The handout will also allow for research on whether the devices help students learn.

Forget notebooks.

Laptops? Passé.

Soon, about 450 University of Minnesota students will pull iPads out of their backpacks.

The U's College of Education and Human Development will give all its freshmen free iPads this month, joining several colleges and universities across the country in bestowing the Apple devices on their students.

But the University of Minnesota's iPad pilot might be the largest ever done by a major research university.

Research will be a big part of the project. The college will study how the iPads change -- or fail to change -- how students learn and classes are taught. Those are topics its professors study anyway.

"We won't simply say, 'Here's an iPad,' and that's the end of it," said David Ernst, director of academic and information technology for the College of Education and Human Development, or CEHD. "It will be part of a coordinated, focused research agenda."

The college notified its first-year students late Tuesday night that they'd get the iPads -- plus a training session -- at the end of the month.

That will give students and faculty time to play with the technology before using it in earnest for their spring semester courses, said Jean Quam, the college's dean.

"We really hope the students and faculty will help us to figure out new ways to use this tool," she said.

Read the full article HERE