The recent WIRED article on the use of the iPhone/Touch at Abilene University was an interesting read:

How the iPhone Could Reboot Education | Gadget Lab | Wired.com. (image from same URL)

As someone who is looking at rolling out 1000 laptops to faculty and students in the coming year I am always looking out for any possible options or alternatives in order to have a successful 1:1 Learning Initiative (because it has to be about the learning… NOT the device).

The article does a good job at exploring and explaining how the use of these devices is improving the social interaction within the classrooms, giving student that ability to use the devises as individual response systems, providing them with a device capable of access any bit of data/information on the web.

All of these things are great and compelling, but….

As with anything less than a laptop you end up missing things and it’s these things that need to be considered.

1. Multimedia projects in the classroom – How will these be handled with an iPhone/Touch or even any of the sub-notebooks that are all the rage right now. Sure they cheap when compared to a full-size notebook, but try saving any large project to them or even making something like that on an iPhone/Touch.

2. Note-taking – I don’t know about you, but while I pretty good on the small keyboard, nothing beats a full size keyboard.  And I am not even going to start on editing. Copy and paste is one thing, but I am someone who lives on spelling and grammar check (which is painfully obvious when I don’t use it here on this blog – “After the Deadline” plug-in for WordPress).

3. Syncing – You are always going to need something to sync these devices to.  If I’ve learned anything, its backup is key and these devices are no different.

While there is a lot more to point out pro and con for using these in education and it seems as if Abilene is making good headway I am curious to see what more they do with them and how other school use them as well.

Again… these are just my ramblings… chime in if you’d like or have something to share.