• Home
• /
• Education

Textbooks or iPad: What would you like to use in the classroom?

Students from Dubai schools share their views on the conventional way of learning against the smarter one.

Rudransh Rajput

The Indian High School, Dubai

Technology is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts on one hand, and it stabs you in the back on the other. According to me, iPad or e-book is a bane for the teaching-learning process. We can’t deny the fact that iPads in the classrooms make the students to pay attention to apps, emails, games and websites instead of listening to their teachers. Prolonged use of tablets or iPads contribute to eyestrain, headaches and blurred vision. Contrary to iPads, print textbooks can’t crash, freeze or get hacked.

Geetika Raj Devkishin

The Indian High School, Dubai

The Internet is so big, so powerful that for some people it is a complete substitute for life. I think that classrooms should have iPad as it has an unlimited package of information. iPad is one object and 100 books. It is easy to carry only one iPad rather than 10-12 textbooks. e-book allows students to annotate their book, search the whole book for a phrase and find an instant definition of any word.

Sonali Chawla

Gems Our Own English High School, Dubai

I feel though iPads are more thrilling, innovative and full of excitements and provide us with portable access to multiple books within the same device, and present deeper core
content and knowledge at our fingertips, I personally prefer and opt to read traditionally printed textbooks with more concentration, looking to our age-old culture, cost-cutting feature and most importantly protecting our health positively. To conclude, we may take advantage of iPads to phase out textbooks that are cumbersome but not to be too dependent on them.

Sama Amin

Gems Our Own English High School, Dubai

iPads have a major problem that you always have to charge the battery. Children in schools often say that their bags are heavy because of textbooks but recently our school has taken a step on this issue: we have to take textbooks to school when informed. If this rule is followed in all schools, the ‘heavy bag problems’ can be solved and I think textbooks are more reliable sources than iPads because we never know whether the information given by the Internet is correct or not.

Meghna Manoj Nair

Gems Our Own English High School, Dubai

May it be textbooks or iPads, the main motive behind teaching is to make sure that the child grasps as much information as possible. Most of the schools today have replaced textbooks with iPads which, I think, is not a very good suggestion. Though most of the youngsters enjoy swiping pages through iPads with their fingers, I would rather stick to textbooks. The main disadvantage of iPads is that you can never rely on it completely. It might run out of charge at any moment and can even get spoiled.

Next week’s topic

School tours to foreign countries: Necessary or unnecessary

Send us your views on the topic, along with your school name and photograph to education@khaleejtimes.com