Students required to type lenghty essays on iPads

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I was speaking to a boy in year 10. He said each student at his school had been provided with an iPad. He said he found it difficult to type out his essays and assignments because the touch screen based keyboard isn't as fast as a conventional keyboard.

Why do schools use iPads instead of PCs?

That is insane. I'm continously making errors on this thing, re-typing, then re-typing again because the screen jumped. It is a nightmare. How could they do that to them?

My high school required iPads, but you had to buy them yourself. And you can attach keyboards to them, so you can type just as quickly as you can on a PC if you get one. I have one.

As for why schools are using them, it's likely because assignments can be done on them immediately and turned in via apps like eBackpack instead of having to have each student at a computer or giving homework that has to be done at a computer. They're just more convenient for assignments.

I don't know if the students had to pay for them themselves. I didn't enquire about that.

At CC we turned in assignments over the network on PCs. An instantaneous process.

Old people like smudge and I can't adapt to touchscreen typing. Even my phone has a physical keyboard.

Because iPods are the latest technology and schools think high-tech = good education. The problem with that is, teachers don't get the right training, administration doesn't understand where the technology works best and where old-school methods would be better, and it's often used as a substitute for actual good teaching.

I went to a public school and a Catholic school. Both had state-funded smartboards. Only two teachers in the public school and one teacher in the Catholic school ever used them.

I really wish I could type lengthy essays on an iPad. It's so much easier to edit than if I was writing by hand. I won't have to make an eraser mess or scratch out half the page. It would also make it a lot easier on the poor person who has to decipher my essay.

Yeah but what if you could type lengthy essays on a laptop?

I remember writing essays in my history exams by hand. This was back in 2005. We were allowed to use a computer for normal essays but the exam essays had to be written by hand. It wasn't actually too bad for me except that there was no spellcheck and there was zero editing. Whatever order I wrote stuff was the order it would stay in. And I could never write at 60 WPM by hand lol.

For those exams I had to write two or three essays in a three hour period but I didn't mind at all because history was my favourite subject. I wrote everything in print because I'm even slower in cursive. Maybe I was the only 17 year old who wrote in print but they didn't subtract any marks for me not using cursive.

Nowadays my handwriting is even worse because I don't do it much lol

I can't write a lengthy article or essay by hand. I never could. I always had to spend recess rewriting writing assignments the teacher deemed as too "sloppy". I couldn't help it and my hands and arms would start to cramp up and hurt if I wrote too long. People didn't believe me be about it because I could draw and it didn't hurt me to draw.