Beijing School Begins Using iPads in the Classroom

Now that's patriotic education for the web 2.0 era.

Using tablets (especially iPads) in the classroom has been a dream for educators the world over for some time now, and increasingly, it is becoming a reality. Although it’s extremely uncommon in China, one school — Beijing’s Shi Jia Primary School — has started using Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPads for teaching.

At present, the tablets are used in only one class: Morality and Society. Students use school-provided iPads to do things like create presentations and interact with each other in groups. They’re not allowed to download or play games on the devices, but the school says that the kids have taken to the devices quite quickly and that they seem to enjoy the class more.

That’s important because Morality and Society is another name for patriotic training (read: propaganda). According to teachers, the class is a mix of patriotic education, history, and geography. For example, here are some lesson titles from their current textbook: “Our Fatherland”, “Beautiful China”, “An Ancient People”, “Cooperation of Ethnic Groups as One Family”, etc. There have been some questions as to whether or not it is appropriate to use the iPad — a foreign invention, after all — for this sort of class, but school representatives dismiss these concerns. The iPad is a tool, and there are plenty of other foreign inventions already present in the classroom.

The school is now considering expanding the program to put the devices in more classrooms, but it’s not likely this is going to become a nationwide project any time soon. Shi Jia Primary School is an elite school that caters mostly to middle class and wealthy children — many of them already have iPads at home — and the average Chinese school could not afford to buy large quantities of the devices (the cheapest model on Apple’s site still costs $585 in China)

Still, it’s cool to see technology working for at least a few kids in the classroom. Education, especially lower-level education, is one of the few areas of life that hasn’t really been touched by the internet and technological revolution we’ve seen over the past twenty years, and we hope that in the future more students and teachers will be able to take advantage of the powerful tools modern technology has to offer.