Students go from books to e-books

A principal described his move from books to tablets as an "unmitigated disaster" when his students’ devices were not up to standards. 

 

Pupils at a community school in Laois, experienced major difficulties when school books were replaced with HP Elite Pad tablets as a way of keeping up with trends.

 

Students experienced technical problems such as tablets randomly switching off, tablets failing to switch on at all and problems connecting to Wi-Fi.

 

This is terrible news for parents who had to pay €550 for the devices at the beginning of the school year with no option to pay in instalments.

 

However, Principal Martin Gleeson has ordered a full set of books for pupils to use while HP are doing everything they can to resolve the issue.

 

A letter was sent to families of the students, where Mr Gleeson wrote: “The roll-out of e-learning which involved the use of HP Elite Pads and e-books should have been an exciting and new way of moving forward.”

 

He said that he made an “ informed decision” when he chose the HP Elite Pad because very few tablets have a memory of up to 64GB.

 

It stands to reason that books will always prove to be useful for pupils, even in this day and age.