Fraser Speirs

"Quite a good move on their part if it is successful."

I haven't used it, nor do I work in education, but what I have read of it, it at least is successful in the sense that those who use Apple's Swift training material find it to have good quality.

For example, http://www.speirs.org/blog/2017/6/1/a-year-of-teaching-swift:

"In times past the experience was that, if you were an able student in Computing, you would get your programs working. If you were not an able student, your experience would be almost insurmountable challenges to get anything working. Working or not-working was the differentiator in the class.

In the Learn to Code curriculum, I found that everyone got something working. The difference between the stronger students and the weaker students then was more to do with evaluations of the complexity of their solution, the understandability and style of their solutions or other factors like memory and time efficiency.

I have never really had these kinds of conversations in classes at this level before. It has been an incredibly satisfying year to get the opportunity to debate which of three possible solutions is the 'best' for a given problem and, further, what definition of 'best' we should accept."

It also is good to see that Apple expands its offering. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/06/swift-playgrounds-expands-coding-education-to-robots-drones-and-musical-instruments/:

"Apple is working with leading device makers to make it easy to connect to…

http://www.nd.edu/~cangst/NotreDame_iPad_Report_01-06-11.pdf

http://robertkozma.com/images/kozma_jrte.pdf

http://www.educause.edu/ELI7Things

http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html

Not formal studies but great anecdotes:

http://www.fastcompany.com/1727292/apple-ipad-officially-passes-the-higher-eduction-test-exclusive

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1-8OOrBi0o&feature=player_embedded

Anything on http://speirs.org/

And of course, there's always the success of Khan Academy.

There are many, many more studies and anecdotes available, but these are the ones I either had bookmarked or could remember off the top of my head.

You're right that there's no absolutely conclusive and irrefutable study about tech in classroom because nobody has undertaken such a bold experiment. However, all of the evidence is there and points to the potential of adopting newer tools in classrooms. Unfortunately, people who blindly dismiss all applications of technology in the classroom have slowed farther, more informative studies from being conducted.

Fraser Speirs' iPad 1:1 deployment odyssey at a private elementary school has been fascinating to watch:

http://speirs.org/blog/2010/9/23/the-ipad-project-how-its-going.html

At this point, all I can give you are some practical anecdotes which, I hope, will give you a flavour of the change.

I picked up a ream of printer paper yesterday. It had dust on top of it.
Primary 2 pupils have now memorised their passwords. That's not something that happens when they get 40 minutes a week on computers.
Last week, we couldn't get the Primary 3 pupils to stop doing maths and go for lunch.
My daughter April asked me if I could install the educational apps from school on my iPad so she could use them at home.
We're seeing a reduction in the amount of homework forgotten or not done.
"Forgetting your folder" for a subject is now a thing of the past.

tl;dr: iPads are an epic, epic win in education – if you can afford them.

This is just my speculation, but people might use smartphones sitting next to their laptop for a variety of reasons:

- Streaming video on laptop while doing something else

- You can't text message or snapchat from your laptop

- It might be quicker to hit an app icon than load a webpage for checking the weather

- You're on your work laptop but you get a personal email on your phone

I think the author's point about a "better" internet is that ubiquity / portability will eventually trump any other advantages you get from accessing the internet from your computer. A larger laptop screen doesn't really help if you don't have wifi access.

There are definite advantages to accessing the internet with a real keyboard and a large screen, but over time those advantages will shrink. Consider this "reversed" review of the Macbook Pro: http://www.speirs.org/blog/2015/11/30/can-the-macbook-pro-replace-your-ipad

The author's original "I'm out" post: http://speirs.org/blog/2008/9/12/app-store-im-out.html

What I find sad is that every issue he had with Apple is still just as bad. The only thing that has changed positively is the app store approval time. Everything else is either the same or worse. And so basically he's just saying, "Fine, you're just going to keep doing the things I find reprehensible, but consumers love you, so I'll play your game." It's an understandable position to take, it just makes me sad to see developers feeling like they're forced to cede their strongly held beliefs because Apple has gotten too big and the momentum is too great to ignore.

And yes, I realize nobody is actually forcing him to act against his beliefs, but he clearly feels that way.

Here is a list of some:

http://speirs.org

http://mattgemmell.com

http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/

http://nshipster.com

http://www.objectivesee.com

http://www.fruitstandsoftware.com/blog/

http://ashfurrow.com/blog/

http://www.cimgf.com/

http://www.cocoawithlove.com/

All of them extracted from here:

http://ashfurrow.com/blog/blog-resources

And some more:

http://objectivesea.tumblr.com/

http://soff.es/

And finally, this is not a blog, but a series of videos, and not all the videos are free ($9/month subscription), but I think it's a great resource:

http://nsscreencast.com/

Edit: added some urls