How to Sell Teachers on the iPad

        I love the iPad, but I don’t have one, and I (and most other teachers—English teachers in particular) won’t use one in class until it, or any other tablet, has three characteristics:
        First, it must be able to lie flat on the table—which the iPad does. Traditional laptops in classes are nightmares of distraction and unproductivity. The vertical screen is a wall behind which adolescents are helpless victims to their attentions and social impulses. It is the same screen through which for hours they chat with friends and browse pictures and profiles. The temptation is too great. For the sake of transparency of attention, which is different from control, the tablet must be able to lie flat on the table, like binders, folders, and spiral notebooks.
        Second, it must have a stylus. I know, I know--Steve Jobs famously said, "If you have to use a stylus on a tablet, you've already lost." But hear me out: While the iPad offers a wonderful tactile experience, the tip of the finger isn’t precise enough for annotation, for underlining, circling, drawing exclamation marks, writing questions or comments, or simply scribbling down a thought… or a scribble. A stylus allows teachers and students not only to annotate ebook texts, but also to annotate student writing—which leads to number three.
        Third, the tablet must allow handwriting in word processing documents. With a stylus, I can do what I currently do: handwrite in-text notes and then type up my final comment. Handwriting in documents provides two things: first, it provides ease. Though I’m a keyboard shortcut aficionado, keystrokes and comments can’t match the ease of circling a sentence and drawing a line to an adjacent paragraph, or of drawing a squiggly underline underneath a phrase and writing a comment over it. Perhaps Apple will outdo my imagination on this, but I don’t believe that the tip of a finger will be able to match the precision of the point of a pen.
        Further, while the stylus may be anathema to the iPad, I think that it, at least in the context of technology in the classroom, reclaims some of what technology has chased out of the classroom: humanity. Fonts and track changes can’t communicate like a simple check mark over a phrase or paragraph, like the smile or exclamation mark drawn in the margin, like the bracketing of a whole paragraph, or like the vigorously underlined word. (How would you vigorously underline something in Pages or Word? Double underline? Increase the thickness? Try it out...) Education will always require a human touch, and in the area of texts and textbooks (which the iPad will likely replace), and in the area of documents in particular, humanity means handwriting, however messy it may be.