By Christopher Dawson, ZDNet
Last week I was running my company’s first ever educational trade show booth at the International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) 2011 conference in Philadelphia. I had a few things to say about the big business of ed tech, but, at the end of the day, I had a chance to talk to a lot of people (teachers, vendors, thought leaders, and administrators alike) and walked away with some overarching themes, ideas, and impressions on the state of the art in educational technology. iPads were everywhere. Android tablets could only be found in the Dell and Viewsonic booths. While recent over the air updates to Android Honeycomb have rendered it quite stable and speedy-quick on the latest hardware and Android 2.2+ works quite well on smaller tablets, Apple has somehow convinced every teacher and administrator in North America and western Europe that only the iPad is capable of transforming education. While no tablet will transform anything without the right teaching techniques and curriculum behind it, the iPad is poised to become the next showcase 1:1 platform in schools. It isn’t without its issues in educational enterprise deployments, but the abundance of iPad charging carts, iPad Apps, iPad sessions, and even iPad cases suggests that most people are willing to ignore its shortcomings and leap into iPad-land.
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