Educational Technology

November 25, 2011

The Kindle Fire As Educational Tablet?

Filed under: Educational Technology — admin @ 12:30 am

By Audrey Watters, Inside Higher Ed

The Kindle Fire, unlike the iPad however, really doesn’t seem to be targeting any aspect of the educational market. There’s no educational app category, for starters, and I really doubt we’ll see the sort of edu-focused advertising campaign for the Kindle Fire like we did with Apple’s “Learn” ad. There’s no Inkling app, no Kno app, no Coursesmart app — not really a surprise as these are all e-textbook apps as well as e-bookstores.  These apps have all tried hard to address some of the problems that college students identify with digital textbooks, particularly in terms of note-taking and sharing. Without these sorts of apps or features available, the complaints that students have about e-textbooks just seem exacerbated, then, on the Fire.  It’s definitely a device to consume content, not to create content, and while I realize that was a charge against the iPad that was demonstrated to be quite wrong in the end, the Kindle Fire really does feel like the Amazon store on a piece of hardware. Of course, students do consume plenty of media, and they do a lot more than read textbooks (You can insert your own joke here about their reading any textbooks).

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/hack-higher-education/kindle-fire-educational-tablet

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