Tablets are finding their way into more and more settings and among the most powerful is education. I know I have been setting the stage for us to use iPads in a variety of creative ways come the fall in everything from pre-school to bar-mitzvah to High School. One thing that gets overlooked in too many places these days is the fact that the iPad (or any other tablet but let’s stick with the one that makes up more than two out of three tablets sold) is simply a tool. It is not a replacement for good content and great teachers. The Tabula Project wants to make sure that point is kept in mind and has just launched their campaign to bring affordable, teacher-driven tablet computing to classrooms everywhere.
The project is an Oakland, CA-based educational technology startup founded by Noah Kravitz, a veteran classroom teacher and technology journalist. The project kicks off with a crowdfunding campaign to raise funding and drive awareness around the potential to smartly use tablet computers to empower teachers and students worldwide. The platform they chose to use for the campaign is StartSomeGood.com, a social entrepreneurship hub.
As Kravitz, Editor-at-Large of TechnoBuffalo.com notes
We don’t think tablets are the future of education. Teachers are the future of education. But tablets represent the next wave of innovative technology that’s just ripe for educational use. Tablets are intuitive, powerful, and relatively low cost. The combination of touch, gesture and voice input along with the portability and multimedia capabilities built into today’s tablet computers equals incredible potential to support a wide variety of teaching and learning styles.
The Tabula Project is developing real-time classroom tools to support educational content including apps and eBooks, while also offering backend support for aggregating learning analytics and other data.
“My partners and I have worked in classrooms and producing ed tech projects before,” Kravitz explains, “so we know that the best uses of educational technology support the best practices of master teachers. We’re working with educators and content developers to support good teaching practices and enhance all of the great instructional materials already out there. The Tabula Project isn’t a curriculum company or an app company – we believe in teachers and schools, and we think the adoption of tablets represents a huge chance to advance the cause of education in America and globally. Between apps, digital textbooks, and Web resources, there’s already so much great consumer-facing learning content out there; one of our big aims is to help bring some of that content into classrooms.”
The Tabula Project’s crowdfunding campaign is live now at TabulaProject.com, and donations are being accepted via PayPal. More information is available by following the project’s Twitter account, @TabulaProject, and by liking the official Facebook page, Facebook.com/TabulaProject.
Check it out!