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-go...

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.

Nice idea but as someone who manages technology for a school I can say tablets just aren't there yet. A few things (that might not be apparent with 41 hand picked kids)...

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Damage: Understand that planning technology for a school is all about scale. It isn't about "Can we afford to buy this for each kid" its "can we afford to buy this for each kid and deal with a 30-40% damage rate". Because they're kids.

Remember the way you treated your backpack in Jr High and High School? Now imagine how a $750 iPad would have done if you carried it around all day.

Most hardware companies combat this by either (a) making devices durable or (b) making them easy to repair. The iPad is neither of those things.

Control: The problem with an iPad right now is there's no way to lock it down. If a student decides to start browsing the Internet while you're giving a lecture there's little you can do about it (why do you think most schools ban Cell. Phones at this point). It's hard to focus a class when their text book can also be used as a Game machine and Internet browser.

Software: The most obvious point is that Apple hasn't compensated for mass purchasing yet. I should be able to have a "Purchaser" account that allows me to log in to each system and install multiple copies of a given software package. At least the last time I investigated this option that process was a mess (At first it wouldn't let me pay for multiple copies of software because it said I'd already purchased it then it would lock me out because I'd installed it too many times and so on)

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There were some other issues that are escaping me now but the bottom line is it's a great dream and a great opportunity for some startup. But just plain old stock iPads don't work.

Edit: A few I forgot...

- Power: You either have to find some way to power them during class (which requires rewiring the classroom) or limit their use. Plus kids forget the charger and use it as an excuse not to do homework or participate in class.

- Eye Strain: You'd be amazed how parents who park their kids in front of a TV all day will come back at you complaining they read a report that said extended viewing of an LCD screen is bad for the eyes.

- Updates: Since there are no over-the-air OS updates its a chore to update the things

- Kids Content: Since there's no way to lock kids out of the administrative functions of an iPad a few will just change the account to their iTunes account and start downloading media on it which causes all kinds of problems

- Theft: There's not much of a market for Jr High Text Books on ebay. The same can't be said for iPads.

“You can do everything that the iPad can with existing off-the-shelf technology and hardware for probably $300 to $400 less per device,” Professor Soloway said.

Really? This is why they refer to it as the Ivory Tower!

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When they weren't the market leader[1], Apple used to give good discounts to schools to use Macs. What about now?

[1] You can argue that they are the market leader in the next generation of computing, tablets.

I follow this extensively for some reasons, but I've generally boiled it down to the following issues, in addition to TomofTTB's notes below:

-2.4Ghz Wireless spectrum is overly crowded, and really finnicky. You start throwing a few dozens of devices on one radio and you're going to run in some serious performance problems to each device. Streaming video amongst other things goes down the drain completely. You need a rather massive wireless network to be able to handle this adequately--especially in a school with a few hundred students.

-Massive backend content delivery system. Again, if you want to stream content such as video, you need something in the backend that can handle potentially that much capacity at once during regular school hours. While not every student will be streaming at once (so building it to handle 500x streamers at once is a bit extreme for a 500 student school), you do need to invest in something a bit more than your average system to do that. This will only get worse with large file sizes of HD video, also keeping in mind that you have to deal with the potential of people having to read text off of the videos, which if you're trying to go for "youtube-like", you might run into some text readability issues with compression. YMMV.

-Apple software delivery. So say you want to do an update to your programs, you have to really consider the way Apple does delivery of software updates. Also consider that the kids may take the devices home with them, and want to work on homework from there. So you need to now host your application inside and outside of your network. Depending on how secure you want to be, this could be an issue.

And it's not just about updating the application itself, but updating which content is there as well. Depending on the size of the data, your entire network could come to a crawl as people wait and wait and wait for updates to go out.

Let's not forget Apple's draconian security on releasing "enterprise" applications. At least with 4.2 they let you do something like HTTP download of the app updates which you couldn't do beforehand. But you still have to have a well implemented public/private key cryptography system to make it all work right.