Tech to take over from textbooks

School textbooks to disappear from classrooms as IT marches forward

Future classrooms will be dominated by content delivered over the cloud to PCs and tablets, according to research from Futuresource Consulting.

Mike Fisher, convergence and new technologies consultant at Futuresource, said vendors are pushing harder into education opportunities around content and platforms as the worldwide PC market continues to flatten out. This means, he suggests, that mobile and digital platforms will gradually take over from textbooks globally.

"In the US, by 2015 nearly one in four children in K-12 education will be using a school- or district-funded mobile computing device in the classroom, and that equates to annual sales volumes of more than four million units," Fisher claimed.

"[And] similar to developments in the consumer space, a battleground is emerging in the education sector over who can develop and own the ecosystem. This includes hardware, interactivity, storage, content, the learning platform and associated elements, and it's here within the fully-integrated offering where the war is likely to be won or lost."

The US already has 13 per cent penetration of mobile devices among the school student population – more than many developed nations. The UK has just five per cent penetration, Germany has 0.3 per cent, Japan has 1.7 per cent and Canada has six per cent.

Fisher went on to remark that countries with centralised funding and decision making, however, had made large PC investments for schools – such as Portugal (91 per cent penetration) and Argentina (with 19 per cent penetration).

Joe Mugan, market analyst at Futuresource, said: "Many large and financially established countries have concentrated on traditional teaching methods, and as a consequence their technology adoption in schools has remained relatively low."