We have started to see tablets such as the iPad 2 begin to replace things like book and manuals in businesses. We have previously reported that Alaska Airlines has dumped its heavy flight manuals for iPads and American Airlines is testing something similar. Now a new report claims that the country of South Korea wants its school children to embrace the digital age and get rid of holding printed text books entirely.
According to the Chosun.com web site, South Korea's Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced last week that the government plans to invest over $2 billion US by 2015 to create digital versions of school textbooks. The ultimate goal is to have kids use the digital textbooks only by that date. Beforehand both digital and printed textbooks would be used by South Korean school kids.
In addition to the digital textbooks, the article claims that Sout Korea will also develop a cloud-based server system for its schools where kids can simply download the textbooks they want to their tablet PC devices. Kids in low income families will also be provided with free tablets for their studies. Students could also take online classes from home and have that counted as attending school by the government. Even kids who might be in the hospital for long stretches of time could take and get credit for online school classes.
South Korea has been a leader in evolving its Internet services. Earlier this year the government announced plans to offer every citizen access to 1 Gbps Internet speeds by 2012.
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