I know this is logistically ridiculous, but one time I had a teacher that was retiring, and for his last quarter of algorithms class he hired someone to record all of the lectures.
BEST CLASS EVER. I went to almost all of the lectures, but when I got home the video was usually already online - so if I missed something during the lecture, no worries, I could go back and rewatch it. IT WAS AWESOME.
Slides are terrible though - the problem is that it takes forever to make really good slides. I've seen it done before, and when it's done right it's a real piece of art, but 99% of the time slides are copied/made in haste and then the teacher just reads them off in class too quickly.
The only plus side to slides is you don't have to read the teacher's awful writing that is usually too small on a board that's too small for the giant room.
Education is also one of those places people hate spending money on - kinda like daycare and babysitting. My school district was so poor at one point that the school I was in got condemned by the Fire Marshall and they moved us out into portable classroom buildings. Remodeling all of the schools that had been built in the 50s and seldom fixed drove the district into bankruptcy, and was seen as this huge scandalous thing when it was the only responsible thing to do.
Of course you're not going to see change if people don't want to spend money on it - and usually when they do it's pretty demanding (see the standardized test stuff).
Ah, this is a most amusing topic. Here goes my perspective:
In my university's electrical & computer engineering classes, the teachers no longer use slides - they did for a while and for various reasons switched back to chalkboards. I can see why - the ones that do tend to go through the slides way too fast, because they have nothing to slow them down. It promotes assuming the students know more than they actually do know too, and the danger of skipping slides.
On note taking: I just got a surface pro and aside from the handwriting being a little sloppy, I wish I started using a tablet PC years ago. As a friend that has done so put it, he has his notes archived from every class he's ever taken in folders on his computer. I only keep about a year of old notes/materials because it takes a ton of space when you do it on paper!
On ebooks: I like them if they're cheap/free. Frankly I'd rather the teachers just use public domain books or class wikis instead of assigning stuff out of a $150 textbook that nobody ever needs to read otherwise.
On typing: I grew up typing, we didn't have a computer at home until I was 9 (and I'm in my 20s), but we always had a typewriter, and when I saw my mom using it, I learned how to use it too! By the time I was around 10, I could already touch type without looking at the keyboard, and that fact randomly dawned on me one day lol. Right now I can type around 140wpm max.
On microsoft word: lol, my first computer was a 286 that was as old as I was. It ran WordPerfect and Lotus123. Yes, I used it to write a report, and yes I printed it on a giant dot matrix printer. It was awesome!
As for primary school: It has by a lot. The standardized testing and ACT/SAT stuff, especially in high schools, has made the top end crazy advanced. Students are under pressure to graduate having taken calculus, chemistry, physics - all things that for the most part weren't even options in my high school. If you so much as get a B, you won't have much luck getting into any of the good state universities here.
That's pretty scary, because as a teenager there's this overwhelming tendency to screw up.
I'd LOVE to move to LA! Right now I'm studying computer engineering at UC Davis with an embedded systems project (freescale cup) involved and some iOS app development on the side.
The tough part for me is I keep hesitating to apply to you guys because my projects are getting more interesting as time goes on (and I have more time to put into them, EE classes suck up a lot of time!)
Ah well, anyway, I will be applying for a few positions, including that one mentioned. Perhaps you'll get to interview me, that'd be awesome :)
It also reminds me of that episode of King of the Hill where Hank and his family join another church and they keep getting calls asking how satisfied they are on a scale of 1-10 XD
The ironic thing is that Apple is asking you to do something very Un-Apple. I imagine if you loaded the app up with "Share this with your friends!" kind of junk, they'd accept it.
I use the crap out of apps I'm working on, you know, to debug them. However, I've worked on at least one that I had no interest in using myself. -_- Not my fault!
lol the domain for the MUD I ran from 1999 to like 2005 still exists, and the person that took it over is still running the site design I made back in 2004.
I'd ask for it back but I have no idea what I'd do with it.