Mlearning Article #6 Kindle

“The Kindle Fire will Enable the Next Generation of 1:1 Education Apps”

This article is about the potential of the Kindle Fire in an educational setting. The author of this article has never been a fan of the Kindle in educational settings because of the lack of color and interactivity. The Kindle Fire, however, is a full Android tablet, is only $199, and has a 7” screen (a good size for backpacks, children, and adults). The screen is a little small for touch typing, but a great size for mobile internet access. The price is also great for schools, where children will be handling them (the author mentions that a 7 year old holding a $500 iPad is a scary sight). The Silk browser is always connected to Amazon's EC2 cloud, making connections ultra fast. Applications can be delivered right to the Kindle Fire in ways that won't work with other browsers, because of limitations in internet speed. The Silk browser will allow schools to hand out hundreds of Kindles without drastically increasing their bandwidth. There are some great possibilities, like data aggregation and analysis of assessments available in real time, or collaborative apps. These things are not on the market yet, but the Silk browser could possibly do things that are not even practical on a desktop browser.

I had some trouble understanding the technical aspect of this article, particularly about cloud computing infrastructure. Even after watching the video I was a little confused, but the possible applications of the Silk browser in schools seems interesting. If schools take advantage of the possibilities, I could see the Kindle Fire becoming the go-to tablet for schools. However, I wonder if the kind of content the author envisions will actually come about. I think educators are a little slow to catch on to possibilities, and there doesn't seem to be as much educational content as there could be, even for older devices. If Amazon markets especially to schools (and the Fire becomes the dominant tablet in schools), then I think educators might be motivated to create content for the Kindle Fire.