Looks like Stanford School of Medicine’s incoming class of first years will have an innovate study tool to help ease the pain from the countless hours of studying – Apple’s iPad.
Class of 2014 will be getting the iPad as part of their welcome kit.
- The school cited four reasons behind the new program, including student readiness, noting that iPad "creates opportunities for efficient, mobile, and innovative learning."
- Stanford also noted "the flexibility of iPad technology," noting that "iPad allows students to view and annotate course content electronically, facilitating advance preparation as well as in-class note-taking in a highly portable, sharable and searchable format."
- Access to information and "information literacy" was also a consideration, with the school pointing out that "students will be able to easily access high-quality information at any place, at any time (for example, images from textbooks on digital course reserve, image databases, journal articles, Lane Library’s various search tools, etc.)"
- A fourth rationale was Stanford's intent to go green, "replacing printed syllabi with PDFs is in line with the Sustainable Stanford initiative, which aims to build sustainable practices into every aspect of campus life."
It’ll be interesting to see what apps the school’s IT department will be putting on the iPad for the medical students. My guess is you’ll seeing lots of anatomy apps and PDF reading apps. This is going to be a fantastic story to follow and we’d love to hear from some Stanford medical students when they start using the iPad for studying. Either way, learning gross anatomy just got a whole lot more fun.
- So basically, Stanford appears to be leaving it up to their students on how to use their iPad. It appears the UC Irvine School of Medicine (recent article) is taking a more direct approach and actually implementing the iPad into their curriculum. Either way, it appears the iPad has firmly gained a presence as a key tool for medical education.
