Good iPad apps can make the iPad feel not like a device running an app, but like an object that is the app. GarageBand isn’t a musical app running on an iPad. It turns an iPad into a musical instrument. The interfaces for each GarageBand instrument are exquisitely skeuomorphic. Every control — every button, every switch, every slider — is custom designed. The keyboard’s use of the accelerometer to detect how hard you hit the keys seems impossibly accurate for a device that doesn’t have a pressure-sensitive display.

A Scottish independent Christian school has forsworn books, pencils, pens, and paper, and will now educate its young charges solely via Apple’s iPad.

“We wanted to give each of the pupils an opportunity to use the best equipment available,” IT teacher Fraser Speirs told the Daily Record

Each and every one of the 105 students at the modestly named Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock will now take all their lessons on their personal “magical and revolutionary” devices.

The students, ranging in age from five to 15, will also do their homework on the Jobsian tablet — although whether they’ll each be given an Apple iPad Keyboard Dock with which to type or be forced to tap away on the onscreen keyboard wasn’t noted.

“Each of the children will have their own iPad,” Speirs said, “which is hooked into the school’s wireless network and from there they will use the computers for learning in different subjects.” The tablets will enable the young ‘uns to access “pre-approved websites for lessons in English, maths, languages and history.”

Educational apps are usually flashcard, textbook or calculator substitutes: They make games that help with memorization, are references for information, or give you the answer. What’s exciting about Wolfram Alpha’s new apps is that they sometimes give you not just the answer, but a step-by-step explanation of how they arrived at it. Instead of just spitting out an answer and a line for a one-variable equation, for instance, the Algebra app shows each step of the equation.

Both math apps could stand in for an expensive graphing calculator, and they provide more detailed information. The music theory app not only shows you correct chords and intervals, but allows you to hear them as well.

The Apple iPad ushers in a new era of computing that leaves the world of offices behind, a profound paradigm shift that is difficult to appreciate until one has had the opportunity to live, play, work and learn with one. Graham Brown-Martin, founder of Learning Without Frontiers, explains why he thinks this is the most exciting development since the original Mac and why the education sector should take note.

If there is one thing that holds teachers back from engaging technology more it is a lack of comfort with that technology. This Flipboard is a dream come true if you have colleagues who do not know what they are looking at when you show them a Twitterstream or your list of Blogposts from Google Reader. Those colleagues do understand magazines. Your Twitterstream and Google Reader posts now will have meaning to those colleagues. The content has been turned into a non-techie format, so they might accept it more readily. Ironically, we use technology to hide the technology. Maybe that explains the unfulfilled promise of flying cars. People are comfortable with cars, but they are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with airplane stuff. Hence, no Flying cars!

I see the way technology is manipulating the content to be more familiar to people as a good thing. One of the big stumbling blocks with involving all teachers with technology is a lack of comfort with the unfamiliar on the part of many teachers. Converting RSS feeds to a magazine format creates a familiar platform as well as up to the minute content for consideration and reflection. Maybe one day it will come to the screen on the dashboard of our Flying Cars.