Will iPad transform med school?

Stanford’s medical school joins a small but growing group of educational institutions across the nation experimenting with iPads as a way to lighten the load of textbook-toting students, and to learn how best to teach an extremely tech-savvy generation of students who’ve grown up in a wired world.

“So far so good,” said Brian Tobin, the school’s instructional technology manager who helped hand out the iPads on Aug. 19 during orientation week, adding that it’s still a work in progress. “Everyone is doing their own thing,” said Tobin “Some students are learning on it really well. Others have decided that laptops are still the best option. Some still use paper. And others use some mix of all three.”

Tobin had earlier addressed the students at an Aug. 20 tutorial on how to use their iPads  and had pointed to a 2-foot pile of binders. “This is the material for one course,” he said. “We want to get you started going paperless. There’s a lot less for you to carry around. … We want you to use the iPad when working with your cadavers in anatomy, or viewing slides in pathology.”