New 'Steve Jobs' Grade Schools Will Use iPads Instead Of Books, Blackboards, And Everything Else

The Amsterdam school system is conducting a very cool, and potentially very important, experiment starting in August.

It will open up 11 schools where the only tool students and teachers will use is the iPad.

The idea of an iPad-centric school is so wild, these schools have been informally nicknamed as "Steve Jobs schools," reports Marco Evers at Dutch site, Spiegel Online.

Evers writes:

Some 1,000 children aged four to 12 will attend the schools, without notebooks, books or backpacks. Each of them, however, will have his or her own iPad.

There will be no blackboards, chalk or classrooms, homeroom teachers, formal classes, lesson plans, seating charts, pens, teachers teaching from the front of the room, schedules, parent-teacher meetings, grades, recess bells, fixed school days and school vacations. If a child would rather play on his or her iPad instead of learning, it'll be okay. And the children will choose what they wish to learn based on what they happen to be curious about.

The school will be using a variety of video game-like apps at the center of its curriculum, too. The idea is to make learning more fun.

Gertjan Kleinpaste, the 53-year-old principal of the facility is convinced that "what we are doing will seem pretty normal in 2020," he told Evers.

Certainly, schools around the world will be watching this experiment to see what they can learn from it, too.