The St Andrew’s Cathedral School in central Sydney, Australia, informed parents this week that it would require all students in years 7 to 10 to own an iPad starting next year, reports the “Sydney Morning Herald” (http://macte.ch/9OuAM).

The initiative will cost parents $597 per iPad, but the school expects hard copy text books will be replaced by e-books that will offset the cost “and spare their children’s backs,” the article adds. Several private Sydney schools are requiring compulsory tablets or other touch-screen computers, “convinced they are vastly superior learning tools to the heavier laptops that were given to every year 9 to 12 student under the federal government’s $2.4 billion Digital Education Revolution,” says the “Sydney Morning Herald.”