SAN FRANCISCO — Julie Garcia handed Apple iPads to students in her seventh-grade pre-algebra class on a recent morning before showing the pupils how to use the tablet to graph data, hunt for correlations and record how-to videos.

A math instructor at Innovation Middle School, Garcia is one of the first to use some of the more than 25,000 iPads the San Diego Unified School District bought from Apple this year.

“It’s the cool factor,” Garcia said as she looks over the room of students tapping energetically on tablets. “They are super motivated.”

For districts around the country, though, it’s the price as much as the cool quotient that could draw them to a new, smaller version of the iPad that Apple will unveil Tuesday in San Jose, Calif. Apple has long been a leader in education, and schools began embracing the iPad soon after its 2010 debut. Yet as fiscal budget shortfalls crimp spending, schools in growing numbers are warming to the handheld devices as an alternative to more expensive laptops.

Now schools, and consumers, are about to get another big price break: The smaller iPad may cost as little as $249 (U.S.), according to Barclays. That compares with $499 to $829 for the current iPad.

Beyond the school market, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook will use the device to try to widen Apple’s lead over Amazon.com and Google and fend off a more recent threat from Microsoft in the market for tablets, which NPD DisplaySearch predicts will more than double to $162 billion (U.S.) by 2017. Cook will unveil an iPad with a 7.85-inch screen diagonally, people familiar with its development said in August. The current iPad has a 9.7-inch screen.

Apple executives will highlight the iPad’s educational capabilities on Tuesday, according to a person with knowledge of the planning. Education spending on information technology, including hardware, was about $19.7 billion in the 2010-2011 period, according to the Center for Digital Education.

Educators’ bet on tablets mirrors a trend in the broader consumer-electronics market, where consumers are buying iPads instead of traditional personal computers. PC sales in K-12 fell 8 per cent in the last quarter, the third straight decline, Gartner said.

“We’re moving away from desktops and laptops,” said James Ponce, the superintendent of the McAllen Independent School District in Texas. “Ninety per cent of the work is now being done on mobile devices.”

The education push is part of a strategy put in place under co-Founder Steve Jobs, before the iPad was introduced in 2010. While Apple has a history of selling Mac computers to schools, the company realigned its education sales force to emphasize iPads, a person familiar with the changes said.

Innovation Middle School traditionally used Lenovo computers because Macs were too expensive, Principal Harlan Klein said.

“They were cost- prohibitive,” Klein said. “With the iPad, they are competitive.”

The new iPad comes at a critical time for Apple. Its shares have dropped 13 per cent since reaching a record on Sept. 19, two days before the company released the iPhone 5. Supply constraints have limited smartphone sales, and on Friday Microsoft will release its table, Surface, its first foray into hardware. Apple had about 70 per cent of the market in the second quarter, compared with Samsung Electronics, with 9.2 per cent, and Amazon’s 4.2 per cent, according to IHS ISuppli.

To woo educators, Apple’s sales staffers meet regularly with school administrators and procurement officers nationwide and are assigned to work with schools in particular regions. Apple pays for district officials to visit headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., to learn about new products.

“Apple has got the world’s biggest education sales force, they have a great device and they have a long history in education,” said Tyler Bosmeny, the CEO of Clever Inc., an education software company. “This is absolutely something that they would be crazy to ignore.”

“Once these tablets get in to the $200 to $300 range we are going to see a real aggressive uptake in the K-12 market,” said Vineet Madan, a senior vice president at McGraw-Hill’s education unit.

San Diego’s school district bought iPad 2s after Apple dropped the price of that model when the newest version was introduced earlier this year. Drawing on funds raised through a bond measure, the district spent about $370 on each iPad, which comes pre-loaded with educational applications, Browne said.

Other major challenges for schools is training teachers and managing new equipment and software. For a teacher using an iPad math application, synchronizing a classroom of devices and monitoring all the students’ work can be time-consuming. In San Diego, a team of eight employees helps train teachers and manage new technology.

“A lot of the time we see people putting technology in the classroom to be innovative, but it ends up being more work for teachers, not less,” said Bosmeny, whose San Francisco-based company is designed to help schools manage the data from iPad applications. “Everyone becomes a part-time data shuffler.”

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In South Texas, Ponce contacted Apple soon after the McAllen school district decided to get away from buying laptops and desktops, which were expensive to maintain and unappealing for many students. Apple helped craft the district’s strategy for integrating technology in classrooms, he said.

“We included them because they have revolutionized the world,” Ponce said. “We had people in the room who were thinking bigger than we could.”

The result: McAllen bought 25,000 iPads, paying Apple $3.5 million a year — about half the district’s technology budget, Ponce said.

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