Wired does a comprehensive article about all the different colleges and universities giving away free iPads. Schools include North Carolina State, Seton Hill University, Reed College, Unversity of Maryland, Duke University, and George Fox University. Some schools are giving them to every full-time student while others are giving them to only 30 students. Regardless of the number, these schools are getting a lot of press.

Katie Marsal at AppleInsider talks about the trouble Apple is having keeping stores stocked with iPad. According to the article, Apple is prioritizing delivery to retail stores and customers over education customers:

But when April 2nd rolled around and regular Apple Store customers began receiving their shipping notifications, a number of those education pre-order customers were being informed that their orders were being placed on the back burner and wouldn’t ship to much later in the month.

Guest columnist at ZDNet, Matthew E. Rich, Ed. D., makes the case for the varied reasons why iPad is uniquely qualified to solve many education problems.

The Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop school district has decided to buy an iPad for every high school student. The $265,000 program will cover the iPads and wifi infrastructure upgrades to support Apple’s latest computing device.

As many university students and employees have already noticed, Apple is not offering a student discount on the iPad. Now it is coming out that iPad education orders are not being shipped with priority given to non-education customers.

Seton Hill University is promising a brand new iPad and iBook to all students starting school in the Fall. This move has received a lot of press, but mostly it serves as a market indicator of the huge potential of e-textbooks for the iPad.

According to a survey by the Association of Learned Professional and Scholarly Publishers of 400 textbook publishers, most are seeing growth in their electronic publishing divisions. The survey also shows that electronic sales now account for 8% of total sales. Because the survey was taken before the announcement of Apple’s iPad, some of the anticipated expansion numbers may already have changed, such as the 17% of publishers who have no plans to expand into electronic textbooks.

A good article by John Paczkowski about how education sales will be a chance for Apple to regain classroom marketshare. Price and education products (such as textbooks and apps) will build up the iPad as a quintessential educational tool.

Textbook publisher Macmillan has announced a new product called DynamicBooks that enabled teachers to modify an electronic textbook to better suit the teacher’s needs.

This is a big step for the publishing industry where promises of “future” books have been around since the first CDrom. What makes this different is the scope of Macmillon’s titles combined with the huge iPad distribution channel.

Lawmakers in Georgia, USA introduced a bill earlier this week to allow local school boards to decide on using electronic textbooks. While many reader manufactures are pushing for this kind of progress, the timing may give a nod to the importance of the forthcoming iPad.

The law has passed the Senate, but would still have to pass the House of Representatives and be signed into law by the governor.