NUance

Sorry but the Surface gets a huge thumbs down from me. Our school district switched to those my last year in the district and what a disaster!  They’re cheaper that’s for sure and you get what you pay for. 

The pen on the Surface didn’t work half the time, the battery life was crap and it was so difficult to maneuver. As you can tell, I wasn’t a fan. 

Sorry to hear that ladyhawke but we have many of them on our university network and we haven't had many problems (surface, keyboard, and pen). Were you using the pro version? If not properly setup and managed, I am sure they can be a burden. The same can be said about the iPad in a school setting. I had to deal with those from my wife in her classroom because they weren't being properly managed by the IT staff at her school. I have noticed that a lot of deployments in the K-12 environments are disasters because of the lack of configuration and management.

I'll actually second the Microsoft Surface recommendation as well--one of the good things about the platform is that it is rooted in Windows, so the same apps you run on your desktop run on the Surface. The price is about the same as an iPad Pro for the same power...but you can spend more on Surface to get a beefier i7 Surface Pad Pro, whereas the processing is static no matter what iPad Pro variant you purchase. 

And Ladyhawke's criticisms are the first ones I've heard about the Surface of that nature, to be honest. In fact, Microsoft's success with their pencil/stylus integration is what prompted Apple to incorporate the Pencil into both the iPad Pro and this year's 'standard' iPad versions.