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Maine buys 38,600 ibooks for Public Schools
Anderson Silva writes "I just found this piece of news on MacSlash, and since I live in Maine, and I own an ibook, I thought I would pass the word along: The Maine Learning Technology Endowment has announced today that Apple has won the bid to provide Maine 6th, 7th and 8th graders with Apple iBooks and Airport wireless connection points."
It's good to see schools diving into this technology rather than figuring out pressing educational problems or sticking to the "core functionality" of a classroom. Our children will be well-equipped to serve as marketing drones and politicians. Their quality of life will be greater than their parents', according to the trade magazines.
This is nothing new, Henrico County Public Schools (Richmond, Va.) started this year by issueing every 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grader with an iBook. According to various students, it has been a massive disaster, students using Instant Messanger all the time, hardware failures running rampant, the latches on those things just can't take the abuse of a teenager. That coupled with the low bandwidth estimates have constantly crashed the Airport systems. It's a great Idea in theory and I'm sure after a year or two it will do a great deal of good, but for now, we are just giving out Laptops to teenages for games and the like.
...someone would donate computers with operating systems and hardware, which are relevant beyond some artistic niche market, to students then there wouldn't be any need to reteach students how to use Windows or Linux. Otherwise there'll be a generation of kids frustrated that their mac knowledge can only go so far in a wintel dominated marketplace.
So instead, we'll give kids laptops that they can learn to use comfortably, and then get out in the real world and try to get a job, and go "right mouse button? What's that?"