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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."
you have to admit, these ibooks make pretty nice unix boxes. The nice graphics of OS X(not ugly graphics of Xfree) with the power of unix. I just bought an ibook a few months ago as my entry into macs to try out the BSD derived OS X, and so far its been a grear ride. I recommend for your next laptop to try out an ibook or powerbook and if you don't like OS X, you can always install OpenBSD or some linux distro
It would be pretty hard for MS to sell them IBooks. I assume other companies were competing with different products.
Apple has always gone out of their way to win school bids. I remember when I was a kid I wanted an Apple ][ just because that's what the school had, and that my friend, is what Apple wants!
Mike
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Why spend money on hardware that is harder to replace and more expensive than desktops? Aside from the very limited ammount of field research that schools do, desktops should be fine. The only reason they buy laptops is to seem more in tune with the 21st century, or whatever bullshit the school administrators believe in. My school just bought a bunch of laptops, and they're not very usefull considering their lame hardware. The money could have been better spent on desktop PCs which would take longer togo out of date (you can buy more powerfull desktop PCs for the same money as a less powerfull desktop)
Photos.
Besides using macs, which IMHO is totally cool, The Maine Learning Technology Endowement itself is actually quite a progressive idea.
(Not a troll.)
Most people don't have wireless network connections and laptops. Why is it imperative that the government pay to buy luxury items for the schools?
I'm all in favor of spending money on education, but that means *education*, not laptops for stupid powerpoint presentations on Abraham Lincoln. (Bitter high school experience.) Why can't we buy the children better textbooks or pay the teachers more money. A laptop for every teacher and assuming ~20 kids per teacher is tens of thousands of dollars that could pay for more and better-qualified teachers and facilities.
*Sigh* Maybe I just miss the good ol' days of playing Doom in the high school computer lab -- the old fashioned way, with wires.
"This award is a conditional award, subject to successful negotiation of an agreement and State Purchases Review Committee approval. The Department will now enter into negotiations with Apple Computer, Inc. in order to finalize the terms and conditions of the agreement for the State?s Wireless Classroom Solution. If negotiations are unsuccessful, the Department may enter into negotiations with the next highest scoring bidder."
And who is the next highest scoring bidder? Dell? Are they/he still aggressively going after school contracts?
Apple has led the educational market for many years, and 38K laptops is certainly a big win for them....
However, with M$ and the ***Billion Dollar*** Settlement offer still floating around (looking however less politically viable everday)
What can Apple do to keep their educational position?
they need to be putting Apple products into the big city K-12 school systems....
New York, Chi Town, El Lay, Don't forget the Motor City...these school systems have orders of magnitude more students in them than the entire state of Maine..many future developers and other technologists will come from the Big City school districts...
One of the edges that MS has being a software centric company, is that "giving away" products like WinOS and Office and Visual Studio involves only trivial duplication costs...MS could burn "collections" of educationally aimed software on to DVD's and have "per byte" costs that are microscopic
Apple has to cough up genuine hardware that represents real (and very non-trivial) capital and production costs, which in its current market position is not an attractive proposition...
What will Maine (or any other state) do if MS comes along and offers them 50,000 low-cost XP laptops (bullied out of Compaq or Gateway or some other Wintel mfgr with big inventory excess problems) with Office, FlightSim, and Visual Studio pre-loaded for net net cost????
Maine would probably dump their Apple order in a second......
This is what happens when you have a monopoly position....
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
The area where I live (Lewiston) has a high school that is tech heavy and accomodates other high schools in the region. We've found that computers help out education a lot. (Yes, I did say I'm a student. But I like playing with tech and get my hands all over everything). The laptops should be a further boost.
The idea is NOT to replace desktops, but to give people decent usable computers that they can carry. Nighmares will happen - they'll get dropped, stolen, broken, maimed, abused, and dead. What we want to see is if we can keep that to a minimum. And if it works, the wireless networks that are being planned should prove interesting. And if it doesn't work, then other states can save themselves the cash. I really believe it will work. And we're ready for it.
SIG: HUP
I can speak from experience on this one, sort of. I am a 2nd year student at Northern Michigan University, and every student here gets a thinkpad every 2 years. i have a 500mhz one, 64mb ram, 6gig hd, the new ones have a cd burner, 700mhz, 124mb ram and 10gig hd's.... it seesm like a good idea, but really, the only thing anyone ever uses these things for is chat and downloading music on the hella fast connection. well, i write papers on it as well, but that doesn't really warrant having it i guess. oh, and 365 comes out every semester of tuition and you don't get to keep it at the end. kind of a ripoff. that's my 2 cents anyway
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, not just chemistry, reality!
I don't know the current condition of Colorado schools, but Michigan isn't in great shape either. Michigan recently approved the distribution of laptops to every teacher in the state, but I hope to God they wouldn't think of giving out laptops to every kid in the state yet. I recently had the pleasure of doing volunteer work at some Detroit inner-city school districts, and many of these kids wouldn't have the slighest clue what to do with a computer, even the high-schoolers. I could think of 100 better things to do with that money than buying laptops. Our state needs to figure out how to keep schools from stinking like urine, having ceiling and walls that don't leak, ensuring more than 50% of students actually graduate from high school, and making heating systems that don't run on coal (yes folks, there are school districts in Michigan and Ohio that still use coal for heat) then maybe we could splurge on such luxuries as fancy laptops for every kid.
These laptops are totally unnecessary. What a waste of money. The vast majority of teachers don't know what to do with the computers in the computer lab down the hall. How is that going to be improved by putting them in every backpack?
Sure, computer literacy is important in the modern world, but so is writing and math. In fact, computer literacy without both of those to back it up gives you nothing but slashdot trolls. This is just as bad of an idea as letting kids use calculators in pre-algebra, and for the same reasons. How are kids ever going to learn the basics of anything if we keep handing them machines to take care of the basics for them?
Computers in schools are great. I remember the first computer I ever got to use, a Commodore PET with a cassette drive that lived in the corner of my 4th grade classroom. You had to reserve it ahead of time to play games on it during recess. Unfortunately that's all we ever did with it. A few years later we had a lab with some Apple]['s that we could use to type up our essays, and by the time I got to high school those were replaced with PCs. Were they useful? Did I learn from using them? Sure, but not enough to justify giving every kid their own. 10:1 is a perfectly acceptable ratio, probably even less in more upscale neighborhoods where everyone has a computer at home.
There was recently that linked the rise of the modern word processor with the decline of writing skills in college students. My fear is that these programs are just going to produce more of the same. Kids need to learn how to do stuff themselves before we hand them tools that do stuff for them.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
You know, when it was Microsoft giving computers to schools, they were evil monopolists. Now Apple is doing essentially the same thing, but I hear no vehement protest. And as other people have written, the Apple presence in schools did have a considerable effect one what computers they wanted at home. Of course, Microsoft was using the offer to get out of the anti-trust suit, but the impact on the future consumers (formerly known as kids) is still there...
Another testament to the bias of Slashdot, I suppose.
________
"And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion...." -- J.S. Mill
Remember when people learned howto use a computer by first reading documentation ouf of a book? The same goes with every form of science. I went to a Private School whos computers were approximately 4KHz 80x286 with 640KBytes RAM all running MSDOS 4.x. We learned howto use spreadsheet software on all those green-chreens and I have some of the best memmories from my school. Even though I learned howto use Microsoft-type software, we learned enought to progress to other software and learn more concept. I'm the only person I know from back in those days, that weilded my keyboard as an artist his pallete. Look at Rob for example, he attended a Private School and look at how intellegent, courteous, and kind he is. I can sense in your words your kindness too, but you seem to be disappointed that your school couldn't afford computers... Truthfully, common, everyday usage of computers in schools is a big financial risc that is realy determined by the schools' students' level of maturity. You hear about Public Schools buying expensive computer equipment and the like in Mathematics class with graphing caclulators, and all you hear about is something getting broken and waiting for some kind of replacement or fund. In Private School, it's the other way around where people first learn to appreciate what they have and treat school property with respect...it's the only way to do it in Private School because they have so much overhead cost with bankrupty looming closely overhead; whereas Public schools don't have to worry about a single thing and they get more spoiled with by every new politician that is elected into office. Be proud. You're on slashdot with some of the most intelligent people on Planet Earth, your preference of Slashdot.org proves it, and guess what, you are a member of this fine user forum. :o) Hurrahh!
without prejudice
I work in the It department for my school and all the teachers have laptops. They break the screen, break the dongles, drop them, one actually ran over his with his car, and these are all PhD's, imagine what these kids are going to do with these things!
... they'll treat those computers like gold. That is, if you let them.
In my experience, I've noticed that smart (ie. PhD), non-hitech people are the worst with technology. This is probably because they think like "why doesn't this work like I think?" instead of "why don't I try to figure this out?". This is how they end up breaking hardware (and software!).
It's hard, I know. But smart people sometimes have to get past their egos and realise they don't know everything. They NEED training, probably more than kids. For kids, computers have been around almost all of their lives. They are natural. To adults, these seemingly fragile pieces of equipment are clumsy, heavy and ugly. No wonder the guy is using it as a speed bump.
Kids, on the other hand
----- rL
At the high school I go to, the school has a few (around 20-30) Dell C500s. (thats the kind with integrated wireless networking.) They also install 802.11b WAPs all around the school. However, as I have been bringing a laptop to school for several years, I can see quite a few problems with this plan:
1. Rough Treatment
Laptops have LCD screens, hard drives, plastic cases, and other delicate items, and kids who are familiar with stuff they can just throw into a backpack (i.e. books) will likely treat these the same way. Since backpacks get throw around, kicked, banged into stuff, etc... these will get probably get broken fast.
2. Dead Zones
My high school campus, except for a few areas, is a cell phone dead zone. I'm not certain whether the contruction/locstion of the buildings will have the same effect on wireless networking, but I doubt it will work to full potential on a school with concrete/brick/steel construction.
3. Interference
My school has over 1,000 kids, and even the elementery schools have over 200 each. If even a quarter of the kids have wireless equipped laptops, you're going to see major interference between the signals. (not to mention the kids as they fight for laptops.)
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
Okay, my mother is a 6th grade teacher in Ohio. And let me say, that because a corrupt state senators daughter was 4 when the law was passed, our schools got computers in the classroom starting with kindergarden, and worked their way up.
Ludicrus as it sounds, not even the 6th grade classes, who now have SOME conmputers, use them for anything. The kids type reports, and play video games..... and surf for pr0n when my mother is not looking.
Now they want all of our kids to have laptops?!?!?!?! What is it about our society and laptops. I own a laptop computer, I am a programmer, and I have poor handwriting, I use it quite often. And as a laptop owner, I feel qualified to state that very few people on this planet have any need to own one. There are many misconceptions about laptops that just drive me nutty. And the truth behind them them all are great reasons why laptops in elemantary and high schools is a really dumb idea.
In our society, laptops are cute, small, handy computers. WRONG! In reality, laptops are small, slow, hard to handle, hard to service, and EXPENSIVE AS HELL. A touchpad is not like a mouse folks, that keyboard takes some getting used to, and they aren't exactly the most rugged pieces of machinary. Add all that togther, plus a complete lack of need in our schools for each student to have the ability to get his daily pr0n fix when he should be learning geomtry, and you have some politicians way of getting relected, at the taxpayers' extreme expense.
I'm sorry, computers in schools right now barely get used, laptops will get misused, and mistreated, and eventually become worthless paperweights..... all at the taxpayers expense.
Call me a complainer, cause I am.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
...that no one who is saying that giving laptops to schools is pointless would be dancing in the aisles is they had been notebooks running Linux. Oh, wait, this is Slashdot. Silly me.
OK, so this is a reply to a lot of comments here. I've just been reading the article and noticing that about half of the people here have something negative to say about this.
This comment mentions that they aren't figuring out "pressing educational problems." I would personally say that they are: having been in schools where they had computers that were avaliable for everyone to use (even if they were just computer labs) they did many things to help the students, thereby alleviating some of the issues that seemed pressing at the time:
Sure, some students don't do their work. Some don't do it because they find it overly difficult, others because they aren't good at it, and some out of pure laziness (such as my brother). Others didn't do it because they found the pencil (or pen) and paper based approaches too difficult. Writing becomes much faster when sitting in front of a computer. Research becomes easier - Google is an excellent research tool (honestly - enter anything you happen to want and it comes up, and the most relevant stuff happens to be sitting right there). Much of everything seems to become easier because you aren't spending so much time dealing with the issues of, for example, copying an entire paper because you need to make 3 or 4 changes to it. Pop it up in your word processor, make the changes, print it out. Voila, done.
Of course they can't - they're human too. Do you expect everyone to know everything?
I'm sure it's expensive. But giving students access to technology provides greater benefits than it really costs - see #1. Sure, the machines aren't PC's. But does that mean that they aren't going to know how to use a PC when one is placed in front of them? Remember that most (all) of these students have been around computers (or at least have known of their existance, and have used a few) all of their life, and could most likely navigate their way through Windows 3.1 just as easily as they could through MacOS, and just as easily as they could through KDE. The fact that they're not PC's is a non-issue. And the fact that they happen to be running MacOS is also a non-issue. See here for someone else's comments on the topic. And as for support, it's been done before.
As for comments that claim that this whole thing is pointless, they aren't pointless. See #1 in the previous section for some reasons why they aren't pointless. Beyond that, some other reasons:
- "... vast majority of teachers don't know what to do with the computers in the computer lab down the hall. How is that going to be improved by putting them in every backpack?"
- "...computer literacy is important in the modern world, but so is writing and math..."
- Children who are intrinistically inclined to writing or other creative activities which can involve a computer will do more of it. All of a sudden, your hand doesn't get sore from holding a pencil for too long. The keyboard and mouse becomes your digital paintbrush and you can do whatever you want with it. And you didn't like what you just did? Oh well, that's what the undo button is for.
- Children who are intrinistically inclined towards mathematics can do everything that they would want to do with a computer (besides for things like chemistry and other things which still have physical reactions and the like, where, at least I personally prefer holding the instruments and doing everything else rather than having it simulated on the display), and will likely start writing their own programs because they can do it (and, since writing code requires some mathematical knowledge, as a result they will still get their math skills).
- "... recently that linked the rise of the modern word processor with the decline of writing skills in college students
..."
You aren't the only one. MacOS has always been a good operating system of choice for school desktops and laptops:Well, now the teachers, at the very least, no longer have to compete for lab time: I know that while I was in high school, and we had access to many computer labs, the teachers would generally find some use for them. English classes: we would go type our reports. It was easier for the teachers to read and grade (because they didn't have to deal with illegible handwriting, which computers didn't help, but it's still no worse than it was originally to begin with), and easier for us to type as opposed to write because we didn't have to go through the repetitive steps of write, copy, copy, copy, (wash-rinse-repeat, you get the idea).
Well, given that you really don't have computer literacy without either of the above in the first place...
And furthermore:
Maybe true. So go back to text editors. Or use older word processors that don't try doing everything for you.
Everything you would want to configure is right there. Open up the Control Panel, and you get access to everything that would need to be configured for the machine. That's not enough? Every school that I've ever been at that uses Apple systems (post-Mac of course) has plenty of software to safeguard the system from the students so that they don't do things to the system to make it unusable for everyone else.
Everything has a standard interface. Going from one program to another is easy, because they all follow the same UI guidelines. There isn't anything difficult to use about a Mac. They're designed for people who aren't necessarily the best with computers, but can be used by even the most knowledgeable people with little hassle and do the job well.
Keeping in mind that plenty of schools have them, there happens to be all kinds of educational software for the Mac. Nowhere near as much as for Windows or Linux. Sure, one could use Windows for it, but now you've got machines that are suitable for word processing (and if they're trying to use ancient hardware with the latest software, barely suitable for that even) and little more. Same goes for Linux.
And, sure, there is no need for computers in education, but not only are they helpful to the teachers (every teacher of mine from 9th grade on up used a computer for everything from preparing lesson plans to keeping students grades to doing presentations for the class), but they're also helpful to the students (see #1 in the first section of this comment).
Anyway, that whole long-winded comment is my 2c for this.
Dogma: Dead (mostly because your Karma ran it over)
You're probably thinking of FrEdWriter.... which, I believe, stood for Free Educational Writer. More info on this great program can be found here.
I remember typing papers up on that in 5th grade.... and being all happy that we'd gotten the latest version of ProDOS. Every once in a while I get a FrEdWriter flashback when I'm using pico... heh.
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"...and Maddest of all, to see Life as it Is, and not as it Should Be."