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Apple's School Days are Numbered
prostoalex writes "Business Week describes the current situation in the educational market, suggesting that Apple will lose its share among the high school teachers and students. The worst enemies, according to Business Week, are school superintendents. "We want a single platform," one of them said. "We're trying to get there using the carrot, or blackmail, or rewards, or whatever you call it.""
"We want a single platform." == "We want EVERY machine to be effected by any virus or worm that's going around." How 'bout doing some research first to see if supporting multiple platforms really does cost more?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Much is made of the Mac's durability, reliability, low TCO (when everything is factored in). Doesn't this have any appeal any more in education?
:P Of course, IT managers don't care about purdy, and I do feel inclined to, once again, make a comment about IT managers recommending what they know and what will keep them in a job...
:P
:s
Quoth the article:
It all comes back to what I call the lemming effect -- the willingness of people to follow blindly along, never questioning as they march in step with everyone else.
Ah, the age old problem. One might say Mac zealots are a similar breed, but I'd have thought that for education, a computer as damn simple as a Mac would be an enormous boon, especially when you think of the savings on support.
And they're so purdy...
Oh well, guess it's all downhill hereon. Still, he shoulda called Apple beleaguered...
iqu
Because, there are few classes where they actually teach the students the OS?
You can teach them to use photoshop or a number of other things on a Mac and they can go home and use their windows machine and still function in photoshop with no problem.
haven't we been doing the "Apple is dying" thing since the days before /.? Before teh Intarweb even? :oP
do() || do_not();
I hate to make the usual Apple enthusiast party-line complaint about the article, but it just seems like a whole lot of assumptions and FUD based on no real facts. Even the comments about the Maine program fail to mention the general budgetary hard times that have fallen on the states (who have to choose between cutting educational computer programs or healthcare, or raising taxes).
Is there anything to this other than more "Apple's about to go under!" talk that we've been hearing since 1984?
As an employer I looked for people who had a range of experience. These people would be able to cope when changes and challenges presented themselves. I remember even twenty years back putting someone one a computer to do some work and they said that they had only be taught how to use another software package and they were completely stumped by what I was asking them to do.
The same is true today. People trained to use MS Office and Windows are frequently hopeless when put in front of another OS. Someone who has learned how to use computers rather than a particular OS and package are much more flexible and know how to read a manual. They will be more productive in the long run than these MS trained drones.
For this reason I would encourage schools to look for less uniformity not more. Mac, UNIX, Linux, Windows, Be, even VMS, it's all good and the diversity helps stem the tide of malware. Whatever happened to the network being the computer? The client shouldn't matter, mix 'em up and we'll have more rounded students entering the workforce.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
But it does make sense to use Apple/BSD to educate kids for a Linux world. ;)
Seriously, education platform doesn't really matter. All of what 95% of what kids learn is how to type and use a word processor, and that'll easily translate to any platform.
The other 5% are smart enough to learn other platforms as they go.
Also, and this really ticks me off, education shouldn't be about memorizing facts, but about learning how to learn. That'll really prepare you for the world and do you good for the rest of your life, unlike learning how to use Windows to make iron-on transfers of american flags.
As Microsoft is so fond of saying. There is more to TCO then the initial purchase price. Microsoft insists that windows has a lower TCO despite the fact that Linux is free. It seems to me apple would save enough on admin costs alone to make up the difference.
Of course there is also the fact that you are educating the kids to learn a unix operating system. As Microsoft is so fond of pointing out Unix sysadmins get paid more then Windows sysadmins. Why educate your kids to get lower paid positions?
War is necrophilia.
Haddad writes about Macs in K-12 education, but he seems to be a little too anxious to make his point.
Haddad said: "Hear what Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison (Wis) school district, told the local Capital Times. He conceded that Macs outperform PCs, but he didn't care. "We want a single platform," he said. "We're trying to get there using the carrot, or blackmail, or rewards, or whatever you call it."
Not quite. Here's what the Capital Times printed:
Superintendent Art Rainwater acknowledged that in some cases, Macintosh computers outperform their competitors.
Slight difference there?
Haddad continued his imaginitive use of quotes further on: "Drama teacher Rebecca Jallings at Madison West High School, for one, is fighting Rainwater's effort to strip her classroom of Macs. She told the Capital Times that she finds them the best machines by far for editing video, an important tool in her acting class."
Jallings may have told the Capital Times that, but it never published it, at least in the version that appears on the Capital Times web archives.
As an aside, Jallings records the students on video and then puts it on the Mac. The Capital Times reports "Rebecca Jallings, a theater teacher at Madison West High School, shoots video of her students as they learn to act. If they're "doing that swaying thing again" during their monologue, she said, she rolls the footage on her Macintosh computer and can prove it to the student immediately."
Quite how that's superior to using a video camera alone is beyond me.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
"Why should my child work on a Mac in class when most people use PCs at home and in the office?"
To show them that there are other options besides Windows. What kids really learn on computers at school is how to use applications more than the OS itself... word processors, spreadshee software, video editing... all these things translate fairly easily between OSes. At least having kids "grow up" and learn on a Mac shows them that there are other choices out there for Operating Systems once they leave the nest. The fact that OSX is now BSD-based makes me all the more in favor of it... might get a few more kids interested in *nix/open-source development. If only the decision-makers had a broader vision of the future the say they're trying to make the best of.
I believe the New York Times had a piece on this last spring also. At any rate, it's too bad that Apple is slowly losing this battle too. I believe that they have had the suprerior product for years, but when only a fraction of homes have Macs, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the students to have to learn to use a Mac at school.
Case in point: I go to the University of Nebraska. They used to have Macs all over the school, but now they are all but phased out by PCs. Despite the fact that many of my classmates still have problems with papers getting lost of their floppies (floppies!) and have their computers "break down" on them, they continue to use PCs at home and at school. Just last Thursday I was at a workshop where we were all given iBooks to access a web page. The setup could not have been simpler, for the dock contained exactly three items: the finder, the applications folder, and the trash. And yet people still couldn't figure it out. Their home PCs were familiar and therefore simpler to use. And from their perspective, why should they have to use a computer at school that does not take their floppy disks and is different from their home PCs.
From an administrative standpoint, it is a lot cheaper (in the short run) to get a truckload of Dells for $400. They will break more often, they will be attacked by more worms, and they will continue to reinforce the age-old reliance on floppy disks, but the up-front cost is half that of an eMac, so it's a better solution.
I wish Apple still controlled the education market, and to a large degree, they still do. Schools keep their computers for years, but the new generation of educational PCs won't be stamped with my much-beloved Apple logo. For now Apple is still riding out their honeymoon with schools, but shortsighted thinking and short-term economics may make that a thing of the past.
http://www.walkingtaco.com
this is not a logical argument. you are comparing the cost of administrating a bunch of lcIIIs to the cost of administrating a bunch of new machines. you can not surf the internet with lcIIIs, much less do video editing. you should be comparing the cost of emacs vs. pcs, and i think that windows would prove to be cheaper in this case (atleast in the initial purchase, administration might be a bit more expensive).
i disagree, for years i used windows at school, and apple at home (i have my own PC now, oh the joys of counter strike! :D). If anything, it was a good thing, it taught me how to use both systems, to an extent. And i think that some ofmy moronic classmates could use that. Besides, since when does what kids want matter? If it saves money, go for it. A 700 dollar eMac minus (i think) 150 dollars in educational discount, plus fewer staff requirements, and less network downtime, is a far better arguement than,"kids like windows." Also, i think userfriendlyness is important, because i cant tell you how many dumb questions i've had to answer from teachers.
F*ck kids.
...at least not when you consider what ought to be the primary focus of any schoolsystem: to give the children knowledge and prepare them for a life in the real world. A school is not a place you keep your kids until they are old enought to move out, it's supposed to be a place your kids are prepared to become a contributing member of society.
One may or may not like it, but for most kinds of work out there, the Wintel-platform is what it is all about. Working with office-apps? Chances are that you're not using a Mac. Accessing a database? I'll guess ten to one that the clientend is a windowsapp.
As long as the subject matter isn't one where the Mac dominate in the real world, schools shouldn't "miseducate" (sorry, I couldn't think of a word that fitted better) the pupils by using machines from Apple - weither or not they are better / cheaper to maintain / has more fancy colours than a wintel machine. If they do, they are not doing our children any favours.
Towards the end of school, say the last couple of years before people graduate, I think it would be wise to have a "general OS" class, teaching the pupils the basic of not just the wintel or the MacOS, but also divers flavours of Linux, BDS, Contiki and whatnot. Show the pupils that there are many more operatingsystems out there, each with a distinct set of pros and cons, and make them make up their own mind what they will use at home; because when they start working they will have to use whatever the company has decided on.
PS: the line 'Here and there you'll still find an original Mac -- not to mention a few Apple IIs -- hard at work in classrooms' isn't really saying anything about the longvity of the mac - but it does say a whole lot about the lack of proper funding of the schools.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Sure, it's a bit more of a challenge if you have to be a sysadmin for both systems (like me), but if you're an end-user, what's the big deal?
IMNSHO, the knowledge you learn about the specific operating system (be it Windows, Mac OS, or *nix) is far less important than understanding how a computer functions. Once you have the concepts of computing down (again, I'm just talking about using them, not administering), you should be able to apply those skills to any computer, any platform.
As a university IT administrator, I can tell you with 100% certainty that other IT admins put PCs in because it's what they know, not because it's what is "best". There are indeed instances where a Windows-based system is the "best", but there are plenty of times where Windows is used for the admin's comfort when a Mac- or *nix-based computer would be a better choice.
Here's another question: does the sysadmin comfort with Wintel come from simple laziness, or is it that they're over-burdened with having to keep up with all the MS patches and system configuration madness that they're too exhausted to learn anything else? Hmmm.
Sounds like someone woke up on the wrong side of the Microsoft bed today. I don't care what kids get educated on, as long as they are learning.
What I was trying to portray in my post is that 99.97% of the educators out there would get a glazed over look when it comes to Linux, Unix, etc. I'm sad to say that all they want is that "cool, black Dell" and to be sent packing so that they can surf the web and check their email.
Besides, the whole idea of TCO in the world of information technology would baffle administrators who also want that "cool, black Dell" and to be sent packing so that they can surf the web and check their email. As long as it's initial purchase price is CHEAPER than everything else.
Sad to say, but true.
I teach in one of the largest public school districts in the states, and in my experience this article is both irrelevant and incorrect.
First off, as others have pointed out, the price difference is far from inconsequential. Even under a Preferred Purchasing agreement for Wintel that, IMO, is a slimy ripoff, we would still pay $200+ more for a low end Mac.
Second, Macs are used in precisely the places the article points out as strengths - video editing and multimedia. While my district in general and my school in particular are pretty crude technologically, we do have two small labs of Macs for Graphic Design and Publishing courses.
As for losing other opportunities in the building, Apple's got no one to blame for themselves. As behind as I think we are, we've still got attendance and other functions running on an NT domain. Why? Not because we're close-minded and bought-out (well, maybe we are, but not in this context). But because Apple all but abandoned the educational market years ago. We had the NT domain long before we moved critical functions to it. If Apple had halfway reasonable pricing and a larger educational program four years ago, running those functions on NT might not have been as simple a choice. The argument that "we've got to teach MS because that's what's out there" is powerful, though not as much so as some Slashdotters may suspect. But combine that with a preexisting NT network assembled during years of Apple's educational neglect, and it makes buying Macs for the classroom foolish.
Anyone know if parents are really complaining?
It would sound stupid, even for a non-technie daddy to throw a fit because there is a PC at home, but Macs at school
I hate Macs, BUT like many people in their early 20's now, my first exposure to computers were Apple II E's, IIGS's, and Mac's in elementary school...
My issue here is that I think it's stupid for parents to complain that kids are getting both systems...I think it's good, and on top of that, I think kids should get linux exposure too...if we really want our kids to be computer-savvy, shouldn't they be exposed to the various things people use as home computers? (Macs, PC (Windows), PC (Linux), PC (BSD), etc, etc)
To make your best buy emachine comparable you would have to add a 32 MB radeon for $129.50 and a flat CRT 17" like the emachines eview monitor 17F/17F2 for $209.99
Emachines PC $399.99
32MB Radeon $129.99
17" Flat CRT $209.99
Total $ 739.48
Cheapest emac $799
Difference is $59.50
Ok so $9.50 more than $50, You win!!!
I think to really make it more comparable Windows XP home should be replaced with XP pro to match MacOS X's networking features. And also the iApps. So there goes the difference in proce. The mac looks better even with a slower CPU.
The entire concept of running any decent-sized orginization on a single platform is crazy. Commercial vendors will always want to lock you into their platform. But heed these words well:
Salesmen have to sell whatever they're given.
Most companies will simply shoehorn all thier products into whatever market they can get thier hands on, just so they can compete. But any engineer worth his salt knows that things work best when you use the right tool for the right job.
The real issue here is that people are lazy. So when someone comes along with a song and dance about how all thier support problems are going to be solved by the One True Platform, they swallow the bullshit. Lazy IT people never follow up to figure out if that's actually true. And even if they do, and lazy managers ignore the IT people to make it look like they're 'managing' something by pretending to save money.
Because of Mac hardware architecture, the system specs compared to a PC are misleading. It's really not fair to compare based on megahertz alone because there are still things a 733 mac will do better than a 2ghz pentium.3 008,3339307,00.html
In about 2 minutes of searching on google I was able to find this, which compared a 733 mac to a 1.8ghz PC and the Mac came out on top in a couple of the tests. http://www.techtv.com/products/hardware/story/0,2
I don't know a whole lot about Macs but I do know that when you're used to using PCs, Mac system specs can be misleading. So it is very possible that truly comparable macs and PCs differ by about $50 in price.
I can't think of a good sig...
... for one thing courses in Spanish and French and German verge on being **TOTALLY* useless for people who already speak English.
... other languages are useless for Americans.
Ther rest of the *world* is learning English so the school system in English speaking countries could save vast amounts of money by simply halting language courses and firing the teachers as redundant: one world, one language
Since computers and spread sheets can do most mathematics and arithmetic we needed to do in thepast WHY TEACH MATHEMATICS??!! People should be left to fend for themselves (using the nwe PC's equipped with the latest most expensive versions of Excel) until university. In university one can learn about hte concepts behind mathematics without having *WASTED TIME* learning it for 10 years in school.
Clearly too much money is wasted in the US school system.
Now, I am a mac guy. And every time an article comes up, someone says they are cheaper, they aren't cheaper.
First off, we'll assume that a school is going to buy a computer from a manufacturer. We'll use Dell to compare.
The cheapest eMac isn't $800, it's $700. (Did you actually check the education store, since we are shopping for a school?)
It has an 800 Mhz G4, which is pretty respectable for a mac.
Comes with 128 MB RAM, 40 GB HD, a CD-ROM, 2 Firewire ports, 5 USB ports, built-in ethernet, 17-inch display and a Radeon 7500.
Heading over to Dell's education site, I found a Dimension 2400 for $689.90. It's got a 2.2 Ghz processor, 128 MB RAM, a 40 GB HD, CD-ROM, 6 USB ports, built-in ethernet, a 17-inch display, integrated video, 17-inch display and no speakers.
Both come with a mouse & keyboard, although the Dell does spring for an extra button.
I would say $10 is pretty close for about the same system. I was actually expecting the Dell to win by more, but have something silly like no network card. If you are buying machines without monitors, the Dell low-end trounces Apple; there isn't anything without a monitor at Apple for less that $1200.
My school ran macs all the way up until my senior year. Then they got rid of ALL the mac machines and got IBM Windows boxes. Saving money was not on their mind. What was then? They wanted to teach students how to use the most popular OS.
I'm sorry Mac people, but Windows is the most popular OS. The school wants to teach kids how to use the OS they're most likely to use in the workplace. Mac (especially OSX) may be better, but in most people's eyes, popular (meaning compatability) is better and this is the unfortunate but sad truth. Microsoft has simply cornered the market.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
because teaching children at that age how to use a particular platform is quite the opposite of what they should be doing. If they can't teach on any platform (that has the basic software support) then there's something wrong with the teaching.
I'm not sure what shocks me more, that my zealotry license has been revoked or that my comment was modded "informative"...
Imagine if every driving school in the US was to use nothing but Ford. Or every geometry class required kids to buy one particular make of compass, ruler and protractor. Or if every school was required to use exactly the same model and make of chair and table from one manufacturer only, even though independent studies had shown that these chairs and tables had a shorter life span and needed more frequent repairs than the alternatives. There might be problems.
The logical thing, as with other public procurement, would be to have an agreed open standard for school procurement, and allow suppliers to tender freely to meet that requirement. School IT administrators would be trained on the administration and maintenance of the base standard, and any supplier proposing any proprietary modifications would have to declare them and explain the on-costs for support staff training and additional maintenance.
The answer to the parents who complain that children are not being trained to use home PCs is, it is no more our job to teach kids how to use your PC than your dishwasher, your TV or your lawnmower.
Of course it won't happen. But it is the genuinely free market approach (i.e the customer decides the rules and the market delivers). What we have at the moment is literally fascism, i.e. a society in which the State works with and favors particular sections of industry, and in which officials corruptly work in both fields despite the conflict of interest. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a free, democratic, idealistic 1940s US to ride to the rescue any more.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Oh, come on! A $1700 iMac? Why coulnd't you bother to check the prices first? Apple Store sells iMacs starting at $1299 and eMacs starting at $799. For schools, that would be $1199 and $699 respectively, possibly less with a volume discount. And maybe not buying direct from Apple will lower the price further. And this includes a monitor, does the $500 Dell include this?
Btw, the cheapest Dell (with a monitor) I managed to find for a K12 institution in PA was $666. This model didn't have a modem (wich probably doesn't matter, though) or FireWire (probably more interesting).
> For a lab of word processing/basic app machines, like
>99% of the k-12 computers are
Stop.
You are assuming word processing/basic app machines, this is not necessarily a valid assumption--I've known schools that do digital video work or teach programs like Photoshop or even use programs such as Lightwave or Maya. These are *not* all that uncommon uses.
Also, on another note, macs now have Quartz Extreme and in 2005 Windows will offer "tiered" user experiences and offload the user interface to the graphics card, an integrated chipset is (likely) not going to fare as well with Longhorn.
>The monitor's a non-issue because a flat picture tube is
>only (marginally) beneficial to people who are using it day
>in and day out.
1) It is better. Whether it is worth paying for is in question, but it is better.
2) If you find another CRT, make sure the quality is good, I've seen monitors in some HS's which were so low-quality they hurt they eyes to even glance at.
>You don't need the networking features of XP pro because
>once again, you're in an environment where you just need
>to crank out texts.
XP Pro is also useful to programmers et al. Programming tools are free with the mac, they are not with the PC, so if you teach AP (or even basic) computer science you are going to need to fork over more for the PC.
You are also looking at Windows 2003 Server, which costs a hell of a lot more. MacOS X's unlimited client license is your friend.
> The iApps are similarly worthless for a great deal of the
>market we're talking about, and aren't a great added
>value.
They still present an added value that (especially with iMovie/iDVD) I can certainly see schools being willing to pick up on.
iPhoto+iTunes, which can be used to create image slide shows and set them to music, also have a good bit of classroom utility.
>So, you're still left with spending several hundred dollars
>more for a comparable emac.
Non-comparable emac, you mean. The school may not see the additional utility as being worth it, or they may, but that is their concern.
>Add to the fact that the PC's non-integrated monitor
>leads to cost savings down the road as one doesn't have
>to replace the monitor at the same time as the rest of the
>system, and the PC is clearly a better deal.
If you are going to factor this in you might as well factor in as well that the Mac is going to cost less to support.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Myself, I'm 25, and when I was in grade school, the Apple II series was a computer I used a lot, and I still love Logo. I would love for kids to still learn to program in BASIC using a fun program like Logo, but now it seems that basic computer knowledge needs to be with MS Office applications instead.
Unfortunately, there is a much higher number of drones than geeks, and the drones need to learn to use whatever their future employers tell them to use. Really, it doesn't bother me as much to hear that Macs are losing ground in grade schools as much as it bothers me that crossplatform apps like OpenOffice aren't gaining ground.
As far as Macs in education, I don't forsee Macs losing any ground in higher education, where things are more specialized. Macs are becoming a very attractive platform for computer science students, since it's a UNIX environment but it's easy to use, meaning lot less lost time learning to fix things that aren't part of the class. And the Mac has never lost its appeal to graphics and video people either.
I would prefer to see a Mac in the place of every Windows machine out there, but that won't happen unless that MS monopoly gets broken up. Right now, it's more important that open source applications succeed. If OpenOffice was the standard, there wouldn't be a such push to go to MS Windows.
Using the Mac as an example, we should see that the "desktop experience" isn't going to win the mass market share. Using Linux as an example, we should see that "security and reliability" aren't going to win it either. Right now, if we want a good OS to beat the giant, we should focus on the apps before the OS.
The premise of the article is ridiculous. The entire premise of people needing to learn the programs the "industry" uses is ridiculous. If you work somewhere you have to learn the software your job requires, not infrequently do businesses use software you've never seen before working there.
I had to go downtown to the Hall of Justice one afternoon to pick up some paperwork. Waiting for the clerk to find the file I needed I was looking around the office. On the clerks desk I noticed an X terminal. Some sort of database search program was open on the screen. When the clerk came back I asked her about it and she just knew the box was a "terminal" and it ran her database software. Way back when my city signed a contract with Sun for a bunch of mainframes so I'm betting the terminal was probably hooked up to a Sun mainframe.
That clerk was using a Unix system and X11. It is entirely likely at home she had a PC with Windows running on it. She was a bit older than me so it is even more likely she had never seen a computer in school. She had never used a computer before and was using SunOS daily. Did she know anything about it? Judging from the way she looked at me when I questioned her she didn't seem to know much if anything about the terminal or the mainframe driving it. She was using the terminal because she was trained to click the right buttons on the database app and type the right things in the right spots. Anyone who isn't a complete moron could be taught the same thing.
At a publisher I worked for the pre-press office consisted of about twenty eight Macs. They were all running a program specifically written to layout and work with advertisements. Being as the program has little use outside of pre-press departments dealing with advertisement composing even the most advanced users in the office did't have it at home. I'd be really suprised if any school had ever taught that application specifically.
Several of the people in the office had PCs at homes. All of the advanced (well paid) artists had Macs at home with most of the software in the office - Photoshop, Illustrator, XPress. My friend had a PC at home with those apps on it. At work he used a G4 PowerMac. Some of the people there while very nice people were computer dummies. They were however still able to use a rather purpose specific graphic design application, a custom written database system, and a Wyse terminal in the corner for order processing.
The idea that people can't figure out how to use a PC because they were taught on Macs in school is simply absurd. If you understand basic computing concepts like clicking bottons on a mouse and typing things on a keyboard you can be trained to use just about anything. Thinking you're somehow going to train third graders useful or even applicable computer skills is an obscenely myopic idea. It would be at least ten years before a third grader ever really needed to use a computer in a professional capacity.
Ten years ago DOS was all the rage and networks were voodoo. Teaching a third grader how to do everything in DOS would not be much help to them in today's job market. The Excel XP tips, tricks, and shortcuts will be equally useless in another ten years. What is important is teaching people the concepts of using computers. With the knowlege of concepts anybody can pick up the specifics pretty quickly.
The pre-press workers and clerk I mentioned had been trained to use systems they were entirely unfamiliar with. They understood enough however to know what a keyboard and mouse were for. They were able to grasp the concept that clicking on-screen widgets would cause the program to do things. People who could not so much shut down there computers without help were able to lay out very nice looking advertisements. It is a shame people want public schools to become vocational daycare for minors.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I strongly suspect you are a troll, but here goes.
First: Touch typing is a critical skill in most of today's society.
Second: Last I heard Dijkstra's _grad_ students took a minimum of 6-7 years to graduate with their Ph.Ds.
Second (a): If you are gong to learn Computer Science, a little time working without a language or a computer can be very useful. If you are going to be an Chemist or an Engineer, but need a little programming, it is probably best if you learn it on a computer a little more rapidly (albeit it should be a language like Python, not C++, but that's another matter).
Third: Office Apps, such as the ability to use word or excel, or put together a presentation in powerpoint, are exceedingly important when you get to college.
Fourth: There is a broader skill set requirement in many fields, and programs that are required to use them. It is becomming increasingly common to cover things like Photoshop in school--I consider this a good trend.
Fifth: Comp Sci AP. You generally get one semester/year to teach this, better make sure you do it well.
Sixth: There are now programs to help teachers teach their classes more effectively. One program lets students self-pace in mathematics, making them much more effective, and it allows one teacher to teach more students and to teach them all more effectively than he/she could before (seriously, I've seen the results out of these programs and the student's comments as well).
Seventh: "Hasn't been shown to improve learning" is incorrect--I've spoken to many teachers who have found it a useful aid in teaching basic english (one teacher used a dictionary with a built in vocalizer to help students with definitions and pronunciations of different words--that way she needed less involvement).
Eighth: Most people are basically comptuer illititerate. With the number of jobs/COLLEGES that prefer basic computer literacy, it is a *good thing* to cover this in HS (or before).
Ninth: LD students. I am twice-exceptional and have dysgraphia. Through being an accomplished touch typist, I can overcome this and take lecture notes faster and more completely than most people can write them out.
Tenth: Handwritten assignments vs. Typewritten assignments. I have never seen a college professor accept a handwritten paper. Most college applications I looked at even specified typewritten assignments, and this was some years ago.
I can go on, and on, and on if you would prefer....
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I think we have this the wrong way round. Surely we should be teaching children how to use a computer and not how to use Microsoft Whatever (TM).
It'll be great for them in 10 years when some other company or consortium is producing the dominant operating system and all those hours of IT classes will be for absolutely nothing.
I don't know what they're teaching kids these days, but a word processor is a word processor and a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet no matter what it says on the box or what operating system it uses. Shouldn't they be teaching people to look beyond the Microsoft Excel toolbar and realise that when it boils down to it, practically all these programs do the same thing? Sure perhaps OpenOffice.org doesn't do pivot tables like Microsoft Excel does them. But I have yet to see a school that teaches kids how to do pivot tables.
Teaching them exclusively on one platform leads to the possibility of giving them a false sense of intuitiveness. Just because a you can't find C:\ or the Start Menu doesn't mean a platform is harder to use - unfortunately this is what many people seem to believe these days.
If taught right, you should be able to pick up the basics of pretty much any program or operating system in about an hour.
Better still, rather than teaching kids the computer equivalent of rote formula plugging, how about actually teaching them about computing so that they aren't tied to a particular system?
Remeber "Apple ][ Forever"?
This was the advertising slogan Apple used to boost flagging sales 'back in the day'. So, many a teacher lobbied the school district to keep buying Apple ]['s. These educators lost face.
How about the Newton eMate? It was sold to schools as a way to put low cost, hard to break, uniform computers in the schools. Many a teacher lobbied to make it part of the school district plans. Not only did these teachers loose face over the cancellation, but Apple knew this, and was willing to lie to educators. The Newton was axed on Feb 27th, but during the March national educators convention, Apple staffers gave a speech refering to the Newton as "A very important part of their product line."
Then you have Micheal Spindler (Short time CEO after Scully) who said "We are committed to enhancing shareholder value." This was the formal announcement of the continuation of the price premium on Macs - gouging of the customer.
The memory of being shafted by Apple is long in education. Why would you buy a product form a company with a history of shafting its customers?
Jobs himself does not understand the education market. His NeXT computer was to be sold to schools. Instead, due to the great engineering of the NeXTSTEP environment, the NeXT was popular in wall street and the NSA because of faster turn around time from idea to code, meaning quicker results, to give both orginizations competitive advantage. To further support the cluelessness of Jobs WRT the marketing of computers I will remind you of the 1986 Seybold speech where Jobs said "Publishing is a niche market for Apple and will be gone in 2 years." (Turns out that Education didn't move to the mac in droves, and that publishing is what kept Apple afloat.)
On one platform, you can:
Thorough study of Mac OS X can land a student a $100k+ job. Thorough study of Microsoft platforms gets a student an MCSE and $8.50/hr.
School administrators, do not cripple your students with Microsoft products.
This is exactly true. Come on People kids are pretty smart when it comes to tech. "Hey little Johnny go help your mother plugin the VCR". Im sure they will be fine. Its not like its hard to figure out how to type a Word document, and if they don't know, it wont take but a few minutes to show them. The hiring process will not include questions out previous knowledge in operating systems, so it will not be an issue. Besides what happens if they DO go to a buisness that has macs?
#1 IT is not a high priority in schools.
#2 The amount of work performed supporting dual networks is usually less because when worms like slammer, etc hit you only have to patch 1/2 the computers instead of all. Checking for the minute by minute patches comming out of MS makes administrating a Windows network exponentially more difficult than a Mac network or a partial Mac/Windows network.
I am the sysadmin for my small company (in addition to being a software engineer and dba) and we run Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris boxes. Guess which ones I have to check daily? Guess which ones have 180+ days of up time? Guess which ones have a better TCO.
Maybe next time you should do your research. Or learn to be a better admin.
In some ways, Apple sucks. If schools were to lose just one platform, it should be Microsoft. If schools were to switch to a monoculture, it should be a Linux distribution (for the felxibility that gives). However, I firmly believe that schools should teach as many systems as practical for the important lessons to be learned therein, including the Greatest PERL Lesson: TMTOWTDI. (-: Note that I say this as a near-non-PERL-programmer :-).
The Greatest PERL Lesson is a more important thing to know (not just hear occasionally) than most if not all of the entire high-school courses I can remember.
Schools really should be teaching principles, not single-obsolete-system recipes. That way when the systems they were taught on are obsolete, the students aren't left high and dry, a herd of one-trick ponies - and The Greatest PERL Lesson will continue to serve them well in area's they not yet faced, perhaps in areas that don't yet exist. The "How to produce greeting cards in MS-Publisher 101" course won't even make a dent in that.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
... they need some new books.
It amazes me that educated people get all up in arms about the computers in their kids schools. These are tools people!
Reliance on computers in the classroom is turning academic programs into vocational ones. Mac? Windows? Linux? Who cares! Teach kids concepts not tasks.
Some kids are learning how to fix carburators over in auto shop (for those schools where these things still exist) while other kids are in physics class learning how the internal combustion engine works. The kids in auto shop can apply that knowledge, pretty much just to fixing carberators.
Similarly if we teach kids to accomplish specific tasks on specific hardware on specific software, that's pretty much all they'll be able to do with it.
I've worked with some people who received serveral Cisco certifications without ever having touched a simulator much less a router. They had a far better conceptual understanding of what was going on and learned new skills and tasks very quickly as a result.
School should be about learning how to learn. I know that this is increasingly no longer the case, but if it your goal is learning, rather than training, non-education market-share is completely irrelevant.
The purpose of having computers in the classroom is not to teach kids how to use computers, but instead to use computers to teach kids how to do all kinds of other things. I think it will be a sad day when the purpose of school is to prepare kids for clerical jobs.
If you stick a young child in front of a PC, they're lost. If an older child wants to do anything remotely advanced on a PC, they're thwarted and frustrated. Half the time will be spent learning to use Windows, rather than learning things like reading.
And if we do want to prepare children for the real world, using Windows they'll learn nothing about computer concepts, because everything is hidden from the user. If a kid uses some Unix variant - Linux or OSX - they're going to be a lot more prepared for doing real computing work than if they grew up using Windows.
The problem with IT admins, in my opinion, and I will probably be flamed for this, is that they're IT admins. They're not computer scientists, they're not engineers, they probably didn't go to University. As such, they don't really know much about computing in general, instead usually knowing only how to administer a certain OS, and maybe if they're lucky, a couple of OSes. Obviously someone who only knows how to use PCs is not going to go out and buy a pile of Linux or Mac boxes.
One thing I have noticed over the past number of years in forums and in chats is that very many (by no means all, but very many) school age people with English as a first language simply can't spell. I suppose I could rant on about the fact that my schooling, without computers at all, was better and that students actually learned skills that encouraged thinking, such as being able to do simple calculations on paper or in one's head, but I won't because I don't really know the answer. I do see my own ability to spell has receeded in recent years, and my ability to do quick, off the cuff calculations has dwindled but that might as well be age as well as heavy computer use.
Most if not all students these days write their essays on computers and having to write everything on paper would take far too much time. The world has changed and life without computers would be all but impossible these days, irrespective or whether they are Macs or PCs. It definitely is true that most businesses use Windows and knowledge of Office is worthwhile, but will this be true in 10 or 15 years time? There is a good chance that much of the developing world and a good portion of the developed world will be using Linux by then, which will always be cheaper than Windows, and definitely will have a much larger share of business life by then. And OSX, as a Unix like platform, is better shaped to fit in there than Windows, which hasn't had any good press for a long time.
I work in the fifth largest district in the US. The second largest accredited district. At the top are IBM AS400 machines keeping the data. Under that there is a mixed enviornment. The so-called network has a silly bunch of MS boxes groaning under the email load and running in circles trying to keep up with the traffic. Thank BOB for Cisco. Let me hear it!
Points:
(1) There is really no motivation to save money. Box cost is irrelevant.
(2) During the bidding, undercuts do occur to contradict this statement. (see number 6 for service contract ad ex)
(3) Most students are being taught applications because most educators are without *clue*
(4) Teaching people the right things will always be like swimming against the tide.
(5) Users can and will use anything that gets the job done.
(6) My lab was set up last week with 25 already obsolete G4 machines by a vendor who installed OS X 1.1 (Am I pissed?)
(7) I've been using OS X for two years and the official support from downtown is non-existant. Thank BOB my support people are simply wonderful and let me do what I want.
(8) The people downtown still hire Pascal programmers.
(9) School districts are 80% elementary, 15% middle, and 5% high school. Don't forget the guys at the Taj Mahal downtown. Oops, that's the county to the North. Ours live in the Crystal Tower. So how are decisions made you ask, given that distribution of personnel? School districts are as varied as any other business. Mine consists of hundreds of individual schools. Some have just a few. There is a group in North Florida that pool their IT needs. Some can and should be broken up under anti-monopoly laws. *coughnameyourfavoritecough*
Conclusion?? sadly, none. Obviously the population of the world will do what it is told to a degree. Then it will get irritated and shrug off whatever is bothering it. It is a huge mindless beast confronted by the other huge mindless beast of Education.
Enterprising companies will make money off foolish behavior. Wonderful smart and loving people will try to prepare the latest crop of geeks for eventual geekdom. They are such unruly little buggers. Should we keep them in the same classes with the rest of humanity?
Can I offend anyone else? Please email me with suggestions.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
I think many people here are missing the point of computers in schoolwork these days. Back when our generation was in elementary school, the few computers the schools had were there primarily to teach kids about computers.
But times have changed, and that's no longer the focus.
Those kids in Maine didn't get an iBook each just to learn how to use an iBook. They got the laptops to use them in class, to google up facts, to write essays, to edit short video presentations.
It's not about learning to use a computer. Believe me, the 10-year-olds of today are so computer savvy that they don't need a mouse usage primer. And if they later in life encounter a system with the widgets in slightly different places, the difference is trivial enough to be completely inconsequential to them.
Marko Karppinen
in jr/highschool, my home computer was a Commodore Vic20/C64. in school we only used Apple IIc's. I was one of the very few who could do any "homework" for the computer class because of the fact the Commodores were BASIC. the others in class either didnt have a home computer or they were Wintel/DOS machines(yes, they had QBasic, but c'mon, that wasnt real BASIC!
:(
get to college in fall 90, and the instructor and most students waere so happy that they had a system running a GUI(Windows) as it was brand new(a horrible kludge compared to even GEOS!). he couldnt understand that I knew so much about computers...he thought they were one of the few to ever have a GUI. he didnt grasp the fact that both Commodore and Apple had GUIs YEARS before Windows.
when I explained this to him, he questioned the ability to cross platforms...he couldnt grasp that all GUIS were the same...point/click, drag/drop.
in his mind it was Windows only/allways, and if you didnt use Windows you would never succeed in the "world".
needlesss to say I was bored silly for my entire time in college with exception to the COBOL/PASCAL classes...wish I had taken those classes more to heart
nowadays at work, all I ever see is companies miserable with Windows and looking for alternatives to ease their headaches.
they dont care if they end up with a mixed network because they know the systems will integrate regardless.
in my experience, the more you know about different platforms, the farther you will go. getting stuck in a rut is the quickest way to becoming "dumb".
the history of the world
As a school library information specialist, I'm working in the trenches of this issue, and I have three observations:
1.) When I started in this position, I laughed at all the Macs we had in our school (we had 3-1 mac to pc ratio). I called the Macs "toy computers". I'd only ever used Wintel machines, and was basically uncomfortable with the idea of having to fix them. I soon learned, however, that they required less fixing than the x86 machines, which allowed me to focus on my real job-- teaching students. It's the rare school that has in-house dedicated tech support. Time spent fixing PC's is time not spent teaching by librarians and computer lab instructors.
2.) Because of budget cuts (and, to be frank, a financial scandal in the district tech department), we've been unable to upgrade more than a handful of machines in the last six years. That means our students are still using LC575s and PowerMac 5400s. These are slow machines that have a hard time running today's software and browsing today's internet-- but they're still running. We don't have even a single Wintel machine left from that era. They've all died.
3.) Our principal has recently gotten a new black Dell-- and he's convinced it's better than any Apple machine. Why? Because it's so much faster than our LC575s and 5400s! Our teachers say the same thing-- they have newish Dells at home, and so they know that PCs are faster than Macs. The fact that they're comparing 7 year old Macs with new Dells doesn't seem to have occured to them! None of them have ever used a modern Mac-- we have two bondi blue iMacs, and everyone refers to them as "the new macs."
Apple makes good computers. Too good. Our legacy Macs are still running, and so are unfairly being compared against modern Dells. This is feeding the push to go all Wintel in our district.
Kids should know what computing is, what a word processor is, filesystems, programs, operating systems, interfaces, what makes your average computer, how to recognize one and perhaps its type, etc...
If they see only one computer, then they make many assumptions that will hurt them later on.
These things only become evident when more than one platform is used.
That platform could be a PC running more than one OS, so this does not exactly support Apple however.
Every kid should be equipped to understand on a basic level what computing means, not just what a particular computer happens to do. We have had these machines in our culture long enough for these bits of information to become part of the body of common knowledge. If these things do not happen during K-12 then something very clearly is wrong with the teaching.
Unless, we all want to accept the fact that Redmond Washington is the authority on computing...
I for one don't. I also don't want my kids to either.
Blogging because I can...
One more comment before I leave for the day.
Platforms and programs make no difference teachers! I have a hell of a time driving this point home with them. Why are you so concerned about teaching the latest version of Office? By the time they graduate they will see a different version in the work industry. What you should understand is that you should teach them concepts, not a program.
Some bitch because I have photoshop elements in the labs and they want photoshop. Let's see, $21 per license versus $150? Guess which wins folks? I tell them once the students learn the CONCEPTS of correctly adjusting color balance and brightness/contrast it doesn't make any difference what program they use in the industry. They would do just fine using an open source Linux graphics app.
I tried to sell our IT director on moving from office to openoffice to save lots of money. His response was that people want MS office and it's not worth the bitching we'll hear. Grrrr! I could really use that money we would save on licensing to buy a new RAID and a cluster.
I don't think the original post in this thread is off-topic at all. Here's why:
teachers in category 2 are delighted by this kind of challenge.
I'm afraid the current push for standardized testing and the over-administration of teachers is quickly clearing our schools of this kind of teacher.
My mom has just retired early (59) out of frustration because she can no longer teach in a way that's meaningful. She taught for 35 years as a public kindergarten teacher. She worked at school from 8 am until 5 pm, at-home lesson planning at least an hour and a half every night, and at least 3 or 4 hours every Sunday (my entire childhood). She had her kids doing creative mathematics and writing their own (albeit short) stories and illustrating their books by the end of the year.
Then the mandatory standardized testing started a few years back and the district locked down all of the ways she can teach. She has to teach only from textbooks and workbooks and give these five year olds frequent standardized tests. The kids must earn a letter grade at the end of the year. There are classroom observers that come in frequently that will downgrade the school if she isn't teaching according to this new curriculum. No more story reading. No more creative mathematics and learning about patterns with unifix cubes. No more buddy projects with the 4th graders who would come in for additional creative learning time. It's all gone. My mom's students always loved school at the end of the year and couldn't wait for first grade. Now they all hate school and much of my mom's job is keeping them on task when they're bored out of their skulls.
My mom was the most dedicated teacher I have ever known. She easily worked 55 hours a week for the duration of her career and has a masters in early childhood education and a certificate in bilingual education. Teachers like my mom are no longer welcome in the public school classrooms of America.
It's pretty clear that we're in the midst of the corporatization of our public school systems. Textbook conglomerates like Houton Mifflin and McGraw-Hill are making an absolute fortune off of the recent changes. Not surprisingly, they were also the companies who sponsored the educational studies that were used by legislators to push for these changes. Is it any wonder that a company like Apple would get pushed out of such an environment?
I'm a friend of a friend of the working class.
I agree that one of the main problems with the eMac is expense. The integrated monitor is also a major problem for most IT departments, they already have an investment in a bunch of monitors, why can't they use those? And contrary to most people's statements here, there are two things that everyone is going to do with these machines that matter: word-process and surf the web. Yes, schools teach photoshop and maya and whatever else. However, it is easier for Apple to sell them specialized hardware in fields where they are strong. Apple gets screwed by not having all of those cheap word-processing machines. Once cheap Windows boxes start taking over that field the administrators start thinking how to get them to do everything.
Ok, fighting fire with Fire...
On the PC box I have:
Windows, Linux (essentially all flavours), BSD's (Free, Open, etc essentially all flavours), GNU Hurd, OS/2, AtheOS, BeOS (many flavours), Plan9, Minix, QNX, Solaris, etc...
The list goes on for miles and miles and miles... The x86 instruction set is king, it has won hands down. That I think is the essential problem of OS-X. OS-X is a great OS. It is what many OS's should be. Because it is only available of PPC, it becomes a secondary OS.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
So you say your high school is almost all Windows because "People know how to use [Windows]."
You then go on to say that computers are like cars-- cars have the brake, gas, shifter, and steering wheel. You assert that if someone can drive one car, they can drive practically any car because they have a grasp of the concepts of its operation.
So by your own argument, anyone who knows how to use Windows should be able to effectively use a Mac or Linux (with GUI) system with a minimum of effort, because it's just a GUI with applications, operated by a mouse and keyboard-- just like Windows. Yet your position appears to be just the opposite, that Windows is what should be used/taught in schools because that's "the dominant operating system on desktops today" and that "is what will be used in whatever their future job is" (I guess none of your classmates are heading for careers in the media, then).
An education is about teaching concepts and reasoning, so the accumulated knowledge can be applied in many situations. Teaching a kid how to use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office instead of teaching them how to operate a computer and basic productivity applications is to do that kid a disservice.
Example: Someone who graduated high school 10 years ago was probably taught DOS and/or Windows 3.x. By the time the class of 1993 made it out of college, however, those had been supplanted by 95 and NT, which were *completely* different-- any Windows 3.x-specific knowledge was almost completely wasted. But the basic knowledge of using a GUI and applications was still viable.
~Philly
One thing that has always amazed me is how much the elementary school teachers have integrated their Macintosh computers into their curriculum. Those 1995 Apple Macs are still in use in their classrooms today and are still play a key role in the students' coursework. High school teachers in the same district that have had new computers every 2-3 years rarely touch their computers. Computers are what they tell their students to go use when they want to right a paper. Their computers play no role whatsoever in the classroom even when they have a much newer, much more powerful computer than their primary education counterparts. It baffles me sometimes. Strike that. It baffles me all the time. If the elementary school had only half the IT budget the high school gets, the elementary students would graduate from 6th grade with an even richer technology experience. Of course they would be sorely disappointed once they reached junior high at the other school. Still I think it would benefit them in the long run.
I can understand how an administrator can initially believe Macs are sub-par. What I don't understand is how a person like that who obviously doesn't have an open mind can stay in a key position such as that over an educational institution. Don't get me wrong. I do think PCs have an intrigal part of a child's education. I also think that Macs have just as equal a part in their education and I don't see how administrators in education can be so short-sighted that they can't see that.
You fail to mention that the computer or system you use in school will most likely be nothing even close to what you'll be using 10 years or more later in your working place (unless you're lucky enough to have chosen UNIX).
I learned computers on a Schneider CPC (an Armstrad clone). Nobody even knows this computer nowadays, or even 13 years ago, when I got my first job. Your post is pointless.
When learning a Mac running OS X, people at least have a chance to learn some UNIX basics, which might actually be worth something even in the future.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.