Slashdot Mirror
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
"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
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.
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...
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.