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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.""
Apple was making a lot of money from the education, I don`t think they will lose it though. I know they are losing a lot of ground but in retrospect they have not been as actively persuing it as they have other markets. Perhaps Apple has a trick up its sleeve for schools. I know where I used to work there was a couple of die hard Apple fans in the tech departement that will now allow the school to be taken over by PCs. :D
http://w1.901.telia.com/~u90121759/ahem.JPG
Look cloesely at the "sponsorship announcement" next to the article.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
So, the deal is that the school IT folks have been sold down the river on the concept that a single platform will save them money. Furthermore, they have been sold on the concept that Windows will save them money.
The reality is quite different. For example, a good friend of mine's wife is a grade school teacher. Their school last year had a bunch of LCIII's and IIsi's that they wanted to replace with new Macs. The district IT said no, and they would be replaced with Wintel based machines. So, not only did the Macs work with only a single teacher administering them for over ten years on his own time, they now have a staff of four administering the Wintel machines, their costs have gone up 600% for administration alone and the district tells them the machines will be replaced in four years.
I ask you. How has this scenario saved the district, the school or the taxpayer any money? Administration costs have skyrocketed and the computers will have to be replaced more often. Rather as Cringley and others have stated, it sounds like a consipiracy to maintain IT jobs and expand their budget.
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Most students could easily complete everything up to a highschool level education using any computing platform: Windows, Linux, or Mac OS. Windows is self-perpetuating: we teach Windows because it's popular, it's popular because it's what people know. It's a shame it's gotten to this state of affairs. Even if a single platform is more cost effective to maintain than a mixed environment moving to Linux or BSD on the existing x86 hardware in a school would be cheaper than sticking with Windows licensing for Windows, Office, NT Server and on the next hardware upgrade cycle moving to Macintosh systems (if that's deamed to be the best move) or upgrading the x86 systems already there. I think a two major reasons for the standardization on Windows has to do with the administrators trying to secure their employment (weekly patches = overtime) and the fear of maintaining something they aren't familar with.
The techs at most public schools are dumbasses. It's sad but true. (I apologize if you are a tech at a school that doesn't follow this trend. Keep up the good work.)
My entire school's network accesses the web over one of two T1 lines. Rather than a load-balancing Linux server, they have two 80486 systems with 32mb apiece running illegally purchased copies of NT4, with only service pack 2.
The school's techs worked for 3 damn weeks trying to get an iMac G4 on the school network. Every printer in the school is shared, while none of them have passwords. Every teacher's computer is shared, while none of them have passwords. Hell, the records server's Administrator password is the initials of the school!
In the middle of a budget crisis(we'll go broke Oct 1), the school bought 40+ Athlon computers.
Macs are going out of schools. It's not because OS X is any harder to use (perfect blend of idiot friendliness and power), but rather because idiot-proofing is now being winshit compatible.
Apple computers will always be used in video editing classes, and PCs have wormed their way into the rest of the school years ago. Apple lost the battle during System 7, it's time to move on and accept that the world at large can't be steered by a better product. If they focus on the informed consumers and professionals, they'll survive and flourish.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Schools can only afford low end tech salaries, and thus they mostly get one of the flood of ignorant MSCE sheep. And it doen't take much experience to realize how fanatical they are about Microsoft.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
When I went to high school, we used TRS-80's. At home, I used an Apple II In college, the net was VAX . Later, I used the product of a company that will go unnamed and unlinked. Recently (and for the past half-decade) I used linux because what I learned was the idea, not the platform. Don't underestimate the curiosity and inquisitiveness of young humans. They are amazing creatures.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
I remember my high school computer teacher in 1991 telling us that we needed to learn DOS and Wordperfect 5.1 because "that's what they use in industry." He always said "industry" as if it was this mythical, magical place, the one place where people paid for computer skills, the monolithic arbiter of everything good and meaningless.
Of course, I used a Mac. And his explanations about our need for DOS seemed strange. We used WordPerfect in computer class, and I wrote my English, Biology, and History papers at home in MacWrite and PageMaker. I learned how to program a simple ASCII charting program in GW-BASIC at school, then went home and wrote a grade record tracking program in HyperCard.
I was, of course, told that my efforts were wasted, because "industry" didn't use Macs. That turned out to be mostly true. But it seemed awfully strange, a year later, taking the second "advanced" computer course to be using Windows, the "future" of the industry and finding myself completely bored to tears. I wrote a simple word processor in C in my spare time from samples in a Mac programming book. The geeks in my school never learned from Windows. They used Macs or they used DOS, and most everybody respected the motive, if not the platform. I learned more from the Mac geeks, though. They just seemed to have more fun, without having to rely on "games."
When the SoftArc FirstClass bulletin board/email system was really hitting its stride in 1993, I proposed to the school principal and the head of the computer program the idea of creating a school-wide bulletin board hooked up to OneNet and then, eventually, the Internet. I demoed it on my Mac IIsi. All they could see was the Mac. "They don't use Macs in industry," the computer teacher said. "PCs don't do graphics like that," the principal said. It was all very disappointing. I was trying to point out the possibilities of interaction. All they saw was something that they couldn't do (they could, but they just didn't know) with their Intel-Microsoft computers. I learned that day that it didn't take a lot of imagination to be a teacher or an administrator, and that's why I sift dumpsters for food and clothing now, rather than teach.
it's not in the classrooms. That's the tricky part. You don't see the waste that goes on in public school districts because it's off limits even for the teachers. You walk into the classroom and you see this pathetic scene and you think, god these people need money bad. And they do, but that doesn't mean there isn't extravagant waste. It's just that you're not permitted to see it.
The waste is at the district level, not the classrooms. And the worst offenders are usually the district network admins why are owned by MS at the vast majority of American K-12 schools.
In large part, this district level administrative waste is the major motive for the charter school initiative.
It's all rather insidious though because if you ask for more information, you won't get anywhere for so-called security reasons. That's security like as in job security. Call it the corporate/educational complex if you will.
The refutation I've also heard to this is along a slightly different line, but equally valid: XP is nothing like Windows 95 is nothing like Windows 3.1. OS X is nothing like OS 9, which is fundamentally different than OS 7.
That's been in the last 10 years. A kid is trained on Windows XP in high school (or even grade school or middle school!) and the operating system is going to be fundamentally different--even if they are still using "Windows" or "MacOS"--by the time they are out of college.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I work at the IT office of a state-run public university that focuses on research. UMBC's 24-hour student computer labs contain hundreds of terminals with a variety of hardware/OS configurations (PCs, Macs [ranging from G3/4s to eMacs] and a smattering of SGI Indigos/Indys dating back to the mid 90's, when the state budget allowed for such purchases).
Gradually, our student terminals -- PCs and Mac -- are shifting towards a "common platform": Unix. Our Macs are being upgraded to OSX, and each PC (most are Dell Optiplex GX-110s, GX150s and newer 270s) can be booted into either Windows 2000 or a customized RedHat lab image.
Insects and Grafitti Photos
(This is slightly off-topic, but I just want to get this off my chest)
I don't know about you but I am a lecturer at university level (I'm posting AC because some of my students might recognize me) and for the last five years I've observed a gradual decline in the motivation and, in particular,
They come to the class and sit there like empty receptacles I am supposed to fill in with information that'll be on the exam. If I digress and try to tell them something extra-curricular (like showing photos from my latest trip to the ALS) they'll scream bloody murder (or first they'll ask if this will be on the exam and if it's not they'll scream bloody murder).
You try to ask them questions and you get blank looks. Some students look at each other as if they're confused by the prospect that they'd actually participate in the class. Some people who I know know the answer won't say anything and keep staring at their open book as if there's something particularly interesting in there.
And don't get me wrong. They are not fundamentally stupid people beneath the surface. They just don't know how to use their head until someone tells them how. Some of them actually do know how, but the reason why they are so passive remained unanswered for a long time.
Then, last week, I was visiting my brother who's married with children when her 10-year old niece came to me and asked if "uncle could help with my math homework". The homework was typical 3rd grade mathetmatics and it was apparent that while my niece was mathematically talented, the problem was actually quite hard to solve using the methods they had been taught so far. I skimmed a few pages forwards and lo-and-behold, there was the method I would have used. I showed it to her and said something along the line "You can always go ahead and look for help in the later parts of the book - you're so good with math that you can learn these things by yourself".
She took the book, smiled shyly but looked a bit worried. Then she said something that still makes my blood boil: "But my teacher says that we are not supposed to learn anything by ourselves because we might learn wrong things".
I mean what the hell?! Since when did thinking for yourself and being interested in the subject become "a bad thing"? Learning wrong things?!
I know this is just one case and it's impossible to draw any conclusions based this, but I have a suspicion that something is horribly wrong in the school these days. Could it be that this "do what I say and God help you if you try to learn things on your own!" attitude is prevalent and actually making people into these passive vessels that expect teachers just to pour information into them.
Anyone else experienced anything similar?
Oh, and with my bros permission I called that teacher about the matter and told her in no uncertain terms that if I ever hear that my niece has been discouraged by teachers from thinking and learning, I'll call PTA and the local newspaper and I'll sue the school too.
In the Mathematics department, we have a room full of ugly-ass old iMacs. I've only seen 1 or, at absolute most, 2 machines in the room that were not functioning.
The worst part is that the Pentium III systems are set up on a fancy little "imaging" system, where each boot restores a remotely hosted disk image for whatever OS you choose (Win2000, Win98, or an old Red Hat Linux). So we're not even talking OS problems here - every working machine gets a fresh one every boot. It's pure hardware failures in that room.
The iMacs all run off persistant locally-installed copies of OS something (not OS X, and I'm not much of a pre-OS X Mac user, so I can't tell you if it's OS 8 or 9 or what). No fancy re-imaging on boot or anything. Just an OS that doesn't tend to break, on hardware that doesn't tend to break.
One of our local colleges had a vote among their students. They were faces with a switch to OSX on one hand or a switch to Windows. Both would require a lot of work and a lot of money but their Mac hardware could run OSX.
The student body voted and came back with Windows.
So, the Macs were carted out, sold off cheaply (Yes, I made out like a bandit) and new PCs were installed.
Then the problems started.
Y'see. When the Macs were there, they were pretty open. There aren't too many viruses available for the Mac and the students could while away their lunchtimes playing UT on the iMacs and no-one would care. There just wasn't much malware and what there was, wasn't unrecoverable. All of the Macs had FireWire and I know of half a dozen really good student films that came out of students with a cheap camcorder and a couple of hours on ANY of the Macs there.
The students came in and eagerly logged into their new Windows PCs and then discovered that they weren't permitted to install software. Or change the system clock. Or the language of the system. So, now there's no UT or CounterStrike during lunch.
The other problems were hardware related. 20% of their CDRW drives have already been replaced and they had to buy extra machines for swap-out when the PCs flatline during or just before a class. There's a separate "Video Suite" which has higher quality PCs but the students involved in the film-making claim that it takes too long to edit video on those machines. Instead they bought a low end iMac and do it at their digs. For general use the PCs are fine - to get rid of registry crud and keep them up to date with patches, they re-image them every month and put a fresh install out there.
Maybe it's not a fair comparison and a lot of the blame lies with the sysadmins but at the same time, due to the amount of malware for Windows, they couldn't just leave the machines completely open.
I consult for a couple of schools. The inertia built up by Apple is much more difficult to overcome than this quarter's--or even the next three quarters's--sales figures indicate. There is an enormous investment in software, hardware, expertise, money and time in establishing and maintaining a school computer.
One of the schools I work with just installed a 24-station publishing lab. Do you think Dell pulled off a coup and supplied the machines? Do you think Apple delivered a pallet of iMacs? No. The vice-principal in charge of technology bought two dozen Macintosh LC II's, upgraded the motherboards, memory and hard drives, equipped them all with Ethernet cards, and started teaching for less than $200 a seat with site-licensed software. I was brought in to deal with a little SCSI voodoo. I couldn't argue with the VP's logic or implementation. More bang for the buck (and the only machines affected by Blaster were the mission-critical IIS servers running Windows 2000.
The article is based on anecdotal experiences with a few schools. There is a more vast, more stable "If It Ain't Broke, Dont Fix It" constituency for Macintosh out there than a few recent quarters of sales can affect. The LC II was introduced in 1992. The ones I installed will be in service for at least two more years and possibly longer. As I write this on the fifth anniversary of the iMac, I know of two of the original Bondi Blue models that are running Mac OS X in private homes because of their stability and freedom from viruses, worms and trojans. I just retired a customer's upgraded Macintosh 7500 (equipped with a 400 MHz G4, chock full of memory and with a state-of-the-art graphics card). That machine was released eight years ago.
The tide may be turning the PC's way, but it has a long way to go before it inundates Apple in schools.
scientific users are stampeding to openMosix/Linux, not macs. Three computers? Try the power of all idle computers available to your terminal at all times. And offloading loads to in use computers with a lower load.
The only users who may be "glommed" onto macs due to OSX are those that are already mac biased.
I know one scientific company switching to openMosix/Linux. I know another talking about it, and they don't know much about computers. I've heard scientific companies talking about oM/L, contracting companies, abatement companies, consulting companies. And for non-openMosix Linux, inspection companies and others. And when I let them know about the capabilities of openMosix on Linux, they are instantly interested and want to know more.
Out of all these companies, the only ones using macs are those that need them for graphic work, which are just a couple that I can think of now.
Cost?
I haven't checked prices on G4, G5, Gwhatever, and have no interest in doing so. But virtually all of the companies mentioned above are using existing computers, in the pentium I, and pentium II range.
Any of the companies above that are looking for more powerful computers are steered to the $200-$250 range TigerDirect/Walmart Linux boxes, with insider pricing on a local affiliated company for a few of the companies. There haven't been any problems in over a year of use on some of the boxes, and they are overkill for the tasks they are being used for. openMosix is a big reason why.
Except for mac compatibility, gnu/linux does everything you mentioned above, even dos emulation. And guess what? I don't see any of the major studios contributing mac code. I do see them, as have others seen them, contributing code to gimp, filmGimp/cinepaint, and other video applications. And just as Industrial Light and Magic has moved to linux (not mac), and just as their developers are moving off unix (and some macs for some video creation/editing) and on to linux.
So, who again, are these people that are going to mac? Oh, yeah, somewhere less than the 100% of older mac users (OS9 and earlier).
Cringley always seemed half-baked to me from some of his articles (like the one where you buy out an alarm company and transform it into a dsl company by selling dsl over all those dry pairs), but the article on macs shows that he is a real idiot. Or just an overzealous mac fan.
Sound familiar?
The best solution would be to expose children to multiple platforms during their schooling, so they will have experience to work with any system they might encounter in the work place or in college as the case may be. If supporting a multiple platform network is indeed more expensive, then it might not be economically feasible for schools to offer multiple platforms, in which case, standardizing on the least common platform doesn't make a lot of sense.
This would also be the responsible thing to do since using only Windows systems is practically an endorcement of them, considering there are reasonable and affordable alternatives. IMHO, this is akin to have "Pepsi: the official softdrink of Wake University" which they may be considering anyway. 10 Years from now, Microsoft may not be the 97% gorilla it is now, and it is irresponsible for a college to only support this one company.
Last I checked, the goal of higher education was to expose students to a variety of opinions and situations, to prepare them for later life. If you want an institution that ONLY gives you a singular experience on ONE thing, from one perspective, then perhaps a trade school is a better way to go.
My first instict is: follow the money. Is Microsoft offering sweetheat deals if universities kill Linux and Mac support?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I am posting this as Anonymous Coward because I work for a public higher education institution, and I have a budget that I manage.
I recently needed a couple of workstations for my office area. I went to the network administrator to ask for price quotes. He of course pulls quotes from a PC manufacturer. He only buys one brand of PCs for desktops, another brand of PCs for laptops for the school.
Here's what he quoted me:
2.4 GHz P4
512MB RAM
40GB HD
CD-ROM
17" Standard CRT Monitor
Price (with loyal customer discount because our institution buys so many machines from them): $1050
Now, I decided to do a price comparison on a similar equipped Mac. Here's what I was quoted from Apple:
emac, 800Mhz G4
512MB RAM (remember the prices of RAM from Apple?)
40GB HD
CD-ROM
17" Flat CRT Monitor
3-year AppleCare warranty
Price: $953.00
Despite the inflated prices Apple charges for RAM upgrades, a comparably equipped Mac was about $100 less than the PC. When you start looking at PCs with CD or DVD burners and flat-panel displays, the iMacs in comparison are an even better value at the education pricing. The 800Mhz processor? These systems would be primarily used for wordprocessing and spreadsheets, so I would think the 800Mhz processor would be adequate. Our desks are small, so the eMac's space saving design would work well in our environment. Our campus has the sitewide Microsoft licensing that INCLUDES Office for Mac OS X, so no additional charges for that. Not to mention that with the Mac I would have had the capability of creating PDF files built-in without having to go out and purchase additional software or worry with licensing issues with some of the freeware/shareware equivilants on the PC side.
To make a long story short, I COULD have got the Macs and saved the state some money and still had very capable machines for the job I was doing for years to come. But I had no choice but to go with the PCs because I WASN'T GIVEN A CHOICE. The network administrator has final say on all computer purchases. Be damned about the needs of the folks who need to do the work or the students. Need to create PDF files? "Well, we can purchase a license of Acrobat..." More of the state's money being spent that wasn't necessary. The money could have been spent on something else that was needed but will have to be put off.
Oh, and one more thing. You've gotta watch the educational price quotes from the PC manufacturers. I see their education material all the time, and you can find out some of it on their websites. They inflate the retail value of the equipment so they can say the education price is $500 lower. And despite their "lower education price", often times what they offer is last year's technology at prices that's higher that what you can purchase today's technology through the standard consumer channels. Apple's education discounts may not look great, but their pricing scheme for education is straightforward with no smoke and mirrors.
Mod this down if you want, but if you don't believe it, go do a little research and find out.
End of rant.
Things to remember to bring today:
- Brain.
Oh, well. (-:In point of fact, the Mac will avoid teaching them how to reboot their machine when it wedges, but it will show them what a nice UI actually looks like (by 2005, I'm sure MS-Windows-YQ will look the same but Apple will have moved on), and give an even more fundamental lesson: that not everything out there has a Start button (to stop it with, no less) in the bottom left corner of the screen or gets shipped by the most cashed-up company in the world. Most students won't get far past this, but for those that do the variety of lessons beyond will be invaluable.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Hey, they're school administrators. (Why would you listen to a high-school guidance conselor? The man's career acumen has led him to become a high-school guidance conselor. Not a glowing recommendation.)
They don't want to have to think. And stop developping new applications too. They are still pissed off at having to teach VisiCalc (What do you mean they don't sell it anymore? Who cares anyway? Its only for school.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
My wife and I talk about this all the time, one reason we DONT have children...
Part of the problem IS federal money. There should be none... The schools must be 100% answerable to the local population, and 0% to the feds. There is a reason there is NO mention of public schools in the constitution, it should be a local matter, where you can hold them accountable, and choke the living shit out someone when necessary, such as your well stated comment implies you verbally did.
You are exactly the sorts of people who SHOULD be having children! And you know the answer to your dilemma?
HOME SCHOOLING!!!!!
It's the great American tradition: George Washington did it. Abe Lincoln did it. Thomas Edison did it. Who needs some damned government bureaucracy to shove a bunch of propaganda down our throats? For that matter, who needs a God-damned government in the first damned place?
Have children! They're the greatest thing that God ever invented; believe it or not, they're even more fun than making them was in the first place.
HAVING KIDS + HOME SCHOOLING THEM = THE MOST FUN YOU'LL EVER HAVE IN YOUR LIFE
Guaran-damn-teed. Cross my heart and hope to die.
As a technology coordinator in a 2,200 student school district, I feel that articles like this are important as I plan out the future. We have 700 workstations, 94% of them are Macintosh. K-5 run OS 9, 6-12 are now running OS X.
Some of the reasons we stay with the Mac:
Ease of administration: Mac OS X Server and Macintosh Manager/Workgroup Manager coupled with Apple Remote Desktop makes managing this setup possible by one person. Imaging of machines is taken care of by Apple Software Restore.
Price: A $723 eMac ($699 base + $24 for an additional 128MB of RAM). No additional license costs for: server client licenses, imaging software, and virus protection. For $500 I get an unlimited OS X server license.
Years of Service: We can usually get 6-7 years out of a Mac. The 5400s in service all have at least 32MB of RAM and G3 upgrade cards.
For our PC lab I made the decision to move to K12LTSP. These machines were aging PII with 32MB of RAM. a $2,500 dual xeon machine brought this lab back to life for around $100 a machine. I use IceWM as the window manager and installed a XP theme. They run OpenOffice.org. I had one student ask if it was Linux, the rest just blindly use it. :-)
Most of the administrative office uses Windows 2000.
The best tool for the job.
What, me worry?
I'm a University professor in the U.S. who is a longtime Mac user. Mac OS X has made life really great in my lab. We do research that tends to be graphics-oriented, and much of the scientific software that used to require overpriced SGI boxes (and licenses) to run, we now run either on Macs or Linux workstations. The nice part is that for the students in the lab, OS X and Linux look exactly the same, so figuring out one makes it simple to switch to the other.
Obviously, the Mac GUI is much better than KDE or Gnome, so most people want the Mac, and on things like our Beowulf cluster we use Linux (I'm not paying for 32 copies of Mac OS X). I don't think I'm alone. I've talked to other colleagues who are moving to Macs for these same reasons: easy integration of OS X and Linux.
I took a tour of campus last week as part of an orientation group. The university had just purchased hundreds of iMacs! There are G4's in almost all of the graphics labs, or anywhere that graphics demands are high.
This high school may be preparing kids better for "industry" with MS products, but it doesn't seem to me they're preparing them well for college, given the trend I see.
The short of it is that Mac labs were dissapearing accross Canada and the US at an incredible rate. The schools on the whole hate the Mac's. They had support issues that easily were as great as Windows labs, debunking the myth that Mac's don't need support. They were proprietary and not what the students were going to use in the real world (outside advertising / graphics). For schools and teachers that actually do want to prepare students for the outside world, this is an issue (yes some teachers really care). Hardware that could run on the mac was always more expensive, at least 10% more, typically could run up to half again as much. This is for companies selling the exact identical piece of kit.
This also doesn't take into account that appletalk is so chatty that they had to buy a dedicated router to keep them from crapflooding the rest of the network. This gets expensive very quickly. Now that apples have finally joined the realm of TCP/IP, it's not the problem it once was - but the damage was done. This problem got so bad that about the first thing I had to do was check and see if they had a mac lab, regardless of whether or not out software was running on it!
Software for the mac tends to be much more limited in selection, and often more expensive. Since most vendors don't make mac versions, the few that do feel free to charge more due to a lack of competition. The mac's themselves are also expensive. They can buy a lab of wintel systems cheaper than a lab of mac's, and they don't run into all the proprietary issues that mac forces on it's users.
It's not a case of apples school days are numbered, it's a case of a few leftover mac labs waiting for the next budget to become available to replace them with wintels. Frankly, mac labs were very rarely ever replaced with macs, and then only if their was a rabid mac lover in decision chain. For perspective, roughly 3% of replacement labs that used to be Novell were replaced by Novell, and this was far more common than a mac lab getting replaced by a mac lab.
You might be thinking I'm some kind of rabid windows evangelican at this point - I'm not. I've got and use Linux & Windows at home, and am about to start school for SUN. To be honest, I see more Linux labs surpassing mac labs in schools in the very near future if it hasn't already happened. Certainly linux is starting to penetrate into school for file servers. Remember that many of these mac labs only originally got installed in the first place because Apple sold the computers at a loss or simply gave them away to schools.
This is the one thing I don't get about NT servers: how did this legacy ever get started? I'm not advocating the Mac, but there was never any point in history where it responsible or made sense to deploy NT servers. A few years ago, the no-brainer obvious choice switched from Netware to the Free Unixes. The existing NT domain is an illegitimate legacy, and the "simple choice" that someone made, was simply wrong.
While in an ideal world we should be teaching as many OSes as possible, the run into material and personel storages.
I could teach my kids linux, bsd, xp, solaris, and os x, but there is no room in my schedule. Nor is there room in the schedule of any other teachers at my very average, suburban high school. Furthermore, very few of the other teachers in the district have the training that I have to reinforce it....and if they had the training offered they probably wouldn't want it (and I don't blame them). We're sufficiently swamped as it is with the state telling us what and when to teach.
I would sell my soul (and I'm a Christian!) to get the materials and the time to teach my kids all of those different OSes. Heck, I would sell my soul to have all of my XP boxes turn into Macintoshes.
Instead, I have to focus on teaching my students how to teach themselves, and the basic ideas guiding the design of different kinds of programs. I also bitch about how much I hate XP and how much I wish I had Macs or could run a BSD or a Linux.
Good points.
I guess what is missing is K-12 basic computer science. We are showing kids how to get other things done with the computer, but are not showing them anything about the nature of the computer itself.
Many of the educators today are not really capable of this and they should be.
In that, I agree with you.
However, working with a couple different platforms just from a user perspective is a good thing and can be done today. The kids will get the idea of computing by inference, not the details mind you, but the basic idea of differences. It will affect their learning process in a good way.
Instead of asking where is the start bar, for example, they might just ask how to navigate to the applications. By inference they will understand at some level that applications are different than computing systems...
Every last one of them should be shown the command line. Again, by inference, they will learn about parts of the computer that will help them in later more specialized learning.
At the college level, they better damn well be able to show these things, otherwise why pay? (seriously)
Blogging because I can...
(Note: I do know that many of things below are capable on other platforms)
I am a consultant that supports numerous K-12 schools and one of my clients, a High School, is very happy they standardized on Mac OS X. The school had used cheap PC's in the past running Windows 98 and were looking to upgrade. They were getting no support from the district and the machines barely ran and were constantly infected by virus and students P2P software. The teachers pushed to have Apple systems purchased and the district finally obliged. They received 250 new machines and hired me to get everything functioning.
There are 1800+ students and 65 faculty that I support by myself using a combination of Mac OS X Server and open source tools. On the server side I use Apple's Admin Tools, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Radmind, (a suite of Unix command-line tools and a server designed to remotely administer the file systems of multiple Unix machine), Moodle, Carbon Copy Cloner, NetRestore and PHP iCal. All of these items are free or ship with OS X Server which saves the district a lot of money. Their are four OS X Servers that are all administered remotely which helps save them money by not having to have me at school all day long. They have a problem, they e-mail me, I fix it.
All of the client machines are running 10.2.6 and a variety of proprietary, shareware, freeware, and open source software. The school really likes the amount of free and or shareware software I have installed. Here is a brief list of some of the freeware apps I install, Aquatomic, Franklin, EdenGraph, Physics 101, Trade Strategist, Stop Motion Studio and there are so many more but I won't bore you. (they also utilize all of Apple's free apps including iCal, iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto) I manage all log-ins, downloads, apps that can and can not be used, who can use which machines, and mount home directories all from the OS X Servers. This set-up saves the schools bandwidth by not allowing students to download, install, and run their P2P software.
I am not going to tell you this is a perfect set-up, or that everything works the way it should, but I can tell you that using OS X in a large school setting is a cost saver in terms of IT support when done properly. The district cannot believe how easily I manage all of these machines and is now considering implementing similar set-ups in other schools.
That was OS 9 baby. Error Type 2 simply means that your app ran out of RAM.
Wrong. Perhaps that's one possible reason for it to happen, but technically means that some program tried to write in a space of RAM that it was not allocated. That's a GPF. There's alot of other reasons why it happens, but running out of memory might be one of them. Though, I usually get more specific errors when that happens.
OS 9 machines can run as Admin/Student and operate without problems indefinitely. 10.2 machines can get home directories from anywhare you want.
Yes, OS X can pull the usernames from our LDAP directory, but we have too much old hardware right now to go OS X everywhere. Next year, though, that's what we'll do. I don't think it's workable to put 500 individual student accounts on every OS 9 machine. We could use a generic Student account, but that goes back to what I was talking about...if you are willing to give up functionality of everyone having their own accounts, Macs work.
And Assimilator, Lan Commander, Net Octopus and Apple's Remote Desktop. Even Software Update can be run remotely by SSH. You didn't look into this at all.
Not true. Software Update is the only one that works anything like what I need. The others would work in a lab environment where all the machines are really identical, but not where the machines are personalized for teacher users. Assimilator in our Mac lab was the biggest nightmare I've ever encountered. We tried it for 2.5 months and had to abandon it for manually loading images with Apple Software Restore.
With 280 Macs in the school I have never bought Apple parts, so I wouldn't know. The drives are standard, the ram is standard, the rest is on warranty. Big deal.
True. Drives, RAM are standard. Our newest machines, eMacs, have a one year warranty that is up now. Yes, we could buy an extended warranty, but Macs aren't supposed to cost more than PCs, right?
Again, You didn't look into this at all. We have 690 GB of Server space that gets used up constantly, by macs, so those people must be connecting somehow.
Yes, we have about the same. And, I've had to learn Applescript programming to make it work.
I never claimed that Macs could not do all these things. I said it's harder to make them do these things.
I'm one of those "IT Directors" that they talk about...and I can tell you that there's no real complaining. But I will tell you who is talking...the administrators and superintendents that don't have a Mac at home and don't see why we should buy overpriced ones at school either. Yes, I said overpriced. I recently bought a boatload of those cheap Microtel computers from Walmart...for $199 each. I didn't need to buy a new monitor for each one...unlike the iMacs that litter the districts. They are 1200 MHz Durons, have 128 megabytes of RAM, and do their job admirably...and wads faster than the iMacs or eMacs...and right on par with the smattering of dual-processor G4's that we have. They completely blow away the older tower-style G3's and G4's...FOR TASKS THAT WE USE THEM FOR. I noticed how the article talked about "video editing" in school projects...basically we have an art teacher that does it...and that's it. So the biggest advantage (as far as people think) of a Mac is hardly used. Easier to use? Hmmm...Try converting a lifetime OS7-8-9 user to OSX. I can tell you they are lost. Where's my chooser? They ask. More reliable? Double HA! I have seen more iMacs eat network boards and hard drives than a whole fleet of chincey old Compaq's and HP's from 1992. OS9 network protocols are laughably slow at talking to my Linux servers...and printing? No. I'm not trolling here...and not flamebating. I'm just stating what I see in my school district. There IS one neighboring district that is buying Macs like there's no tomorrow...and that's because their IT Director is a former Mac salesman. When he retires (or is fired for mismanagement) they, too, will switch over to PC-only. I look forward to the day when I can rid my own district of them, personally. Mod this what you want, but this is what is going on in the world of education.
Gah - I'd love to see some real numbers on this; my mother (a learning-disabled-kids teacher) is perpetually complaining about the kids she has to bring up to snuff, damaged (both academically & socially) from "home-schooling". There's a reason why teachers receive training to teach - to make them better at it than most of the parents. About the only "home-schooled" kids that I've heard of that turned out to be well-adjusted adults had teachers for parents.
Of course, if you don't pay the teachers well enough for most of the good ones to stick around, then you're pretty much sabotaging your own educational system. Sometimes, I get the strong impression that this is the desired goal of some of the "conservatives" - to destroy the public educational system, since it's too secular for their tastes.
What's really obnoxious are the parents who totally screw up their kid's life, then bring them back to school to be "repaired" and blame the teacher when their kid gets poor results on the next set of exams. God forbid the PARENTS accept the responsibility.
The writer of this article should take notice of the schools handing out Apple laptops to all the teachers and all of the students:
"The 240 students and 40 teachers each will get an Apple iBook laptop computer for class- related use at home and school. Virtual, paperless education, when students are able to access text books online, may not be too far in the future", said Edward Bernetich, principal of the new school.
http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index
Also, Apple's Mac OS X District License Program has been extended through September 27, 2003. This adoption solution for K-12 school districts "takes the hassle out of upgrading, includes Mac OS X software, training, technical support, and applications, and -- most important -- cuts more than 60 percent off Apple's already lower education licensing price." (But, only districts with 1,000 or more Mac OS X-capable systems are eligible for the offer. )
Actually, in my experience, home-schooled children are poorly prepared for life outside of the home. They don't get necessary social exposure, and the parents don't usually understand the material very well themselves. Home school kids do get monoculture -- the single minded (and usually extremist) view of the parent. I, for one, am an advocate of sending children to school (private or public), but also supplementing the education at home (rather than ignoring the child and leaving them to their own devices).
How does a homeschooled kid deal with this raw assault when he/she grows up?
My experience with homeschooled kids is that being less peer-dependant and secure in their identity and relationships they are less vulnerable to bullies. More importantly they are less likely themselves to *become* the bullies. You may view that as a liablity in fields that tend to be "dog eat dog". However, my personal experience with homeschooled kids is that the confidence that comes from being raised in a nurturing rather than a "lord of the flies" environment is a sufficient compensation for the lack of harsh lessons in early childhood.
In addition to being vulnerable to abuse from the adult bullies, I suspect a homeschooled kid will not be able to deal compassionately with the less fortunate (money, IQ, whatever...) kids.
This is an area where I think you are actually contradicting yourself. Being hardened by a "lord of the flies" environment may make you less vulnerable to "raw assaults" but it is unlikely to make you any more sensitive to the suffering of others. In fact the hardness necessary for your own survival in a harsh environment is quite likely to make you a great deal LESS sensitive to the suffering of others. Besides which I think the vast majority homeschooling parents would view compassion as one of the healthy ways that they are teaching their children to respond to others. Which scenario is more likely to produce a compassionate adult 1) Being part of a clique in Jr. High and in your own insecurity going along with the crowd that picks on the funny looking kid and reinforces that attitude with their laughter and acceptance? 2) Being the kid that is picked on and harrassed on every side? or 3) Having a parent nearby that immediately punishes you for displaying such cruelty towards your siblings or friends and protects you from the same?
Perhaps it is a result of the fact that a large percentage of homeschoolers are motivated by religious convictions but I get the feeling that homeschoolers are more involved with charity and ministries than is the norm. We take our kids to volunteer at a shelter and they spend one day a week cleaning their great-grandmothers house for her. Our oldest helps her get ready every morning. That's just us but most of our homeschooling friends seem to have similar family traditions.
When I went to school I had friends from two grades up and I don't see why this should be any different these day
Umm... actually the fact that you think that kids only two years older than you were not *essentially* the same age as you basically makes my point. Sure there are friendships which form between peers that are going through the same things and are at about the same level of development but I am often astounded at the level of awkwardness and discomfort of kids (particularly teenagers) when they have to deal with adults. Homeschooled kids of my aquaintance don't seem to have this peer-dependant hang up. They are are perfectly happy to talk with the adults, or play with the toddlers or hang out with each other.
How many home schooled students do you know? All too frequently people generalize from small data sets. I could do the same and say that I have three home-schooled children. My oldest is now in his second year at college studying to be an audio recording engineer. My middle child decided to enter public high school in ninth grade and was turned off by the whole environment -- the lack of learning, the time spent discipling students instead of teaching, the time spent doing pointless busy work. He is now joint enrolled in college for his senior year and hopes to have a better learning experience. Both are Eagle scouts. The oldest is working summers to help support himself. He just recently witnessed an attempted suicide at work where a high school student, aparrently on drugs, leapt off the 3rd story inner balcony (pointing to the failure of the parents and the school to help this kid). My little girl is in sixth grade and has been home schooled the entire time. They receive plenty of socialization through sports and other extra curricular activities.
But a small data set does not a generalization make.