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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
"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
I've worked in an educational setting this whole summer and I can vouch for the administrators' (both educational and technical) point of view. Now throw in another point briefly mentioned in the article:
Gee, a $100-$150 (at most) educational discount on a $1700 IMac (~$1600 total) or a $500 Dell?
Granted, that's not entirely comparing apples to apples (pun intended purely as an afterthought), but that's how most educators, teachers, and students will see it. What would you want to work on or buy if you were a cash strapped student?
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!
haven't we been doing the "Apple is dying" thing since the days before /.? Before teh Intarweb even? :oP
do() || do_not();
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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!"
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
...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.
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...
i am a school teacher. my district is probably like many. our IT staff are morons. we don't/can't pay industry standards, so we get the bottom. plus, the jobs are secure, so we can't get rid of idiots. anyways...
a little story. a year or so back, district tech at my school brags about coming back from some microsoft conference, (mind you we are a novell network) and he's got freebies galore. XP pro ( no reg key copies), VS.NET, 2K server, office XP (no reg key), and other crap. thrown out like halloween candy. you think they're gonna cut off their source.
another story. 3-4 years ago, we were finishing the wiring at my school. so, the district tech head is there, yada yada. so i ask her about the servers, since we didn't even have a local file server for our one lab, (and I had lots of student work get lost), and she says the district goal is to consolidate on get this, "fewer, more powerful, servers". this at the time that when the industry was moving the opposite direction. and then she retires, and we're half way there, and there is just too much momentum to change. so we go ahead, and have a crappy, unscalable network, and we have win98 clients rather than 2k, because of a multitude of piss poor decisions, we have no money to spend on memory upgrades.
these people have the ears of the PHB's. and let's face it, if it needs 20 admins where another solution would need 10, and their input makes the call, what do you think they're gonna choose.
for those of you who don't quite understand school spending/funding, let me explain. every year, principals have an end of year "wish list", if there is money left over. why? if they don't spend it, they get less next year. so, saving money is specifically NOT DESIRED. in fact, deficits are preferred. don't ever expect linux to make it in this environment. i could go on. get the ear of your school boards. or vote their asses out.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
As is always the case really.. I work for a college, and our ratio of macs to PC's is probably 1 mac for every 150 PeeCee's. And its a case of a viscious circle - no one on the tech team really knows much about them as the college hardly buys any of them... and the college doesn't really want to buy them as hardly anyone knows about how to support them on our team.
Its frustrating for me as I always try and push alternatives - refurbed cheap (but still hugely powerful) SGI's for CAD work, Linux in many situations, etc - but its always the same old story. Some excuse to get out of it and buy Intel boxes.
From a techie point of view it makes the job easier, but I enjoy getting little diversity in the job - it makes it more of a challenge, and it forces the people I work with to learn new things. Most of them find it amusing to chastise Linux even though it is the backbone of the network - the proxy everyone is routed through, the DHCP address provider, and the DNS servers for every machine.
I think the most overriding factor is money.. MacOSX itself is cheap, and if you could buy it for x86 machines, i'd buy it myself in a second - but the Apple hardware just costs too much, when you consider we were able to get Dell workstations with P4 2.4GHz, 256MB DDR RAM, 15" TFT monitors, and about 30GB harddrives for around $800. Apple can compete by providing machines at that price I am sure, but as OSX really does need a bit more horsepower to get the best out of it, then you really need to spend more to beef it up. How do you justify that to your Wintel loving mansgers with tight purse-strings...?
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
(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.
> 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
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.
Any Mac under 2 years old with 256MB of RAM can run Virtual PC under MacOS X. And any native G3 or G4 with a CD-ROM and 192MB of RAM can run Virtual PC under MacOS 9. (And I'm talking Virtual PC 6, of course - latest and greatest.)
That means the schools can have their "single platform" in terms of hardware support -- yet also have diversity. OS X? Check -- and of course, you can run Office:X on it, if you want your students to learn to be mice, er, MOUSes. OS 9? Just start Classic. DOS? It's in Virtual PC. Any Windows version you like? Virtual PC. Linux? Probably Virtual PC - or if you just want to run apps, a lot of them are available through Fink. X Window apps? X11's already available for Jaguar, and I've heard it'll be built into Panther.
Schools aren't the only places that want a single platform. Scientific users have glommed onto OS X Macs because they can run "UNIX apps," Mac stuff and "Windows apps" on a single machine. It frees up desk space, and while a Mac may not be cheaper than a Windows PC, it's most certainly cheaper than a Mac plus a Windows PC plus a UNIX or Linux box.
Yeah, it'll get a little slow if they try to run it all at once on a G3, but oh well, don't do that, then. Unless you're going to do a screen capture of it. :)
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.
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.
Virus-vulnerable monoculture network!". "It's really quite simple you see, there is no other way to guarantee that the virus of the week, coded by some filipino script kiddy, can shutdown every single computer on our network" says J.D. Umbass, superintendent of Jefferson County School System, Pennsylvania. "Besides, if kids every growing up having an alternative perspective on computer technology, they may accidentally understand it." "And it can't be overstated, just how much we save yearly, by being able to hire idiots that only know how to say 'Reboot the computer and see if that fixes your problem'", J.D. Umbass.
"Most important to remember though, is that we don't really teach the children anything other than how to be the secretary or register monkeys of tomorrow, earning minimum wage, and never quite enough to own the likes of the beautiful machines in our computer lab. So what does it matter, if they only get to experience the most ill-designed OS ever concieved, that's what Microsoft is extorting every PC and POS manufacturer into using." said J.D. Umbass.
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.
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
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
... 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.
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.
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
Justify that presumption, I dare you!
Will Microsoft be in business when by 13yod hits the workforce in 5 years? Probably. But how about my 4yos, in 14 years? Maybe, maybe not - but the office tools will be completely different. His older sister won't have hit 30 yet, and the stuff she was taught in school will already be totally obselete.
Teaching kids to use a single toolset (and this applies outside the computing arena too) by rote is stupid, stupid, stupid. Teach them how to find out by themselves for themselves, exemplify it by teaching them with at least three different toolsets.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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...
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.
I've read some of the comments, and most people don't seem to get it. 99% of kids don't WANT to learn C, C++, terminal usage, etc... To most of the kids in school, computer = WINDOWS. They've heard of Mac, maybe Linux, but they don't care. And for the most part, windows is what will be used in whatever their future job is. The small portion of people who want to use linux will use it at home, and have no problems switching to windows at school.
At my school (high school), there are a kabillion windows machines. The newspaper area uses macs, but other than that, it's all windows. People know how to use it. Computers are almost like cars these days. You don't have to know how an engine works to drive a car. Most peole don't want to know how the engine works, they just know "there's the steering wheel, the brake's on the left, gas is on the right, and the shifter is somewhere". Like it or not, Windows is by far the most dominant operating system on desktops today, and that isn't likely to change. People don't care what OS is on their computer, and they'll take whatever the manufactor gives them.
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.
Heh? Actually, your Mac (if you still owned it) has more than just two choices. In addition to OS X and Yellow Dog Linux, you can also choose from GNU-Darwin, NetBSD, various linux distros (including Gentoo, LinuxPPC, Debian, and Mandrake) and let's not forget good old MacOS 9 and older versions. On top of that, you can run (basically) any X86-based OS via Virtual PC.
Limited? Only by how much you know (or don't know, in this case).
Transistors and Beer!!
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.
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.
See I as have my other techs, have always felt Apple was the absolute BEST platform for elementary school students. The abuse those machines get (three CD's in one drive, Juice box gunk in the keyboard) and yet on adverage we lose maybe 2 or 3 iMacs a year (all bondi blues surprisingly, I have only lost one slot load to an actual motherboard getting fried, although I have had to replace 5 or 10 cd-rom drives, my favorite, no you cant put your ham in the CD-Rom, no I do not kid!!!)
For a long time we we where a tri-platform school, Windows in the high school and with the secretaries, macs in the middle school and elemetary school (with a few in the highschool for video and graphics courses.) and two machines running linux for a management software called SAMS.
In comes our new tech adviser to help us expand everything, what does he do, tries to get rid of all 2500 iMacs we have and buy computers from Dell, to supliment our 250 PC's. Yes thats right trash BRAND NEW computers in some cases just to make everything two platform (he tried to trash the linux boxes but was hit with a block when we showed him SAMS only works good on linux)
Its not IT people who make these desicions, its administators, some of whom have never taught in a classroom (this guy doesnt even have a degree in education) who make stupid decision without asking "why are you running things like that?"
After seeing that we only had one part time IT member for the Mac's though and 3 full time and 3 part time staff members for the PC's( in all fareness we all do all three platforms but we have specializations I the mac guy, and everyone else specialized in some perticular way with a part of the OS or network admin), the board of education made him back down or risk getting his contracts ripped up, and as it is after its up he is probably not comming back, but still this is the situation you run into, and IT staff sometimes gets little more say than yes sir no sir.
Heck even when I suggested getting eMacs cause they where cheaper (we could buy more software or equipment for the teachers, or dare I say TRAINNING since they where using OS X instead of 9) I was turned down cause they wanted the fancy iMacs that my assistant super. had. Forget I ever try to save them money again!!!
Itrs annoying, but you just have to play the system.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
PC's are not mono culture. PC's are extremely diverse. Just because many PC's run Windows does not mean that is all a PC can do.
You're right. A PC can do something other then run windows: It can be used as a doorstop. You can use it to break windows by throwing it through them. Just because something can be done, doesn't mean it should be.
The point I'm trying to make here is against the IT-environment myth: Mono-cultures solve problems. Mono-cultures are easier to administer. Since all PCs can pretty much do the same. So why not just buy all one PC? Just because you can tool out a PC to be flexible, doesn't mean the IT eejit will. Most networks take the "Personal" out of "Personal Computing".
I used to run a Mac Notebook. Gave it away. Why? Because it was too limited. With my PC I can run; Linux, Windows, FreeBsd, Solaris, etc. On top of each OS I can run X*X*X applications.
Um....Macs can run X*X*X applications. With Fink, most open source packages can be recompiled and run on a Mac just as if it were linux. You forget that OS X is BSD based, and its compatibility is increasing with every update. Techically, if UNIX is UNIX is UNIX and LINUX is LINUX is LINUX, you weren't limited, except in thinking how to accomplish things. Why not check out OSXguide.com and learn how to handle all the ticky installs. I mean, it shouldn't be much harder the installing a complex software package on Solaris, Unix, Linux, BSD, etc, right?
My Mac essentially has two choices OSX or Linux from Yellow Dog. Software apps is even worse. I once asked a company selling Linux software to do a simple recompile for OSX. No-go.... While Open Source is great not all packages will configure and build for a PPC chip.
But the majority will. And OS is nothing but a tool to run software applications. And with the ability to run X apps, as well as Mac apps, Mac users have more software choice then EVER. And more then just a typical *nix user.
It is just oo frustrating...
Nope, it is the Mac world is that mono-culture...
The FBI to this day still gives its field agents PowerBooks. You want to knoow why? Because they're the most flexible laptops in the world. They've had X windows clients/servers (X is not a *nix feature, its a protocol, it can and does run on nearly every platform. people forget this.) It can run Windows (virtual PC), and its had Applications like Tenons Mach Ten (sort of a propritary version of Cygwin) to run Unix apps before OS X had a BSD underbelly. There's nothing that a mac couldn't do that a PC running *nix or windows couldn't.
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.
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"
The problem that I see with home schooling is that done wrongly, it doesn't prepare the kids to deal with different people.
I mean I did go to public school and I had to deal with smart kids, stupid kids, social kids, anti-social and outright aggressive kids, kids from rich families and kids from welfare families. Exactly like it will be in the real world.
As a homeschooling parent I have to disagree on two counts. 1) While there is a lot of diversity among the students in a public school classroom I never saw much evidence that the kids learned to deal *in a healthy way* with those that were different from them. Just go into (or think back to) a junior high classroom, all the bullying, cliques, hostility between different groups. Sure some kids learned to bridge the gaps or to accept those that were different but it is the exception rather than the rule and often being friendly to the "wrong" kid could put your own position with you peers at risk. I hesitate to say it but I suspect those kids most able to trancend the petty differences that divide school kids were those that had the kind of healthy relationships with their parents that homeschoolers tend to have. I hate to say it but rather than a nirvana of healthy diversity public schools often seem to have more in common with Lord of the Flies
2) Another aspect of public school classrooms is the extreme degree of segregation by age. All your friends (and enemies, and those to whom you are merely indifferent) are ALL your age. All your interaction is with kids the same age, your teachers are generally distant authority figures, even kids relationships with their parents becomes increasingly alienated. These kids are intensely peer dependant. Who cares what my parents or teachers think? Who cares what *I* think? What really matters is what my little clique thinks, to loose their approval is to suffer tragedy. (all of which is feeding into my first point)
Homeschooled kids tend to be dealing with siblings of different ages and friends of different ages as well as dealing with adults (their parents and friends parents). And the parents (who presumably are more mature in their own socialization) are more actively guiding the childrens socialization in healthy ways. I don't know any homeschooling parent that would tolerate the kind of nastiness that is wearily tolerated or not even noticed by the teachers in your typical Jr. High. Even when it reaches a level or is done in plain sight where a teacher must act since the children are so peer dependant the poor opinion and disciplinary actions of the teacher for beating up the funny looking kid is insignificant next to the approval of your peers egging you on.
In my experience homeschooled kids are far better socialized & capable of dealing with peoples differences than their public school peers. As an adult I have never experienced the kind of sullen or insecure silence from a teenager that I commonly experience from public school kids. The homeschooled kids are perfectly comfortable interacting with an adult. Most public school kids are completely out of their element having to deal with someone like myself that is 15 years older. Sure there are homeschooled kids and families that really do poorly interacting with others but I doubt those same kids would do any better in a public school and I suspect they would do a great deal worse since their initial social failings would be compounded by the harrassment of their immature peers.
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.
On a Mac, I have:
In fact, I would go so far as to say that the Mac is the most-compatible platform out there. Personally, I have six different OSs on my Mac right now (Mac OS X, Mac OS 9.1, 9.2.2, Mandrake Linux, Win98 SE and PC-DOS). And that's not even breaking a sweat.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
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.