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Michigan To Purchase Record 130,000 Laptops
goombah99 writes "The Detroit FreePress reports that Michigan state is planning the largest single laptop purchase/lease ever, over 130,000 wireless laptops--enough for every 6th grader. And of course future purchases for each new class. The main competion is between Dell and Apple, with Apple having the edge in classroom integration experience. But price points will matter since the school districts may have to pay $25 per pupil. And the Gates foundation has a foot in the door. No word on what OS the Dell laptops would run. What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?"
The fight between Dell and Apple to supply the laptops
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
Our college just switched to the Dell Latitude D800 from IBM Think Pads and I must say they don't seem to be as durable. The keyboards are particularly a problem. I can't see them standing up to use by upper elementary or middle school age kids.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Working for a school district in Texas, I can tell you that Dell has the edge in the now. Apple had the edge back in the day. I would go with dell and XP. Honestly, I'm not a big M$ fan, but XP is very stable in our environment, and only GPF's or screws up when groups or policies are in conflict with what certain software needs.
-J
"When I look back, my life is not a foreign country, it's more like a library book returned long ago." - ????
I've used both before, and ThinkPads aren't constructed all that well. Dell's are pretty good, but Toshiba Tectra's seem like the most sturdy laptops currently available (not including the ultra durable ones for mine shaft / military application Example)
well i guess linux is out of the question then. all the microsoft studies indecate that the techs get paid more for administrating linux. how else could the TCO of a free operating system, that once set up needs little administration end up costing more than the propietary OS that has a sleww of conection license schemes with fees atached to them.
i would say go Apple.
Maine did this and it was a smashing success.
I wouldn't worry too much about patches... it is the spyware/adware that these kids have a knack for finding. And then you've got to worry about the hardware. These things better be made of steel or either provider won't be seeing a repeat purchase. Michigan is going to lose their shorts on repair charges.
FWIW, my company spends about $65,000/month on repairs for lease replacements. And these are adult users. 6th graders are much less forgiving.
And what about battery life? A typical lithium battery will go through about 500 charge/discharge cycles before failing. This is normal. A 6th grader is going to see a dead battery after about 6 months.
Sigh... what they need is a good set of terminals in every classroom. The laptops aren't going to work.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
In addition to this, having been the guy that fixes computers at a sorority for over three years now, I would say that iBooks have a much higher ability to absorb shock. I dropped mine from my knees onto a hardwood floor (onto it's corner) and it never stopped playing the dvd.
here is some non-anecdotal evidence.
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
Hmmm -- if I were in 6th grade again, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't care what OS they are going to load on it. I would just wipe the disk and load linux and Open Office and be done with it.
Back when I was in 6th grade, in 1976, I think we might have had portable manual typewriters as the bleeding edge technology. I didn't see a computer, outside of video games, until 1980.
Back then life was simple - you just had to remember stuff and use your brain - and you actually went to the library if you wanted to find out about something - or for entertainment in the form of Fiction. The librarian would be there as a guide to help you with difficult searches - and the card catalog would suffice in most cases. As a result, there was this built-in filter (as a result of having limited access at a measured pace) that allowed you to focus on what was important.
Now there is terabytes of crap we have to sort through to get to the kernel of truth on the net. The counterpart of the knowledgeable librarian are few and far between, and information has to be taken with more than a grain of salt.
While I applaud providing computing resources to children - I think it is more important to now start looking at ways of taking those resources to the next level beyond simple hierarchies of filesystems - to a real collector and recorder of critical knowledge for everyone, tailored to their specific neural wiring. I think that will be the next great leap in computing - and now that we have machines capable of making it a reality, we will see it happen.
Information is not static - lets build applications that take that idea to its fruition.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I'm a newspaper reporter and I cover the local school board as part of my beat. One of the biggest problems with this, according to the administration, is that the state is purchasing these laptops on a two-year lease. Nobody knows what's supposed to happen to these computers once the lease is up and the computers are obsolete. Will schools have the option to buy them (even though they're outdated) so that 6th graders don't have to give them up before they're finished with middle school, or will the state just reclaim them? And nobody knows where the money will come from two years from now when it's time to upgrade. The state has all kinds of money for this initiative now, but next time they might say, "Okay, public schools! It's your turn to foot the bill this year!"
Oh, and to answer the main question in this thread... they'll probably run whatever OS a majority of Michigan schools are already running. If the kids are learning how to use XP in the computer labs, it's the most practical (though not necessarily the best) solution to stick XP on the laptops too, for consistancy's sake. As beneficial as it would be for kids to leave middle school knowing how to use both XP and OSX or Linux, it ain't gonna happen.
but I'm truly wondering if spending somewhere between 500 and 1000 bucks per student on something that depreciates so incredibly fast makes any sense.
It makes plenty of sense. Or was that cents?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Completly agree. My local school has gave a laptop (really bad ones - bottom of the line Acers and Toshibas, anyone?) to every teacher, along with installing LCD projectors in each classroom.
There are 3 distinct groups in the teachers:
-No idea. These people have had such fun as 'ripping DVD/CD combo out of chasis because it won't open' and 'oops, my LCD screen has fell off'. That's about 50% of the teachers.
-The 'I'll use it way too much' group. Enjoy shitty powerpoint presentations? Well, these people have every lesson with a crap powerpoint presentation. They also use it for email and generally messing around when they are bored.
-Then there is the I can use a computer ok. Mostly IT teachers or maths teachers, they use the laptop sensibly and don't bore everyone to death with powerpoint #24.
This is TEACHERS. The school has had budget cuts this year, but they are rolling out more WiFi AP's and giving more laptops out. The IT department is completly overstressed, 2 people for about 300 computers in the school, and 50 LCD projectors (and they are all about 1 year old so most bulbs are starting to go). I used too work there, now I don't. I feel sorry for the 2 guys left there, and both guys are on the verge of quitting. Sadly 'desktop' PCs/Macs are going out of fasion fast. The school used to have a 3 year maximum PC life for the IT rooms, but they haven't replaced any for the last 2 years. Some rooms are stuck with P75s and P2 233mhz.
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Like a lot of people here, I would tell iBooks are the best choice because of functionalities:
- Clean OS with simple use and easy adoption by "non-computer-friendly" people (I believe not all the kids love computers)
- Powerful way of limiting some harmful use (even improved on Panther), with clear experience from schools specialists (macosxlabs for example) and from Apple
- All the basic tools necessary for class/fun are included and some other can be found for free on apple.com.
But robustness is also and important issue in the hands of kids. Basically my experience with Dell computers is clearly not as happy as with Apple's ones.
I imagine the cost is an important matter at this scale and Dell can really go low on big quantities, but Apple proved to be able to. On that specific "price" field, I recently searched for a small (second) computer and compared iBook to Dell (and some others, but those 2 arrived in short list) and I realized that the world had changed and, for my needs, Apple was cheaper than Dell!
So perhaps is it the time to say, like in Virginia (G5), that Apple is the choice on the price...
ClaudeBBG
I replied to this earlier in another post, but I'll speak as a small-district IT director (at in Bishop, CA).
In our districts, Macs do not have lower TCO (as nebulous as that term is) compared to our PCs. The reason is simple - Norton Ghost. Our largest manpower sink is when a classroom computer gets hosed completely, and requires a clean install. With Norton Ghost, we re-image the drive in MINUTES, from anywhere on my network. I can VNC to our server, re-cast the Ghost image to the proper computer, and voila! The classroom computer is back online.
This is, of course, our last resort, but it does make centralized managment simpler for very serious problems. Additionally, if you aren't familiar with Active Directory, you can tweak pretty much every OS feature through it, and roll out different profiles on a per-user basis. This is excellent when teachers and students use the same classroom computers. Each profile can be roaming, so that teachers can work on their gradebook software on any computer on our campuses, or the students can get their documents from the same "My Documents" folder because they're all redirected to network shares by user. Cool stuff, and for a staff one one (me), it rocks.
I have previewed the Apple OS X server hardware and software (it was sent free to me by Apple, for evaluation), and it wasn't as tweakable, and I never did find a Norton Ghost equivalent for Apple OS.
Just my two cents.
Joe GriegoBishop Union High School District
Bishop Union Elementary School District
Don't Die Wondering
The pervading attitude is akin to "teach kids about car maintenance by getting them to clean the bodywork".
Kids should be taught how the things work (not down to fetch/execute cycle level) in terms of hard drives, networks, and maybe some simple programming (but not anything which makes it too easy).
Teachers have an easy job that pays well.
Their job is to talk to children, they're accountable to no one, and they work only 3/4 of the year
Christ, you're probably trolling, but if not you're a fucking clueless moron. If you think teaching is nothing more than "talking to children," you've got your head so far up your ass it can't be extracted. I know many teachers, and they ALL work 60 to 80 hours a week. It takes a lot of work to keep up with cirriculum changes, develop lesson plans, create assignments, set up projects, talk to parents, deal with behavioral problems, grade papers, write grade reports, lead extracirricular activities, and fight with administration to get needed supplies - in addition to teaching class. They all spend from $500 to $2000 per year out of their own pockets to buy supplies the district can't afford. Then they have to listen to morons like you talk about how easy their job is (one that requires a Master's in our state), and how overpaid they are at their $30K salary. Roadside construction workers who spend all day rotating a sign from "Stop" to "Slow" or pounding concrete with a jackhammer make more than they do.
Believe it or not, most teachers really care about doing a good job - and they get mediocre pay, and few thanks. Oh, a lot of them work all year as well.
Macs are much easier to administer and use in the classroom, thanks to Apple Remote Desktop. If you have never used this, it is pretty slick. It goes way beyond the normal remote desktop software like VNC or Windows Remote Desktop. And it is designed with education in mind. Some of the cool features include the ability to request help, for the teacher to display anyone's screen on everyone else's screens, to lock students screens (eliminates the issue of students goofing off on the computers while the teacher is trying to teach), and for the teacher to monitor students' screens (so you never know when the teacher may be watching you). And it helps administrators by creating reports on machine states and simplifying the rollout of software updates. I haven't seen anything close to this on the PC and I am pretty sure it doesn't exist.
Plus, Macs are very easy to lockdown. You can specify what apps a user can run, give them disk quotas, etc. Use an LDAP directory for network login (just use the OS X Server GUI admin tools) and you're set. For people who haven't had the pleasure of working on a Mac network, it is a breeze.
I know schools mainly look at price, but you simply can't do most of this stuff on a PC and you definitely can't do it as easily or as cheaply (OS X Server w/ unlimited client licenses is $999; how much would the school pay in client licenses if it went with a Windows solution?). That is why Apple has been winning a lot of the EDU deals.
For Windows NT:
Tools/devices needed: 3.5" USB floppy drive and a 3.5" disk
Software: NT Password Boot Disk
1. Download floppy image of NT Password Boot disk, write to a floppy
2. Boot from floppy
3. Change the local administrator's password
4. Log in as Administrator and add you to the local Administrators group
For MacOS X:
1. Power on
2. Hold Apple+S during the startup chord
3. Release keys after text screen appears; wait for the shell prompt
4. WARNING: YOU ARE SUPERUSER !!
Armed with a google search and some free time, all sorts of things can be done. The most important criterion is that they have physical control of the box.
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
You DON"T need a patch with a macintosh as there are none. You can update the system software usually with new versions every other month or so, but this can be done automatically as well. FYI, there have not been ANY viruses for the macintosh in the two and a haf years that OS X has been around and with remote login for the classic mac os turned off, it IS impervious to anything...note the US Armed Forces using this on some servers. Do not even make someone count the amount of viruses for windows in the last two-and-a-half years though I believe it to be around 500!
--Shut up and get a mac--