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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." - ????
Maine did this and it was a smashing success.
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.
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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