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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 $25 per pupil. And the Gates foundation has a foot in the door. No word on what OS the Dell laptops would run. What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?"
With minimal sys admin resources I would go with apple les patches and updates and virus protection needed. (Not none just less)
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
They are compact (12") and have enough power to do the kind of things kids would need to do in school. OS X crashes less then windows xp, and doesnt have to have a legion of anti-virus software packages installed on it to keep the machine safe.
***There is no point in asking, you'll get no reply***
Honestly, can you imagine what sort of virus protection scheme you would need if you were foolish enough to put windows on 130,000 laptops. Desktops with M$ OSii are enough of a headache, but laptops get taken home...
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
They are the easiest to use and most elegant computers going. Why would you want to burden an 11 year old with the complexities of Windows or Linux?
TCO. That's what the REAL bottom line is. The Macs will cost less because of the lower IT staffing requirements. Unfortunately, that's the same reason many school IT administrators will go with Windows. Less staff = a smaller fiefdom for the managers.
"Clean up the air and treat the animals fair" - Captain Beefheart
I know I'll get howled down by all the techheads around here, 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. History books, saxophones and art supplies do not depreciate nearly as quickly and cost a lot less. So do teachers -- in fact, most of them *appreciate* instead with greater training and experience. That's a shitload of money spent on computers where more fundamental educational infrastructure might make more sense?...
Ok, this wasn't the question, but WHY does every 6th grader in the state need a laptop?
Isn't Michigan having a budget crunch like every other state?
I dunno... maybe a blackboard, some chalk and a couple of erasers. Paper, pens and pencils would be apropos. Textbooks I hear have a pretty low TCO.
over 130,000 wireless laptops--enough for every 6th grader
Great. Now every 6th grader may not be able to write a coherent sentence or multiply two fractions, but they'll be able to point-and-click their way to the job of their dreams.
Computers aren't the solution, but tools to help aciheve one.
Mac. I grew up on a Mac through the school system. Its quite simple: They don't break as often. The kids favourite games aren't available for the platform. And they'll stay useful much longer; it seems PCs get their "useless" rating much earlier than a Mac of the same era.
They can't even keep the covers on their notebooks, what makes the "state" think that they can be responsible with a laptop?
Apparently the state has too much money to spend, either that, or someone in state government has a 6th grader or two.
I think that all 6th graders having laptops, WITH wireless acccess is a bad idea. While a laptop is a great tool, I fail to see how it would fit in with 6th grade curriculum. 6th graders have a hard enough time sitting still and doing their work without a toy thrown into the mix.
.. a custom distribution of some sort that allows the school to lock-down / prevent access to games and non-educational websites during school hours. The school did pay for the hardware after all.
In some of my old CS classes, I remember COLLEGE students playing games or watching movies during the lectures. I can forsee a similar problem with the younguns.
What OS? It should probably be "Schoolnix"
What the hell do 6th graders need computers for? I'd rather see my kid's elementary school spend their money on small class sizes or music programs. Read Clifford Stoll's book "Silicon Snake Oil." http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~stoll/silicon_snake_o il.html
I don't see how they're essential to education at that grade level.
These kids have the rest of their lives to spend in front of a keyboard and screen. Give them a few more years of relief before they get chained up.
What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?
My choice for school kids is pen and paper and good teachers.
Why spend so much money on technological gadgetry with 2/3 years of life when that money could be better spent on smaller classes, more personalized education and fighting illiteracy?
What's more, one thing I strongly believe is that computers destroy what makes kids kids : the ability to imagine and dream. Computers and televisions presents them with pre-chewed images that prevents them from developing their imagination, and pretty much turns a lot of them into passive technology consumers. The last thing we need is that crap to pervade into schools. There's time enough for kids to get into technology later, even touch it a little now and then as introductory classes when they're younger, but really schools should be sanctuaries of things simple, to let kids' brains be free and allow them to learn the basics properly.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?
:)
MacOSX, of course.
It's Unix-based and is widely acknowledged to have the best user-interface.
The UI means less problems of the "how do I do...?" kind.
The Unix-based means you can actually lock it down so that the user can't terminally fuck it up. At worst he loses his home directory.
Linux would be 2nd choice, as it has the Unix advantage, but not quite the slick interface.
Windows would be 3rd choice. It has neither, but is widely used, so the kids will find it again later in life.
*BSD and other less well-known OSs come later, mostly due to their obscurity and the lack of a wide selection of software. Also because even with the "minimal admin" goal you will need some admin work done, and that means you need to find people who can handle the machines. Easy to find for windos, Linux, MacOS (in that order). No so easy for NetBSD, Plan9 or LispOS.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I don't think that matters. Middle and High school isn't a vocational experience. Plus, in 10 years, windows won't look anything like it does today (think 3.1 vs XP). I personally would much rather have schools focus on abstract computer skills. Like telling kids what a variable is, what a icon is, how menus work and are used, maybe some basic networking terms and skills. Then, once the kids have an idea of what a computer is capable of, then they can choose their own environment. Variety is good.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
Every 6th grader in Maine has an Apple iBook. A lot of Apple's infrastructure (net boot, net install, etc.) is perfect for this, and iBooks are small, light, durable, and portable. I'd expect from an experience POV Apple would be ahead here -- there's a working implementation they can point to.
Does Dell have a sub 5 lb laptop?
High school kids are doing powerpoint presentations instead of writing term papers. Just what our society needs, people that can only think in terms of borrowed images and buzzword phrases.
What's next, getting graded on your choice of on-slide animation effects and transition effects?
I'm glad I'll be dead before we've had more than two generations of these clowns, the spiral into ignorance and incompetance won't be pretty.
...i find this to be a remarkably bad idea. not only is it going to cost hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars per student for the initial purchase, it's also going to probably double that cost for maintenance. who'se responsible if the laptop is dropped/damaged/stolen? the parent? tell that to an inner city detroit single mother when her lovely daughter gets her laptop stolen by some random 9th grader. is the state going to cover maintenance? great, double the price then to cover the life of these machines and take it out of my pocket. the state of michigan, like most other states in the us, has been under an intense budget crunch in the last 2 years due in large part to the recent mass exodus of manufacturing jobs in almost every market segment. is this really the best way to spend our money?
:)
as far as an OS choice, i'm going to burn any chance i might have of being moderated up here by suggesting windows xp. apple still doesn't really have a robust and easy to adminsiter means of locking down large numbers of systems and handling application delivery that would be required by this environment, nor does linux without a significant amount of research and development. while the software may be free, most of your local middle school admins (and i've worked with a number here in west michigan) don't have the first clue about managing linux (and barely the second clue on managing windows). this means that there'd be a large investment in outside contractors. of course this might mean some juicy support contracts for anybody that _does_ have these skills locally... hrmm.. maybe linux is a good idea after all
i'd also image that m$ is going to give a signifcant licensing break to the state to indoctrinate the students into the m$ shining path - i wouldn't be at all surprised if they gave away the windows licenses for free. before you act shocked, keep in mind that apple has been giving steep discounts to schools for decades for just the same reason.
I'm struggling to understand why 6th graders need personal laptops.
More well-paid and competent teachers would go a lot further in helping the students.
Oh well, it's the American way -- thinking that a quick technological fix will solve every problem.
*sigh*
They should give the money to the teachers. A salary raise would attract more qualified people as well as increase job satisfaction thus lowering the turnover rate. In my high school, teachers burn out after 3 or 4 years. Maybe with a few extra dollars they would be more inclined to stay.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Instead of computers for each student, why not let them use classroom computers when they're actually needed (for simluations in physics class, or plotting in math, or whatever) and instead hand out books to stimulate their minds and actually teach them something?
Perhaps they can start with some easy-to-digest classics of the Western canon, like Aeschylus, Swift, Twain, Shakespeare, etc., and then move on to the more difficult philosophical works of Donne, Rosseau, Locke, Jefferson, Hamilton, etc.
Most of this stuff I didn't get to read in high school because the standards were too low even in AP classes, and that's just too bad. Perhaps with fewer computers and less bullshit, and more books, better teachers, and school choice, students would actually come out of 12th grade knowing something and not requiring remedial education for their first year in college.
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You obviously haven't purchased any instrument for a school band. My son wants to be in the band and has a clarinet. That easily cost $350, but I could have the bill wrong and it might be $450. Also, he wants to play the saxophone, and the band would not let him without clarinet experience first, so the sax will cost another $350 to $450 itself.
And this is all passed onto the parents, and not paid for by the school!
As for depreciation, you haven't tried re-selling an instrument after 4 years that was thoroughly beat up by a middle schooler/high schooler, have you?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
High quality versions of the applications necessary for a young student to thrive are available on every modern OS...spreadsheets, word processors, presentations, web browsers, and other internet utilities. It's even arguable that Macs have better tools for creating multimedia content for projects, which may excite the students even more.
The purpose of the laptops isn't to teach them how to maintain a computer, it's to use the computer as a tool. That being the case, why wouldn't the state choose the platform that is more easily maintained, more secure, has a lower cost of ownership, and has fewer headaches in general?
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
Hmmm. I see almost no comments in favor of this. I am in favor of it, and I would support it locally with my own tax dollars...
But I have to ask - how many of the people responding even HAVE kids?
Everyone slams 6th graders like they couldn't handle a computer if it killed them. When I was in 6th grade I already had two computers. Now that was the 80's so I was unusual then, but NOW? They already know more about the computers than most adults.
If you treat them like they are too young and immature to have a laptop - then they will be. If you teach them and allow them to learn - they will grow and expand. Children expand to fit their environment. Too many people treat children like they are stupid because they are young. Lack of experience is NOT THE SAME as lack of knowlege. Kids are AMAZINGLY smart. And they will never GET the experience you all want them to have, if you never ALLOW THEM TO.
6th graders are perfectly capable of keeping laptops.
And why not start using technology in the classroom? As long as it is just a TOOL - and not the focus of the course, it is fine... What if people had said the same thing about pen and paper? "We already have chalk and slate. We don't need any new gadgets. Kids won't be able to learn." Technology moves forward, we should use the technology as a TOOL to move forward as well.
Give kids some credit - they need to learn and grow sometime!
Oh yeah, and in my opinion the iBook is more durable than most Dell offerings.
I'd vote for the macs any day of the week. I don't care for them, but I think yesterday's program on NPR (Mid-morning?) had a few good points on the topic. Both PCs and Macs have browsers, word processors, spreadsheets, etc. but PCs have 10x the games base, and I'd wager a 6th grader today would find it much easier to do illicit things on a PC which he/she is familiar with, than a Mac which more than likely they have had minimal experience with. Honestly, is there some capability students in 6th grade need that Macs lack?
What the heck is a 'sig'?
How many Slashdotters had a computer by the time they were in sixth grade? I know I did (a Vic 20).
I happen to think my high level of comfort and adaptability with computers greatly benefitted from my early exposure to the computer.
I also know that I WORSHIPPED that piece of crap with its cassette drive (30 minutes to load Pac Man???) like it was the most prized object in the universe.
Now the Michigan Laptop program may be a flaming-pile-of-shit, but before everyone starts talking about idiot sixth graders, maybe they should think back to when they had their first computer, what it meant to them, and whether or not they were and idiot 6th (or 7th, or 8th) graders at the time.
===============
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
While there, I was involved in a project designed to bring technology into the classrooms. The key sides of every arguement was:
1. Kids don't need it.
2. We only need one per class room.
3. Every kid needs a laptop to be successful.
Of course, each one had its own woes of "Where does the money come from," and "How do we prevent them from goofing off?"
Well, the reality is this - any system, when administered properly, can be locked down. That means they have a large choice - Mac, Windows, Linux, Novell for Windows. It's all in the planning. If they make the correct roadmap, they will require less TCO to maintain it.
Someone here asked why we would buy soemthing that losses it's value overnight, but you are looking at it for the wrong reasons. Will it be able to play HalfLife 2? Probably not, can the encylopedia be updated with the latest content from the web, showing how California elected another actor for Governor? Why yes, it can...
Technology is the future - I'm not saying that they don't need to learn to read and write, but that is what elementary school is for. I don't know about you, but I learned to read and write in cursive well before the end of third grade (hell, maybe sooner).
Vocabulary can still be taught, literary works of art can be read (this content won't change), and RIAA can get involved to provide instruments to children after they sue the parents.
And - if you made it this far - no one ever said these kids were taking them home and running around with them. That's what home directories and mapped drives are for. You should be able to sit down at any machine, log in, and do your work with the standard set of tools (office, adobe or macromedia suite, internet explorer).
You see, laptops are simply an effective use of space in an already overcrowded school environment. I can easily stash 30 laptops in a cabinent faster than I can move 30 desktops and monitors out of the way. That is why they have choosen laptops.
Better watch out - your kids will have this luxury too!
--
Sound In Motion DJs - Official Music Provider of the San Jose Sharks!
If I wanted to start a company, this would probably be it. Imagine, tens of millions of kids in the us, and the current trend is to put them behind an expensive windows box. Strip that hardware down, concentrate on a linux distro based on the classroom, and you've got yourself a paycheck, and an extremely rewarding job.
It doesn't make any sense to give a kid either a mac or a windows pc for educational purposes.
Each route is flawed, because either option wastes hardware. You don't need external monitor support, firewire, floppies or big hard drives. You need a thin client with a school-based distro of Linux that is downloaded and run remote off of a mainframe.
Not only does this improve the price-performance ratio, but it also improves accountability by allowing for detailed logging of the kid's activities, and can allow for detailed administrative control on a classroom basis.
Say a teacher has a classroom of students. The students show up, boot up Schoonix (loading remotely via high-speed wireless). The teacher's first subject is geography. The teacher unlocks the Geography Suite of programs for her students. The students are allowed access to pre-determined geography based websites.
A problem occurs, a student can't find the right web page. The teacher clicks on the student's icon on screen and immediately switches to that students desktop. The teacher remotely shows the student how to find the right web page, and everyone moves on.
Sound far-fetched? Not really. Throw together some PAM auth, hack some remote x11 displays, write a couple custom admin programs, and strip down a linux kernel and you already have something that would work much better than Windows or Mac OS X by customizing it for the classroom.
The problem with insuring them is that the deductable has to be more than the street price for a stolen laptop.
There is a large university in San Antonio that issues laptops to its students with a $50 deductable. If the laptop is lost or stolen the student pays the $50 deductable and gets another one. Street price on them was around $250.
Doesn't take a genius of a student to subtract the two numbers and end up $200 richer after a police report and a couple of days.
Same thing goes for any kind of insured property though I suppose. Its just that when you have lots of kids with expensive laptops and even less good judgment than they have cash, it seems that the incidence of theft may be quite high.
With the numbers of these things they are talking about buying, I wonder if it would be cost effective for them to have a ruggedized design customized for them. Something that addresses the kinds of problems found in an middle-school academic environment (built in GPS and celluar devices for locating lost or stolen machines for instance).
My choice would be QUITTING. Holy mother of god, there isn't enough money in the world to convince me that a "minimal tech staff" could possibly handle a school full of fragile laptops! Giving every sixth grader their own wireless laptop is bar none, the single worst idea I've ever come across in my entire life!
It's been a long time.
The age group is sixth graders, moron. Reader Rabbit is for beginning readers.
If Michigan had a set of specific applications in mind, then there wouldn't be much question of what platform they would pick. Instead it seems like they are following other states' lead by giving students access to laptops for general schoolwork, NOT to run specific applications. Besides, there are definitely plenty of educational software titles available for OSX. Maybe not as <b>many</b> as Windows, but quantity certainly does not equal quality.
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
800 MHz iBooks with airport, and the extended warranty.
Overpurchase by 5% on the units. You won't have a care in the world for three years, repair wise compared to anything else.
Viruses? Feh.
TCO? Much lower.
Networking is self-configuring if you just RTFM.
Airport base stations judiciously placed. Secure the hell out of them, though - each school building will have a big 2.5GHz target painted on it from day 1.
An Xserve for each building, or use your existing servers (in the other articles, the wintel IT people are freaking about the added something or other.
As for the guns or butter arguments - they already have chalkboards, chalk, books, pencils, paper.
The average per pupil expenditure in the US is around $10,000 per year. If a $1200 iBook (that's their target price - easily done for an 800+airport+applecare in volume) lasts 3 years. I know. I bought a 500 the week they came out 2.5 years ago and it's still running circles around anything else from that long ago.
So the cost is $400 per year per student. That's 4%. try and reduce class size with that sort of increase. No can do.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Since ~40% of kids graduating from high school can't read, guess what those kids are going to do... surf the porn/Britney Spears photo crap etc. First teach kids to read, write and do math.
These people are crazy. I don't think I've heard of anything more wasteful and useless in my life. I thought it was bad when South Dakota's previous governor kept putting Dell desktops in computer labs throughout public schools and universities, because they rarely ever got used. Not only that, but they were expensive, and kept getting replaced.
Now, there's this. Laptops for 6th graders. What braindead politician came up with this one? For one, a 6th grade kid is usually not responsible enough to take care of his bicycle, let alone a commercial electronics device with sensitive equipment that costs 5 times as much. They'll be broken within days as they put them in their laptops and lug them about.
That is, if they last for more than day to begin with. As someone else has mentioned, kids like money. Unless these kids are hardcore geeks, careful, and can run like a bat out of hell, chances are these laptops will a) be stollen or b) be sold within the first couple days. A laptop that is seen as primarily for writing reports and papers, is big (for their age) and heavy, and has to be lugged around is not something that a kid would want, when they could sell it and buy, say, two or three years of the most trendy clothing and toys. These are middle schoolers we're talking about, here.
What's more, they're 6th graders. I don't know if you guys remember 6th grade or not, but the majority of 6th graders in my school were affraid of the upper classmen (7th and 8th), because there were always a few that would pick fights, and there was always the chacne that your stuff would be stollen. I'm sure some 7th or 8th grader that didn't get a laptop will want one, and know just where to get one.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I find the biggest obstacle to technical education for my kid is the lack of technical capability, training and computer access for teachers. Many teachers are technophobes. I was a trainer for a while, and they were the most challenging group I worked with. Many administrators have been really slow to "get it" about the need to adopt technology.
This is the 1st year that my son's high school teachers will be expected to use the email addresses they have had for several years. Not all classrooms and offices have working computers with network access.
And this is in Maine, where the laptop experiment was tried. It was a huge PR sucess for the then-governor. As an education initiative, the money could have been used much more successfully elsewhere.
I'm currently a highschool senior at a vocational school that provides laptops for every student, about 2000 students total (junior and senior only school). The laptops provided for each student at my school would probable beg to be given to a 6th grader rather than having windows xp installed on it considering its an IBM thinkpad 390e which has a 300mhz p2 and 64MB of ram. This years juniors got IBM thinkpad A22e's and those only have 800mhz celerons and 128MB of ram. All these laptops are all runing Win98 because they just cant handle win2k or winxp without being bogged down so bad theyed be unuseable. OfficeXP boges them down enouth as is (ever see somebody type an entire page before the first character was displayed on the screen).
I dont see them getting 130000 NEW dell laptops for every 6th grader, its way to expensive compared to used/refurbished equipment.
Also, with just highschool juniors and seniors the IT department is constantly busy repairing or reimaging laptops because either hardware fails or acidents happen. I'd hate to work at a large school where every 6th grader has a laptop.
And even though our laptops cant handle winxp, weve had debian, knoppix, and gentoo running great on them =)