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MA High School Forces All Students To Buy MacBooks
An anonymous reader sends in this excerpt from the Salem News:
"A new program at Beverly High will equip every student with a new laptop computer to prepare kids for a high-tech future. But there's a catch. The money for the $900 Apple MacBooks will come out of parents' pockets. 'You're kidding me,' parent Jenn Parisella said when she found out she'd have to buy her sophomore daughter, Sky, a new computer. 'She has a laptop. Why would I buy her another laptop?' Sky has a Dell. Come September 2011, every student will need an Apple. They'll bring it to class and use it for homework. Superintendent James Hayes sees the technology as an essential move to prepare kids for the future. The School Committee approved the move last year, and Hayes said he's getting the news out now so families can prepare. 'We have one platform,' Hayes said. 'And that's going to be the Mac.'"
Students who don't participate will be able to borrow a school-provided laptop during the day, but they won't be able to take it home, Hayes said.
Which essentially means that the program is voluntary. The school is hoping to be able to save money by not having to provide computer labs.
FTFA:
"Parents can pay for the computers upfront or lease them from the district, with the option to buy after three years. The payments should work out to about $20 to $25 per month, Hayes said. The cost also includes free tech support.
"We realize for some families that will be a stretch," he said. In those cases, the district will provide financial assistance.
Students who don't participate will be able to borrow a school-provided laptop during the day, but they won't be able to take it home, Hayes said."
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IMO, $20-25/mo is a fair plan. That should be well within the finances of most families, and as they noted, they will provide financial assistance.
That said, using a unified platform is not a bad idea, but why make students buy heavily marked up hardware? Why not Netbooks with Linux?
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
I remember when you couldn't use a calculator until you understood what you were doing on paper. Even then, show your work questions sort of kept it so that you needed to know what you were doing.
I suppose with QuickTime X ability to record the screen they can show their work, if you can call mindlessly punching keys work.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I know it's really hard to click a link, so I'll provide the relevant part for you:
Parents can pay for the computers upfront or lease them from the district, with the option to buy after three years. The payments should work out to about $20 to $25 per month, Hayes said. The cost also includes free tech support. "We realize for some families that will be a stretch," he said. In those cases, the district will provide financial assistance. Students who don't participate will be able to borrow a school-provided laptop during the day, but they won't be able to take it home, Hayes said.
What are you talking about? In 1991, I purchased an IBM PS/2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_System/2
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Well, having had some experience with the Maine Laptop Initiative, their MacBooks did experience downtime due to system problems, and of course inevitable hardware failures.
School administrators that I worked with (I did Novell support for a few schools, and integrating their MacBooks into NetWare was nontrivial, but went pretty well) complained the most about having to re-image drives. They spent quite a bit of time optimizing that process, but there are only a few ways to re-image a MacBook, and none are fast enough. I could not get ZenWorks to do it, despite some heroic work by Novell engineers as a pet project. Oh well...
We were required to re-image the machines to a base system image after many repairs, most specifically hard drives and system boards. Data backup and restoration was the responsibility of the student and local administrators. It's their policy, we just had to follow the rules.
Our little business did well providing non-warranty repairs until both Apple and Apple dealers realized they were being cut out of the loop in a big way. I left before Apple got hard and cut off parts access. That was the end. But we saved some schools a little money along the way.
The MLTI has many lessons for other systems. Worth looking into before your school board leaps off the cliff.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I would have looked to ThinkPad T series first, but Vaio gets mixed reviews. ThinkPads are only notebooks I would buy used, and I've never been disappointed.
Toughbooks are the best, but that's a different category. Some people claim Fujitsu makes good stuff, but not in my limited experience.
So there is nothing that I would consider to be in the median price range that compares.
And for a school, good enough should include being tough enough to live through a high school career. Maine's Laptop Initiative gave them to middle schoolers. It was comical to hear the explanations for cracked screens. There is, of course no explanation for a cracked screen, certainly not for one with a .22 hole in it.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Proverbs 17:28
Einstein finished secondary school in Aarau (Switzerland), and then graduated from the Polytechnic in Zurich, and even finished his doctoral studies. So he very much did stay the course. It's just like a student changing one high school for another.
Einstein is definitely not one of those "succesful dropouts". Please stop spreading misinformation.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.