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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.'"
Yes. Completely voluntary. Until the first homework assignment comes around and the kids who don't participate have to stay late and work through lunch.
Public schools should never require parents to pay for expensive items or programs. This is dead wrong. Many parents no longer have a job nor savings. How will their children get by in school? Further why in the sam hell would anyone push Macs on the kids? There are alternatives such as Linux that could save these families a fortune on PCs.
The first three years I was in high school, the school had this ridiculous program going on where they issued every student an iBook. Teachers tried to make us use them, but seriously, how useful is a laptop in high school math? Admittedly, it was nice for language and social studies classes to have something to type/browse Wikipedia on, but the hassle of carrying them around, dealing with the constant breakage, and etc. far outweighed the benefits to the students. And when you look at the $2 mil that the school district spent on the program, the whole thing just seemed like a really bad joke.
My daughters school added the requirement that she have a laptop for school. The school here said that it must run Windows and have Microsoft Office on it.
I gave her a new Toshiba with Fedora Core and open office. She is happy with it, then I get a note from the school that It must be Windows because they had software to install that required windows. I told then that if they would let me know what the software does I would be more than happy to find a similar package for Linux or to set it up in a restricted virtual environment.
Never hear another thing from them. IMHO if the school wants to require an OS or Specific software packages then they need to pony up the money for the laptop and set it up the way they want it.
As a Mac user of 23 years, I've gotta say that this headline is abso-fvcking-lutely surreal.
It seemed like Mac users pissed and moaned for decades about being forced to abandon their platform as schools moved toward cheap PC running Windows 3.1 et al.
Is today backwards day?
It doesn't require a lot of experience to switch between Windows and Mac. I'd expect someone with experience with one platform and absolutely zero on the other to be up to speed in a day or two.
I switched from Windows to Mac on my work laptop about eight months ago, so I have personal and recent experience.
It is not something that takes a day or two. It takes a month or two to regain all the lost productivity. Most people where I work that have switched to Mac have a similar experience. Just getting used to the keyboard with the extra meta keys, and missing keys you're used to, takes a long time.
Once you're over the learning curve it's a better experience, but it's not as easy as you think it is.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Is it really necessarily to require every student to have a laptop in order to learn? Are they saying it's nearly impossible to correctly teach students without this technology?
And sure, while technology makes things easier to do, it almost feels like they're blaming the lack of technology for not being able to properly teach the students. But, that's my opinion.
It's amusing isn't it! Yet another example of technology being used to hide inadequate education. The real solution to most teaching problems is to hire good teachers, pay them enough to make them want to keep the job, and keep the class sizes small enough so that the teachers can actually interact with all of the students.
I'm a math prof, and I've found that the best way to present complicated material is a chalk board. Sometimes I get all crazy and use advanced multi-media like "colored chalk".
Really, though. Why do they need Macbooks? If they are teaching them computer science, then part of the learning is figuring out how to handle your own computer (whatever OS it might be). If they want them to typeset their term papers then they should just say that, not require a specific proprietary product. Part of being a savy computer user is developing enough skill with manuals and search engines to figure out how to solve $common_problem on $your_platform.
Albert Einstein didn't have a laptop in school.
Ben Franklin didn't have a laptop in school.
Stephen Hawking didn't have a laptop in school.
Thomas Edison didn't have a laptop in school.
Nikola Tesla didn't have a laptop in school.
Even Bill Gates didn't have a laptop in school.
Oddly enough...
Einstein dropped out of Luitpold Gymnasium (=high school)
Franklin dropped out of Boston Latin high school
Edison went to school for a grand total of three months
Tesla dropped out of Graz University
Gates dropped out of Harvard
Hawking was the only one to stay the course...and yes, he did get a laptop.
Differences
1: The ubiquity of windows in a work/real world setting makes forcing students to learn how to use it logical. OSX, less so.
2: An equivalent windows laptop usually doesn't cost $900 (hence why you can't ignore the price issue)
3: This is the first time I've ever heard of any school district forcing students to buy laptops at all let alone a specific made model and brand. I was required to have a computer for COLLEGE that ran windows but I fully free to pick the one I wanted. And laptops, while helpful, were not required if you didn't mind carrying a flash drive to move files from the lab to your home.
The school is hoping to be able to save money by not having to provide computer labs.
A school district near where I live is doing exactly that, but the school is providing the macbooks, one to every student. And the teachers are also ditching the imacs from their desktops and getting macbook pros. Doing this allows the school to reclaim 7 entire labs into new classrooms to make smaller class sizes without building a new wing, so it's actually a cost-saving measure.
They crunched the numbers, and talked with other nearby school districts that had done the same thing, to see if theft/loss/damage of the laptops was an issue, and surprisingly, it was not. (four damaged laptops in the entire year in one district they asked)
But this is a fairly wealthy school district, they had the money to pull it off, and I think it's great.
I suppose the next ideal evolution will be getting the textbooks onto the computers. That would be an entirely new level of awesome.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I wouldn't want my child using one of the school laptops either. What if it's gets damaged while in the student possession. Will the parent be responsible for repairs? If I can't afford to buy my child one I won't be able to pay for repairs either.
And why mac books? I don't like windows anymore than the rest of the /. crowd but if you want them to be prepared for the high tech future why not get Dells with Windows 7 at half the cost.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
schools is where they begin to indoctrinate the young people to step the line, not to do anything that is even remotely different.
How is it at all sensible for a school to require everybody to buy a laptop, especially a laptop with a non-Free operating system?
this is insane, if a laptop is really required it must be a laptop with an operating system that is Free to look at the code and probably free to own.
You can't handle the truth.
Yeah, my wife taught at a high school that bought every student and teacher a Macbook Pro. Yes, Pro. At the cost of several million dollars to the school district, no less... oh, but that wasn't the REAL cost. The REAL cost was that the teachers could no longer buy books to teach with. They were supposed to use only the laptops. Oh, and at the end of the year, the school laid off 50 teachers.
They closed down one school in the district entirely, electing instead to privatize it and lay off all of the teachers to "save some money." The private company that came in was supposed to "specialize in teaching underperforming students using technology." Good luck with that... Remind me again when technology became better than books and teacher interaction for students.
Then again, I guess I can't expect much, given my state's history in education. (Hint: We're the dumbest, poorest state in the US.)
"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..."
Jeez, why not use Apple's own Disk Utility software, which works great for re-imaging single machines, or their Server tools which allow you do the same thing for multiple ones.
Sounds like you were trying to use every method but the one that's obvious.
"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."
You can't order your parts from a distributor like every normal person?
And why mac books? I don't like windows anymore than the rest of the /. crowd but if you want them to be prepared for the high tech future why not get Dells with Windows 7 at half the cost.
I completely agree with you here. These are students being taught for their future and will need the skills required for their future jobs. Pushing the Mac platform is a horrible idea and a form of playing russian roulette with their computer skills and future job possibilities.
Regardless of anyones personal opinion of computer OS's, Windows still rules in both the personal and business OS level. And I don't care what anyone else has to say on the level of 'but, but, Macs are slowly gaining.' Thats great for Mac. But here's a good dose of reality. OSX was released in March of 2001. Its now June of 2010, just over 9 years later. Mac has been able to improve its market share from 1-2% to 6-9%. That means less then one in 10 computers is a Mac even after 9 years and one hell of an aggressive marketing campaign (we've all seen those 'Pc vs Mac' commercials). This idea is set to be set in motion for 2011, and considering it takes on average a person to graduate from HS a total of 4 years your looking at someone graduating with Mac-only education in 2015 being 5 years from now. I don't see Mac being over 50% market share by then to even consider itself the OS leader let alone getting over 33% if the market can even fragment enough to split evenly between Windows/Mac/Linux (without going into others like BSD, etc...). That means you will have students that can work with a small segment of the computers which will seriously hurt their chances. Any employer that has computers needed in the job will just look at the young adult and see that not only will they need training on the basics of the job, but how to use the basics of their workplace OS that is the business leader. And training isn't free, it's expensive and they will be more likely over looked for someone with Windows experience which means less training and money saved.
The school is also mentioning security as an issue, but thats getting more and more of a questionable problem. Fact of the matter is, Windows 7 is pretty secure (but not the most secure). And computer security is no longer as simple as how fast a virus/worm can spread. This keeps being shown on the Pwn2Own contests, as security is now based on what else is running on the computer. The biggest security risk seems to be running Flash on the system. If I remember right, Flash is not installed by default on Windows 7 and since many businesses won't let you install programs from the internet by default, that makes a big security hole gone. Not so on OSX where Flash is installed as factory default, a huge security hole. Another thing to consider as mentioned by Pwn2Own winner Charlie Miller: Windows 7 or Snow Leopard, which of these two commercial OS will be harder to hack and why? Windows 7 is slightly more difficult because it has full ASLR (address space layout randomization) and a smaller attack surface (for example, no Java or Flash by default). So in the end, security to no longer one sided, each OS is now more secure in same ways then its competitions and less secure in other ways.
Also to consider is things like hardware compatibility. Most hardware is written to support Windows, with some to little to no support for Mac. Sure, Macs play great with other Mac hardware but if Apple doesn't make it things get iffy (again, depends on what it is your talking about exactly). These students go home and will want to use their laptops with their devices at home. Have a blackberry phone? Good luck doing anything but the basics of syncing (and no, showing me some complex set of instructions doesn't count. We are talking students of different interests and backgrounds, not the slashdot crowd). Printers and scanners? Again, depends on which ones and how old they are
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
Great post. My feelings exactly. I'm not a fan boy of either. I grew up coding basic at 5 years old on an Apple II.. so I know full well about Apple's beginnings. Since the early 90s I've used mainly PCs. And now? Well I have a mac mini, and iPad, iPhone, and I7 PC. I use them all because I need to know everything that is tech as I'm a computer consultant. However, everything that is useful in business except for graphic design and web design is run on a PC using Windows XP or Windows 7.
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