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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.'"
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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.
They're preparing them for a technological future with MACS!!
Sorry - this was obligatory. :(
Suppose I were the parent of an underprivileged child. Suppose I live paycheck-to-paycheck, and don't have room in my budget for this. What the hell is the school going to do when I refuse to adhere to this absurdity? Fail my child? This wreaks of something illegal.
My other sig is clever.
And this is what you get when you put technical decisions in the hands of people who call their tower a "CPU." Any competent content administrator should be able to deal with their data moving across windows, linux and mac systems. This is expensive ignorance at its finest.
Something tells me this is one of those districts that doesn't have any poor kids. Those districts have to share a single IBM PS/2.
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
A new program at Beverly High will equip every student with a new laptop computer
Odd, from reading the summary, it sounds more like the parents will do that, while the 'program' will just require it.
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.
Macs are at least a step up from Windows in terms of viruses and security - which I expect is why the school chose macs rather than pc's. Keeping a bunch of PC laptops free of viruses would be a nightmare for any public-school IT department. If they even have an IT department, and it isn't just a second job piled onto the computer teacher's desk.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
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.
As a member of the Stallman Cult, I am morally and religiously obligated not to work with closed platforms!
Probably a far better idea to get them all netbooks. They're cheaper and they will draw less irk from parents. Besides, what can a Mac do that Linux can't when it comes to schoolwork? And I'm not going to even mention using Windows and how much a joy that could be.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
Fuck those fundamentalist idiots. They're part of the reason the world can suck at times. I'd burn them all for the pitiful education that they not only reveal but also pass on to younger fellas.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
You can't say "the 900 dollar mandatory price tag aside" and then say there's no issue. Putting a statement that you want to ignore the major issue in your post doesn't make it go away.
BS.
UNIX is very alive an well, and OS X is based on UNIX, and so are the majority of other platforms that are needed if you are to get ahead in technology.
Plus, MS Office is on OS X...
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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."
---
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.
If we are training kids for the future we should definitely have them use a windows/linux variant. I remember back in the university our C++ class had a computer lab that was split between Macs and PCs. The PCs would always be all in use and I had to make do on a mac. I definitely did not enjoy having to do everything differently than the majority of the class, but my teacher appreciated me taking one for the team. If anything I think having a multi platform environment would be good for students having to deal with different platforms at different companies.
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The median income for a household in the city is $53,984, and the median income for a family is $66,486. Males have a median income of $45,348 versus $35,659 for females. The per capita income for the city is $28,626. 5.7% of the population and 4.0% of families are below the poverty line. Out of the total population, 6.5% of those under the age of 18 and 5.2% of those 65 and older are living below the poverty line.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly,_Massachusetts#Demographics
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.
Ignoring the issue of forcing parents to come off $900: Why go with Apple? A Linux-PC is free+hardware and a Windows platform is the most probable system these kids will wind up using at work. I don't think Hayes is being terribly objective here.
I got a Dell :(
I'd wholeheartedly agree if it weren't for the fact that "the web" is a terrible platform.
Sounds like a lawsuit to me. The school board is requiring people purchase a specific computer without reimbursement to get an education. Last I checked, everyone in the U.S. is entitled to a free education up through high school.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
"wreaks" means to demolish or damage
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.
PARTS of MS Office is in OS X. Outlook is not. PowerPoint is not. The statistical [and other] add-ins for Excel are not (nor any of the other extremely useful VBA stuff).
Perhaps it would be cheaper for the parents to collect a bigger bribe than Apple offered the Superintendent to require their expensive laptops. Or just get him fired for accepting Apple's bribe in the first place.
... I would say there is some wisdom is chosing apple for that purpose. If they instead opted for a Windows laptop it would be nearly impossible to standardize. Even if they said "everyone go buy a Dell model ABC123" you wouldn't get very good consistency, because inevitably some parents would try to substitute something else (and yet others would substitute by accident). On top of that you do have the problem with the Windows (in)security mentality that leads to crashing systems all over the place.
So if the purpose really is for the kids to learn subject material that doesn't include how to fix the computer, then the apple probably isn't a bad choice after all.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The school probably doesn't realize how much it's going to cost to install 20-30 electrical outlets in every classroom. If its for learning, they can't rely on the students to keep 'em charged.
Outside of a programming class why the hell do high school, hell even college students, need a laptop for school? I guess it's because of idiocies like this that we spend more, by far, per student than the rest of the world.
It wasn't too long ago that Some school systems refused to support Macs, refused to allow them into their networks, some schools requiring PCs only. Times have changed..
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
Good point, but I would submit the fact that 90% of all people who have a PC have Windows to go with it would be an excellent answer. Yes, the school could also (bad car analogy FTW!) standardize on right-hand-drive vehicles to drive in their parking lot so everyone is driving on the same side of the road, but that's ignoring an underlying standard that pretty much everyone already has a car, and it's probably a left-hand-drive here in the US.
I know standardizing will make the school admin's jobs easier, and I don't think tax dollars should be buying laptops, so as far as this program goes it makes a certain sense. Pick a standard, make the parents buy to that standard, offer in-school loaners for kids who need them.
But if they need to standardize on something it would seem to make sense to standardize on something that most people already have. If you don't already have it, you can get a basic netbook for $250 to run Windows, and a decent laptop for under $500 rather than forcing a high-school student to be responsible for a $900 machine and their parents responsible for replacing it when it gets dropped. I bet Apple won't offer the same deep discounted price of $900 on the MacBook when Little Jimmy drops his first one in December, and his second one in March.
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The difference is that, by making this a requirement, this amounts to a tax to attend school. And, the tax isn't even being paid to the school district, it is being paid to Apple.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Apple's going to do well out of this, considering there was something about other school districts have started to adopt this/similar schemes.
If we are training kids for the future we should definitely have them use a windows/linux variant.
Is using Windows so hard that you need training to use it? In that case, we shouldn't be training the kids to use it, we should train them to say "no" if their boss wants them to use windows. But you may not have noticed a subtle change: While the CTOs still use their Windows PCs more or less unhappily, their CEO bosses use iPhones and iPads and MacBooks Airs. When these kids leave school, the change won't be so subtle anymore.
...Because high schoolers are going to be using VBA and obscure plugins for Excel?
Outlook isn't a problem because the move has been towards web-based access with clients for only mobile platforms. And as for PowerPoint, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2008_for_Mac PowerPoint is included.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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?
And as everybody knows, MS Office is not available for Mac.
Slagborr
Direct your hate mail this way: jim.hayes@beverlyschools.org
AccountKiller
Have you ever used Mathlab? http://www.mathworks.cn/access/helpdesk_r13/help/base/install/mac/inst_mac.html
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They'd be better off requiring Mandarin for all the students, to provide for their future when they need to talk to their bosses.
Office for Mac 2008 has Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Entourage (a horrible Outlook copy). Office 2011 will replace Entourage with an actual port of Outlook (it better be better than Entourage or I'm going to have to stab somebody). You might want to look up information before posting.
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.
EVERY employer requires M$ Office experience...
This isn't always true either. I doubt the largest employer in the city where I work require any computer skills for the assembly line workers. Neither do the construction companies whose employees are expanding the building I am sitting in. If you are talking about white collar jobs, you might have a point but most of these require a degree of some sort. Anyone graduating with any sort of degree is going to have used Microsoft Office at least a little so what students use in High School is irrelevant to the real world.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
"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.
This isn't clear whether they mean the "financial assistance" is limited to the borrowing, or if there's some other financial assistance program where they basically buy the laptop for you. But either way nobody is *required* to buy a $900 laptop. It just might be less convenient, depending on what they meant by "financial assistance".
Also,
The district considered PCs but decided to go with MacBooks because Apple offers a better package with educational and technical support, Hayes said. Plus, the software the district would have to purchase for a PC adds up.
"When it came down to it, there was a minimal difference in savings," he said.
So they are arguing that even though $900 is a lot for a laptop the other software they would have to buy for a Windows-based machine would make the prices comparable anyway.
It is a clever program teaching students to fix other students' computers and such. Though which parent is going to hand a $900 laptop they just bought to a high school student to fix when it's probably still under warranty?
Really though the best thing they could do to "teach" these kids is to have mac as the only supported platform and if the kids want to use a different one they have to figure out how to do the equivalent work on their platform of choice. Some parents (and students) might complain, but getting your hands dirty is how you learn.
PARTS of MS Office is in OS X. Outlook is not. PowerPoint is not. The statistical [and other] add-ins for Excel are not (nor any of the other extremely useful VBA stuff).
My copy of MS Office came with Powerpoint, a mac email client with exchange connectivity, and excel add ons, but you are right that Visual Basic is not supported.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Who was the Apple sales rep on this account? Huge WIN - to FORCE parents to buy a kid a new machine when they might well ALREADY HAVE ONE that works perfectly well.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
PARTS of MS Office is in OS X. Outlook is not. PowerPoint is not. The statistical [and other] add-ins for Excel are not (nor any of the other extremely useful VBA stuff).
When did you last run Office on a Mac? It must have been several years ago, at a minimum.
PowerPoint is part of Office 2008 Mac.
Outlook is not, but Entourage is. Entourage will talk fine to Exchange servers. Mac Mail will also talk to Exchange natively since Snow Leopard, so you don't even need Office for Exchange email.
Excel does include things like Pivot Tables, but you are correct that VBA is not supported on Mac.
Outlook will replace Entourage in Office 2010 Mac, which is supposed to ship late this year.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abe Lincoln's famous quote.
Yup, there it is (I actually used one in school, looong time ago):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2
How many of them are just going to get robbed by other students?
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.
There are some nice netbooks that will work well as Hackintosh computers. Then these Mac Netbook users can make fun of the idiots that spent $900 for a heavy laptop, when then could spend $250 on a lightweight Hackintosh capable of running the all the crap software the school makes them use. Heck, when I bought OS X for my Hackintosh, the OS came with pretty Apple logo stickers for my case. It was obviously designed to be installed on Non-Apple hardware.
I mean, really, what education experience is my child suppose to get by being locked into a platform not primarily used by business? If it was Ubuntu/(Insert linux flavor here) or Windows, then I could understand the requirement of one OS.
This is just the schools utter lazyness and favoritism. At least the parents get to buy it though and prove it doesn't have scripts built into it to spy on the kids.
-CdDM
IBM PS/2.
Ugh, IBM PC/2! PS/2 is the connectors, PC/2 was the overall product, PS/2 does not include a computer, it's just a connector. Or wait, are you saying they are going to stare at a PS/2 connector?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_System/2
The connector got its name from the computer.
Learning about technology is important in the modern world, but is it really necessary to require the students to focus on ONE vendor?
Hey, I have been an Apple fan from the days of the Apple I, but id still be pissed if my kids school was going to go down the path of single vendor teaching.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Powerpoint has always been in Office for Mac OS X. Outlook is in Office for Mac 2010. VBA is the only leg your post has to stand on.
Last time I checked Powerpoint was.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
That is usually how these sort of things come about. I mean when you get down to it, there is no good reason to require students to have computers. It makes sense to have computers at your school, and to use them for various things and tech students about them, but it does not make sense to try and make everything computer based. I do not believe everything is made better by computers, and I love computers. Sorry, but I don't see math being better done on a computer. I think a book, a calculator (for more advanced math) and a piece of paper is a good way of doing it. I work at a university and we don't mandate laptops for students. We have a lot of computers on campus and they are used extensively, but you don't need a computer for everything.
So programs like this do not tend to come out of real educational needs. Rather they come from fanboy types. You get the person who thinks their chosen computer is just the greatest thing ever and thinks life would be so wonderful is everyone had one. So the district technology person, or the superintendent or whatever is a Mac head who thinks their Macbook is the greatest thing since sliced bread. They get the idea through their head that every student should have one, rather than evaluating what technology might be useful (for example maybe the money is better spent on projectors and digital whiteboards for classrooms). Thus you get a program like this.
Never underestimate a poorly informed fanboy in a position of power. As an example the newspaper here on campus is, as one might expect, Mac centric. So they badly needed to replace their newsroom computers, they were old original iMacs (the 5 colour kind) and were breaking down in addition to being not supported. Also as you'd expect being a newspaper and on a campus, they are strapped for cash. So my friend who is their tech guy worked up a cheap Linux PC for them. Would have cost like $350 per seat including monitor. Wasn't powerful, but didn't need to be, newsroom computers are just for word processing and some web surfing. They wouldn't go for it. The higher ups are Mac heads and insisted they had to have Macs. My friend brought in a system to show them how well it worked, how it integrated with what they had and so on. No go, they bought a bunch of $1500 iMacs. They spent many times what they needed to simply because they had fanboys who decided that was what they had to have.
It isn't. But saying 'this bad thing is no different to this other bad thing' doesn't make it a good thing.
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He's not ignoring the price tag, he's wondering how it's any different from schools requiring similar expenditures on Windows laptops (as they often do). It's an interesting question. The laptops that schools require students to purchase are usually between seven and nine hundred dollars, so while this may be on the outside edge of that price, it's not terribly onerous in comparison. Before you say "But those students could buy any laptop they want, it's just a Windows laptop after all", my (admittedly limited) experience is that this is not the case. The schools require a particular brand and model, and often put their own OS and application stack on the machines. In a few cases I've read about, they even lock the students and their families out of the administrator functions of the systems. This may or may not be the common practice I don't know, but I do know it happens.
If the school wants to issue locked down computers I can certainly see that, but forcing parents to spend a bit less than a thousand dollars on a computer, then treating it as if it were school property seems a bit extreme.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
If you really want to educate them about computers, and not just train them, get them started with 8-bit computers. Apple II, Commodore 64, doesn't really matter. They should learn how these things work at the bare metal.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The men who sent us to the Moon grew up without computers in the school. Every single one of them.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Are they even running software for these courses or are they just reading pdf's? Those are platform-agnostic, even if Acrobat seems buggier on PC.
As big of a tech geek as I am, most of the tech thrown at education is worthless. A $5000 home gym doesn't do a damn bit of good if the owner doesn't make use of it and just taking a walk around the block is more effective than the unused gym. A poor teacher with a gizmo is just a poor teacher with a gizmo; she does not automatically become great.
We're back to the big argument between directed and undirected learning. We've had learning machines for hundreds of years -- they're called books. Kids can learn a lot from them, have been learning for quite some time. But there's things that just can't be taught from books -- someone has to show you. We've had that for even longer than we've had books. Used together, a really proper education can be provided.
A good teacher can provide a proper education even if the classroom is nothing but a mud-bricked one-room hovel and the students are sitting on the floor. The best facilities and equipment in the world will not make up for a bad teacher and unmotivated, unengaged students. But sure, let's throw a laptop into the mix. That has to make kids smarter, it cost extra money.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
How can you expect Americans to have aristocracies if you stand in the way of holding back or penalizing the poor!?
If you can afford to pay $1K for a laptop that does the same thing a $400 PC can, surely you can pay the money for the software. Not to mention that the same software is still expensive on PC.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
...where everybody has the same type of computer. So I guess heterogeneous networks are going away. And none to soon for my taste.
---
Get off my lawn.
d'Baba
Matlab (no h) is very much most highschool math. Heck what it is used for is shot more towards Graduate level courses and above.
I mean I suppose you could pay $10k seat for matrix algebra.
Maple would be closer to what a highschool student needed.
Damn right. I'm glad that my school was forward-thinking enough to teach me Windows 3.11 and Microsoft Works and Word 2. All that other time that they spent teaching me the concepts underlying the systems was completely wasted, because when I got out into the real world I found that everyone used Window 3.11 and Word 2.
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This is just as bad as mandating all Microsoft software - I feel like I'm back in the 1990s.
They should be using the web to get any content out to students, and then students could use whatever sort of computer (or device!) they want, including ipads, thinkpads, or smartbooks or their latest phone which they use instead of a computer. Then in five years time when the next hot new thing comes along or their mac software is broken by a new OS, or Apple drops Mac OS completely (the last WWDC was almost entirely taken up with iOS), they will not be left stuck on an abandoned platform dealing with bit rot in old applications and wondering why they mandated that everyone must use this. You know, like those companies that still use Windows 2000 because they are tied to binaries on that platform and they don't want the hassle of moving on.
This is exactly what the web was made for. If they used platform-agnostic html to deliver their student content (no active-x, no binary plugins), they would have an always up to date resource which students could access from anywhere, and which did not mandate any particular technology to access it (every platform nowadays has a browser). Students could deal with their own tech support, and the school could issue free (far cheaper) web devices to those who needed them.
The question nowadays is not mac or PC, it should be binary or markup, and the answer is pretty obvious for the needs of a high school.
would be that computers from different companies and with OS's could be used together in one school.
Of course, that's an idea that Apple is fighting tooth and nail.
So now, a school feels that they have to force everyone to conform to the same one platform (and the most expensive). And all the software, peripherals, and media that these students and their families buy will further lock them into the Apple platform.
The boss gets to run around with an ipad/macbook air because they don't have to any real work on it.
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At this stage in the game I don't agree. I used all the computers you mentioned and they don't really have any bearing (sp?) on current computing.
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Ok I don't agree with making every kids parents buy a laptop, nor do I disagree with the fact that the school is attempting to externalize costs....however The median income for a household in the city is $53,984, and the median income for a family is $66,486 (Wikipedia). - So...a $900 laptop - probably won't impact most of the kids parents that much....and yeah some kids will have to do homework at school or...imagine this....print out the assignment and complete it by writing!! No decent high school teacher would not allow a kid to turn in homework that's not in digital format - lets be honest...so wheres the huge problem here?
Individuals must choose, decide their "essential" nature rather than having it given from some transcendent source.
I have setup plenty of hackintoshes and I wouldn't recommend it for high school kids who aren't into computers.
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Even the richest districts import a few poor children for their children to tease/abuse/learn how not to be poor from.
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someone tells me someones retirement portfolio needs checking...
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Even after the school discount bringing it down to just $900, that's a 200%+ markup over what a comparable PC would cost.
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.
...will start a "Hackintosh for dummies" course and make a mint...
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Or did they already file the class action lawsuit ?
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Since everyone here is trashing the decision I figured I try to be the devils advocate.
Assuming the laptops do have a legitimate educational use I can see two motivations for a single platform.
1) Specific applications:
They may intend to use specific applications that are only available on the mac, if this is the case I don't really agree since they should be able to find an alternative that runs on multiple platforms.
2) Support:
I suspect this is the real reason. Let every student bring their own laptop, most are various versions of windows, a bunch more apples, maybe one or two linux, and very rarely something else entirely. Now students have to install app X for some class. Even if it's cross platform there's 5 different versions of windows, some unsupported and horribly out of date. Some can't connect to the wireless, others crash constantly, maybe having bad hardware, viruses everywhere, and the poor school admin has to worry about keeping all of these working of students are going to miss out.
Honestly if I was part of a board that said "we really need to have laptops in the classroom to educate our kids" and it was left up to me to implement this I'd probably do something like this.
1) Decide on the software that teachers are allowed to use, any program must run on all OS's (or have a similar variant that does, ie office apps), and if possible, be free.
2) Fine the stablest and easiest to use and support laptop that I can, ie the cheapest iBook. Say that's our platform and our school admins are prepared to support it..
3) Tell the parents, they'll use iBooks in the class, and we'll have some iBooks for signout during school hours for students who haven't bought one. They can use their own comps at home to do homework but at school the only thing in the class will be the listed models of mac OS + hardware. If they really want their child to use their own computer that child will need to go to the school admin and demonstrate they are sufficiently skilled to administer it, if a student is having technical issues with an unsupported laptop they will be issued a school one instead.
There's no way an average school will have the technical ability to administrate a school full of random laptops unless you want to spend a portion of each class debugging machines this is what you have to do.
I stole this Sig
Too bad you never learned that it was Mark Twain who said it.
Rather than require the students to have a laptop (any OS) and use open formats for the papers/homework they submit they want the students to purchase a specific type and then likely require the papers/homework to be done in a software package that will be extra, like MS Office for Mac (do they even make that anymore?) or something from Apple.
I would want to look at the financials of school board members. I smell kickbacks.
On a side note what if a student does bring their own laptop to school and uses it at lunch or in the Library? Will it be confiscated?
Spot on the money, literally in this case.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
The choice of forcing the Mac platform at 900 bucks a pop when PC laptops can be commonly had these days for 379 a pop seems ludicrous. I am not saying make everyone get a PC laptop but the parents should be allowed to choose since they have to spend their own money. Also 95% of the world is on Microsoft Windows so pushing Macs seems to run counter to the real world for which the students are supposedly being prepared.
Personally I would rather see Linux pushed myself. And I would not like to see it the other way around either where the parents would be forced to buy PC laptops. I think they should be allowed to choose PC Mac or Linux.
Getting used to the + button not maximizing things - except when it does - is also absurdly hard. I've been at it for a month or so, still not used to it.
Sorry Teacher, a poor kid stole my homework...
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
without any attempt at trolling or flamebaiting, they could also ask for a modern OS which can be installed on most computers the kids might have, even if it is outdated or from Apple, and which comes with no additional costs nothing.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
It reminds me of how my high school wasted so much money on smart boards, which were little more than digital whiteboards (sure, they had some other functions, but most teachers didn't use them, and I don't blame them...they're useless). The only difference was that it's much easier to make a smartboard malfunction than a whiteboard.
It may look good to be able to say you're "introducing technology into the classroom," but often it makes things worse. In this case I bet a lot of students will be on facebook during class.
I think the problem is that the people who start these programs begin with their solution (technology) and try to find a problem to apply it to, rather than begin with the problem and look for the solution.
Hell, you can get a purpose-built-for-education Dell 2100 starting at $369. That's retail, I'm sure the school could work out a bit of a discount on top of that. For the money you get a more rugged machine than the macbook. The options are better too, touchscreen, carrying handle, charging cart capable, antimicrobial coating, you can even get it with linux!
I'm not affiliated with dell in any way, they're just sweet little machines.
--- Do you believe in the day?
This is ridiculous. First that they would require laptops. Second that they would require Macs. I have to wonder what kind of work are these kids doing. Last I checked English, Math, and most other subjects can be taught without computers. In fact, many of them are better taught without computers because they would require specific/bulky/crappy software. Sure there are uses for a computer, such as looking up stuff online and word processing, but how often are they doing either of those things in class. All this on top of the fact that people bitch because kids get distracted by computers and suffer from information overload.
GNU ocatave is free, altough I see no use of computers in math until university
Right -- computer experience with a Mac. Just what they'll need to get a job in corporate America!
If the school had said windows there would be many comments like:
Windows is evil!
Microsoft is evil!
Windows is the source of all evil!
Windows is making the kids dumber!
The school will be virus/malware central!
The school has been assimilated!
There are many others.
Yes, it really is terrible all the persecution Microsoft suffers on this site. No, really, I'm all broken up about it. I remember I started reading this site back in 1998 or so because I was really interested in fair coverage of Microsoft-related news... And it was great! But somewhere along the line, Slashdot picked up this terrible streak of anti-Microsoft zealotry. Where did we go WRONG, Slashdot? WHERE DID WE GO WRONG??
Oh, and you can say those same things about Apple if you like... I don't know if the prospect interests you at all, but, you know...
Bow-ties are cool.
This is great. Now there will be even more condescending little snots at the Apple store calling themselves "genius".
This is what these high schoolers will be hearing...
Congratulations, you know how to use iTunes and install iOS. Now put the old sim card in the new phone so I can go home and jailbreak this bad-boy.
Wait... you expected more of IBM than that they give us a standard connector for mice and keyboards that didn't require thumbscrews, a socket the size of a light bulb, or multiple adapters, which lasted from its creation until a general phase-out only because of the introduction of USB? Yeah, you're right I guess. They didn't really contribute anything worthwhile to computing. Silly me.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
Has anyone noticed that putting an exclamation after apple's iStuff makes it look like it's in spanish? iCarumba!
"How is forcing all the students to use Macs in a world dominated by windows PCs preparing them for reality?
These people are fucking stupid."
Not necessarily. The students can learn to use a computer while being less distracted by the problems and distractions (gaming, which while fun is also a waste of time) of Windows machines. They'll expect computers that WORK, and don't get bogged down by Winrot.
The standard school "computer" when I was growing up was a slide rule. I adapted to other systems easily enough. :)
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
there's a rather cheap solution to this.
buy a thinkpad of around 500$, partition the drive and install OSX on it.
Hackintosh FTW
btw, is it legal to force a whole school to become gayboys?
having grown up in relatively nearby Andover, I'm not exactly surprised that such a dumb move would come down from an out of touch principal with good intentions. That said, at least in our town the parents have themselves to blaim because the Parent Teachers Association and SuperIntendant were clearly both asleep at the wheel. And not that it matters, but I tend to doubt the money will be a big problem for that high schools population not that its an excuse.
The irony is that at my high school at least there are/were only classrooms that had macs. The music studio class room (used by music theory classes and likely others) and the desktop publishing class for obvious reasons.
Elsewhere it was some form of generic wintel's.
Personally I think that it's horribly irresponsible for a high school principal to have any say what-so-ever about which platform should ultimately be selected; leave that to someone with actual background in technology.... But I would like to point out before stating my preference, that most correctly there is no answer. Saying they should all use windows is wrong, all use mac is wrong, all use linux is wrong. You should be learning how to use technology, not a specific program. I.E. Learn word processing, not microsoft word. So no matter what platform he says they should all be on, he is wrong.
That said it would make infinitely more sense (and cents) to use an open platform like Linux (such as ubuntu or edubuntu) because of the cost component. It is absolutely free and everyone could use it. That said I still think it is preposterious and absolutely a waste of time and money to equip them all with laptops. Most classes simply are not condusive to it, and they end up being a distraction. I had one throughout college and that's mostly what it tended to be.
Other than using it for reading articles (which desktops solves) in humantities classes I just don't see the usage. In math class trying to take notes on a laptop is next to impossible unless you are an absolute master in Latex... and even then its probably a bad idea. Writing out the notes and doing the work is important.
Maybe they are going to redo the whole program, but I tried using a laptop on my own for a year in high school (self provided for a pilot program trial) and it was completely useless. There was no means to "hand in" my assignments, even in college most of my non CS courses wanted printouts of work. (Even when it was a matlab / mathematica assignment). Other than a note taking device its pretty hindered unless you regear the whole curriculum to make use of it. Are they going to have wifi everywhere? No more handouts everything as PDF's? Where are they going to be plugging in all of these laptops? most batteries can't last the 8 hour school day of high school.
This strikes me far more as a we want to use technology for the sake of using techonology, then for an actual meaningful reason. And the same can be said about their mac decision. How much did Apple pay them to do this? Was an open solution submitted and considered?
man sucks to be in Beverly right now.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
That's just ridiculous to mandate this type of thing. But I do see a fatal flaw in their plan. All it takes is some enterprising parent(s) to thwart the plan. Simple encourage every family to not participate. If they schools want students to use Macs, they'll have to pony up a Mac for every single student.
How many students do hey have? 100? 200? 1200? That's a lot of checking laptops in and out everyday. Would be a lot of work for the IT staff.
Hackintosh. They can't do jack shit to you, because you're running an OS which supposedly can do what other OSes can't. BTW, loving the new Darwin 10.3.1 vanilla kernel on the i5-650.
"Variously attributed to Lincoln, Elbert Hubbard, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin and Socrates"
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From what I gather from watching TV, if Beverly Highs is in Beverly Hills - which is the neighborhood for the elites - then getting a $900 Macbook involves them spending 5 minutes going through their couch cushions for the money. :P
My twin daughters are in band in High School. The school DOES have some loaner instruments but most of them look like they got in the way of an elephant stampeede. Let me tell you that the cost of a good Clarinet or Trumpet is far GREATER than a Mac laptop!
and his cronies in IT without pay and start investigating whatever sweetheart deal the superintendent made with Apple or with an Apple VAR instead, including any kickbacks paid or to be paid to the superintendent. For instance, is the guy now driving a car far more expensive than superintendents usually drive? Is he moving to a wealthy, upscale neighborhood? Basically, the only justification I can see to require parents to buy their kids Macs is either dishonesty or incompetence... while the superintendent isn't required to know anything, he is required to be able to obtain honest, competent IT advice and it's obvious he didn't even try.
I can see requiring a laptop for students in the 21st Century. It's a lot cheaper to deliver textbooks on that platform and it's easier for students to carry a dozen textbooks if they're all on a hard drive and weigh nothing over and above the weight of a laptop.
If the IT people are incapable of delivering platform-agnostic documents and applications, they're either incompetent or should be under suspicion of participating in a conspiracy with the superintendent of defrauding the taxpayers.
Tech Public Policy stuff
School requires macs (personal or loaned, wtfever). Kids do schoolwork on macs at school. Rich kids learn to have things handed to them. Normal kids learn to work to buy themselves a mac, or they learn to do things on the home PC and how to use compatibility tools and/or how to convert docs from one type to another for use across both macs and PCs. Either way, lots of people will learn how important a worth ethic is and how important it is to understand the PC world in general as well as knowing how to launch facebook on your particular device.
Win/Win.
Yeah, Beverly is a far nicer 'hood than my old stomping grounds in Salem and Lynn.
I just don't get that schools back their asses and wallets in a corner with a company whose piss poor software costs lots, prepares no one for anything since the serious and real world compute on Winblows and *nix ( not that Mac uses a *nix variant on a P.C., but that business practices , philosophies and product hobbling make Mac useless for anyone living outside cartoon-land.)
Anyway this is Massatushits and the poor can just eat cake or wait till some well heeled Kennedy or such makes a " tax deductible gesture" of outrageous wealth to "help the kids". There are 3 kinds of people in Taxachusetts, Democrats, poor whose votes are bought by Democrats and the homeless. Republicans fall under the tourist category. You might as well write the kids from Beverly off as the uneducated who will end up with no job and only daddys money to support them. Won't you give?
The Bible pre-dates all those.
Score one for the big guy...
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
I don't get why school/educational institutions use Macs. 99% of businesses use Windows. Don't they want there kids to be prepared when they leave schools? This is once again a dumb school administration making a decision in a vacuum
AC
A few years ago when I was in high school we had a similar program. I say similar because it differed in two ways. 1. We had iBooks and 2. the school completely funded it, like they already did with everything else that we used, like pencils, meals, bus tickets etc.
It made me think a bit closer on why we have these programs and my conclusion is that most people actually get it wrong at first. It is not about making students familiar with computers. It is not about teaching them Office. It's not about writing papers in Word. It's not even about programming.
It's about better education.
Ask yourself why we are using pencils in schools. It's not about teaching people about pencils. Sure there may be an introduction for very young pupils in how to use it but that's far from why we have them. It is simply a really good tool for learning.
A computer can also be an insanely good tool for learning.
A lot of teachers get that. Some schools don't and they usually buy netbooks. I'm not saying that netbooks are bad, but when you are basing the decision only on "equipping them with computers" and trying to get away with it as cheaply as possible you are likely to make a bad decision. I have seen quite a lot of schools where they bought cheap laptops, loaded them with locked-down copies of Windows and Word and never really gave it much deeper thoughts on how they could be used in the actual learning process. They only thought of it as a digital pencil. Guess how well it usually turned out.
The important thing is that a computer is so much more than a pencil.
My experience is that these programs is much more effective if you buy decent hardware. It doesn't have to be the most expensive but at least don't go for the cheapest. Then give the students root access and the reinstallation discs just in case they need them and say "Go Play".
It's incredible how creative a student can be when it comes to finding good use for a computer if they have tools that are designed for that.
Apple gets that and I think that's why so many schools use them. They have been doing this for a long time. The other players are starting to get it just now while Apple has already been talking about it for over ten years.
I signed up for my highschool's laptop program (completely voluntary) back in 2000. All students were required to provide their own laptops, and since the school was "PC-only", that's what students were told to buy. I ended up being probably one of maybe two students in the program who did have a Mac. Never had any trouble completing any assignments, and actually had it a little easier since some of the "security" measures they tried to implement were only Windows compatible, so I wasn't bothered by it.
While I find it cool that a school has decided to be pro-Mac, I think it's unreasonable for the school to dictate exactly which computer students need to buy. I could understand if the school said "we only support Macintosh" and PC-laptopers had to troubleshoot their own problems. But there's no reason students shouldn't be able to use PC laptops at their own risk.
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.)
And it will be broken by the third day of school. They're not designed to go into a backpack with twenty pounds of books.
the laptop plays Apple's 1984 big brother commercial.
Just a change in scale form what I've experienced the last 11 years I've had kids in the public schools. Every year it's been a mandate: buy this specific binder, this specific protractor, but this specific calculator (child fails 20% of grade if you supply them with a better one), etc. The leap from a $60 calculator to a $900 laptop isn't that big for a bureaucracy like most school districts.
T.J. Schmitz - the man, the myth, the legend - o
Colleges and high schools around the country seem to be trying as hard as they can to dump computer labs for cost benefits under the guise of "Most students have a laptop anyway".
High schools:
Don't teach with the computer so much!
Or how about using open source/cross platform software so students can use whatever computer they want? How awesome that they chose the most expensive laptop brand for teenagers to be responsible for transporting, carrying, eating around, etc. while parents pay.
Seriously, Ubuntu... get your marketing department in gear. This is business, not funtime.
Colleges (especially Computer Science departments):
People want to have a place to work and a place with all "school" software available to them without having a laptop around. Granted, labs can be scaled back in size compared to what they were, and CS depts do typically require a student computer. However, do not dump the lab all the way. Hell, at least make sure the main library has some CS programs (compilers and IDEs as needed) to do schoolwork on campus.
> How is forcing all the students to use Macs in a world
> dominated by windows PCs preparing them for reality?
It's brilliant really.
If they use Macs but can't handle Windows, they deserve to die. (Un)fortunately, I can't think of anyone who would fail that test.
The Students better be admins with no lockdown at all and be able to use there own apple laptops as well.
If they are paying $900 for a locked down laptop there likely have the right by law to hack them.
for school district officials this year.
Faced with the options, I have to say I can't completely disagree.
First, the option of whether or not to have the kids get computers? YES. It could "potentially" save on text book prices. As for how it's paid for? Well, that's another matter. When "the school" pays for it, there are all sorts of strings and it is a management nightmare. And recall the thing about the webcams? And who to blame when the kid uses it for browsing porn? So that's one vote for having the parents buy and own it. And what about the people out there who have been paying their taxes and don't have kids? They need to pay for MORE stuff too? Let those with kids support the kids. "A Child Tax" would be unpopular as hell, but requiring parents pay for school supplies is expected... a nearly $1000 school supply? That's another matter but still, who should pay? Not the magic school fairy -- that's the tax payer or the magic bond fairy which is still, ultimately, the tax payer. So that's another vote for having the parents pay for the computers.
Second, the selection of Mac over PC/Windows. I know, I know... Linux? I use Linux. I preach Linux. I offer it to all my friends and family. Lots of people use Linux and F/OSS because of me. I completely endorse it. But in all reality, there isn't enough of me or you out there to support Linux yet. That leaves Windows and Mac. Windows -- we KNOW what will happen with Windows. No need to discuss it. And Mac OS X? Well, that's just more interesting. We all know Mac OS X security ain't all it could be or should be and putting them all in the hands of fresh youth? Oh yeah, you can bet interesting things will happen because these Macs won't be in the hands of doe-eyed artists and home makers. There will be some sharp up-and-coming geeks in that crowd. But for the most part, Mac will be more stable and reliable in the classroom. The delivery of courseware and digital materials will be more uniform and successful. Sure you can "lock down windows" but who can really do that when the kids will be taking them home at night?
So over all, I think the selection is reasonable. The requirement of getting a computer was something that was just waiting to happen. This will be interesting to watch no matter where you stand on the issue.
If it were me, I would look to something akin to using VMs downloaded from the school network. The VMs can get trashed and corrupted and if the school network detects the corruption, it could simply download a fresh VM to the laptop. Data would be stored on another partition and all would be well. But that's just me. While I am not the smartest guy in town, I'm not the dumbest either. I know it can be done because I had Dell and some other company feeding my lunch while they told me about the technology. (I don't believe everything sales people tell me, I am pretty sure this is a good idea and people are already doing it out there.) PXE boot and load the machines locally and you can control the contents of the machines. If the kids are bound and determined to do what they want, they will just have to use an alternate hard drive or something.
I actually had mod points, but there was no option for +1 awesome.
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
Whatever happened to hand graphing? I did so much of that in high school and college and Im only 26. Its gives you better intuition into how things should look rather than relying on a computer to spit it out. Sometimes a computer gives you a wrong answer due to user error. Dont get me wrong, I use matlab all the time, but I say people should start math with graph paper, a pencil and a wastepaper basket.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
It just has to run OS X and conform to the OS X EULA...oh, wait...I guess that means it has to be a Mac.
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
WHAAAAQAAAT WTF AR YOU TLAKING ABOT!!!! 90% of the business world uses P......oh oh oh oh oh ahhhhhhhhahahaha
that was a close one
"e. 'We have one platform,' Hayes said. 'And that's going to be the Mac.'""
yeah, running a Mac prepares them for the future, assuming the school is training graphic artists.
Look, I'm not bagging in quality here. If you are a high school and you want to prepare your kids for the future, it needs to be the most widely used platform in the work place. IT's a general education environment.
OTPS: Now that they can get steam on it, there will be less outcry from the students~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When you enter the working world, you have to use whatever operating system (or other equipment) your employer has arbitrarily chosen, and frequently you'll have to pay for your own equipment.
Of course, I'm a fanboy/apologist, so I think the Macbook is a great choice since it can run OSX, Windows, or several flavors of *ux, either with BootCamp or Parallels. Then again, so can a hackintosh - and that's an even more valuable lesson (don't let arbitrary rules by distant companies get in the way of your education aka if you don't get caught it must not be illegal).
lol, even Microsoft doesn't push Windows Ultimate (while you can find it online, its pretty tricky to find on shelves and Microsoft themselves say its not meant for the public). You do NOT need an anti-virus anymore unless you go crazy on warez (and if you go crazy on warez on Macs you'll get in trouble too), and you'll need to buy basically as many apps for Macs as you do for Windows. -AND- Microsoft basically gives all their stuff away for educational purpose (not quite, but close). You can get educational licenses for basically everything Microsoft sells + Adobe for a fraction of that, and that includes countless high end commercial apps students will never need.
Did you know that even many large -DESIGN AND GRAPHIC- companies like Pixar don't use Macs because its not the right tool for the job? (Neither is Windows in their case, but it just shows...)
Heck, even Microsoft has a bunch of "built in free languages, several open source and countless free tools", nevermind if you add the third party stuff... I reboot my computer exactly once a month and it patches overnight when I don't notice. Are you still using a 10 years old version of Windows or something?
Schools already teach "math" by teaching you what buttons to push on the calculator. With pictures of the buttons. You have to buy the right calculator, or you can't do math, as the pictures won't match up with the buttons. This Mac thing is stupid, but not nearly as stupid as the stupid that's already there.
And in my experience with interns, one can make it through a Masters program without the ability to do even the simplest things on Windows, so a little training somewhere along the way might help.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I had someone send a document in MS Works format a few months ago. Not joking at all. Apparently Microsoft is still selling this product. Which makes absolutely no sense considering you need to install compatibility packs on both ends to exchange files with Office users.
So, the obvious comment here would be "WHAT ABOUT LINUX????????????". Everyone would be allowed to keep their old notebooks and the software would be free.. OH, but i hear you complain about tech support. Well, it seems, no other than, the school already thought about it:
"Apple will also provide free technical support at the high school. A teacher is becoming certified through the company, and students in tech support classes will get hands-on experience fixing other students' computers if they break. The school will provide a replacement laptop while it's being worked on. "
Basically change Apple for Canonical (or any other major linux distro corp), and you'll get the same results, if not better ones. Besides, there's tons of educational software for linux out there, and i'm sure more and more will boil to the surface and get improved if they'd go with linux.
students learning to give support will also learn about coding in the way, and soon enough they'll start improving the very software they use in classes (which would be a neat idea actually for a class project).
of course, there's the possibility that the computer actually breaks, and it would end up to be the student's responsability to fix it since the school can't have deals with every manufacturer...BUT, is that really a problem? AND, is apple gonna give that kind of support for free as well?
i wouldn't be surprised if i went to the school board's houses and find iHouses instead, with a real scale, full-body photo of Steve Jobs in their bathtubs and a huge briefcase of iCash hidden inside their iCloset. This kind of things makes me mad, sort of.....
I completed K-12 public education in a middle/upper-middle class school district, graduating from HS in 2008. During that time my family had Macs at home and the school district used only Macs in their computer labs. Being a pretty computer-literate student through all those years, I got a decent idea of how school-administrated Macs differ from regular Macs.
And it's why I'm *really* glad I graduated from HS before my school tried any crap like this. My school's use of computers was appalling.
My school had about 150 Macs for student use in a school with 1600 students. They were all together on the same dog-slow network with roaming profiles over AFP. If a class of 20 tried to all log in at the same time, it would usually be 15 minutes before half the class saw a desktop. This was eventually "fixed" by the IT staff so it only took 5 minutes. Later, I discovered that the student server was just a 2002 PowerMac G4 with some extra hard drives thrown in, sitting in a closet.
The network sucked, but it didn't really matter, because the teachers I had were all born between 1950 and 1980 and thus weren't comfortable with any computer use outside of their e-mail. The teachers would only have us use computers to c/p together 500 words on something when the administrators told them to make us use computers. Otherwise, they just lectured with overhead transparencies (ignoring the proxima projectors on the ceilings) while we took notes with paper and pencil.
My school admins never tried to make computers a core component of classwork, and I think it would have been an expensive disaster if they had tried what this school in MA is trying. My school's network would crumble under the strain and teachers would fall back to the same overhead transparencies they'd been using while students schlepped $999 laptops around all day without opening them. And I won't even go into all the problems with bullies smashing other kids' laptops.
What's sad is that these kids in MA will suffer through excessive/inappropriate use of computers in lesson plans, but that the kids after them *will have it worse*. Why? Because the more technically-inclined administrators of tomorrow won't just tolerate the heavy computer use. They'll embrace it. They'll look at current school institutions like the dumbed-down textbooks, the lack of privacy, the hall passes, the bells, the 3-minute passing periods, and the tardy slips, and say, "This is SOOOOO 20th-century!". They'll look to computers as a way to make it all even worse, furthering the secret goal of every public school administration (creating an environment with no privacy, with total centralized control, and no action on the students' part that has not been pre-approved by the faculty. If you think I'm being sarcastic, read Gatto's Dumbing Us Down, and petition your local sysadmin for a sarcasm font while you're at it.)
What can we expect computers for student use to be like in the future? I think it'll be like 1984, only with iPads (eduPads?):
0. The schools will buy a shitload of eduPads for student use; basically iPads where the school acts like Apple except a million times worse. The schools will consider laptops with windows or linux, but decide on a proprietary hardware/software package so that the students have a harder time hacking them, citing cyber-terrorism concerns in red states; child porn in blue. It will also help that the soccer moms at PTA and school board meetings will be wooed by Apple's sleek iPad-like offering of the time, absent all the intimidating push-buttons of laptops. Le sigh.
1. Computers will be compulsory for all classes. Classes where this wouldn't make any sense (metals, woods, auto tech) will already be totally gone from the curriculum. For the remaining classes, everything done on paper today will be done through the computers. Students will receive access tickets to e-textbooks instead of bound paper copies. Students will receive lecture notes, complete/submit as
It's caramba.
To do list for Windows
chapter and verse please...
Once again, school administrators implement the Zero Intelligence policy
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Bullshit.
A 400 dollar laptop comes with everything you need and it will aslt as long as the 900 mac.
IT's the same crap with a different OS.
It's shiny, so I guess them means cost effective in your book.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In your statement is the answer. These high school students are learning the valuable corporate lesson of "ignorant people in management will make a lot of stupid and buzzworthy decisions without understanding reality."
The only requirement I had through highschool was to type my papers. If you didn't have a computer you could use a library computer, school computer, friends computer or a typewriter. The point is, it needs to be typed no matter what your excuse is. The real world does not need excuses. Just get the job done. Even when I took AP C++ course in HS, nobody ever required me to have a computer. This is complete BS. The kids that WANT to learn about computers will, the others don't give two shits about it. I know a 28 year old friend who doesn't even know how to email someone. She works at Home Depot and she owns her own business on the side. She also owns a 250K house from SAVING money.
Mark
Decisions like this are made by people like the grandparent. They have a Macbook and it works great for them. Their school district has a bunch of PCs which have problems. They fail at the statistics so they don't realize that the more computers you have and the more you do, the more likely you are to see problems. Instead they say "Well I've never had trouble with my Mac, so we should buy Macs because then we won't have problems!"
Of course any computer tech will tell you that any computer, no matter what will have problems. Hell they'll have problems even if just left to sit in a room alone turned on, as some of them will have hardware faults. However even with perfect hardware you'll start having problems when you put users in front of them. They WILL break, they WILL have faults, etc.
Thus you need to look at real failure rates and see if you are getting a significantly better system. Turns out not really in the case of Macs since they use the same hardware as everything else (Intel CPUs, Foxconn motherboards built to Intel spec, etc). The more important issue becomes the cheap, ready availability of parts. When something breaks, can you get it fixed fast and cheap? How about when it has gone out of warranty? While it's a nice idea to say "We'll keep everything in warranty," it is unrealistic to assume you can rebuy all computers every 3-4 years.
Also, as you noted, software support is important. You need to look at the tasks you need to do and see if there's software that works well for it. For example Synamtec Ghost Solution Suite (much though I dislike Symantec) and Acronis Backup & Recovery work brilliantly for enterprise image management, including user data migration/backups... But only for Windows and Linux clients. There's no Mac support. So if that is the sort of thing you need, well then maybe Macs are not appropriate for the setting.
Whatever the case, the choice should never be made on the basis of "Well this works great for me at home." That means nothing. I'm very happy with the setup I have at home, however I have no illusions that it is an enterprise environment (since I work in one of those). There are things I do and choices I make that would not be appropriate for the workplace. A simple example would be I build my systems from parts. Ok fine, costs a bit less, gives me precisely what I want. However, not a good idea at work since building hundreds of systems would take way too much time. It makes far more sense to order them from Dell or Lenovo.
Most careers don't use Macs in the workplace so what exactly are they preparing them for? I guess they're just teaching them conformity. That's all schools seem to do these days.
All my computers at home are Macs and I have been using them long before they were "cool". At the same time I believe strongly in allowing people to use whatever system they feel happiest with, whether it is out of preference or budget. In this regards no school should be dictating what system a student should be using.
I can understand why they may want to standardise (support reasons, amongst others), but they should be focusing on what type of software and data formats the students should be using. For example if its for word-processor documents, then PDFs and word documents should be suitable; if it is for presentations, then PDFs and power point documents. I mention these as examples because they can either be generated from most applications (print to PDF) or can be handled by multiple applications: Microsoft Office, Open Office, iWorks, Google Documents, etc. The goal should be data format standardisation. If there some obscure application needed for a job, then the school be willing to provide the necessary equipment, even if it is in a class or lab - this they appear to be doing.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
They should also provide the answers
If your school did that, then they probably violated the constitution of your state. The school is supposed to provide all those sorts of things to any student - anything else is discriminatory towards poor students
So they should also provide the answers, since anything else would be discriminatory towards stupid students.
-- Terry
The Macs (yes, plural) that I'm forced to use crash on a regular basis (twice last week within the span of 3 hours). The one that crashes the most is a brand new (4-month old now, I guess) fugly all-in-one desktop that can never figure out how to manage a slideshow and Firefox at the same time. It's not any hardware we've been able to identify (not that anyone could check because the god-forsaken things are packed tighter than a japanese car).
IMO, if this school system wants to teach their students about the real world, they will allow all platforms and use a common, browser-based solution. That's what they're going to see in the real world when they get spat out of the 'education' system.
Having worked with school districts let me tell you there is some supreme incompetence that goes on there. Also there's the simply Mac fanboy cognitive dissonance at work. What probably happened:
Superintendent gets a shiny new Macbook because it is cool looking and stylish. It works great for him/her because all they do is surf the web, read e-mail, simple stuff. A new, powerful machine without crap will do that blazingly fast and easy. Goes double because he has a nice new cable modem connection that is just super fast (or in reality more like 10mbit).
At work, however, they have old PCs running even older software to handle student records, grades, etc. These have problems, as old computers are wont to do, in particular when running software designed for even older architectures. Also, as with most schools, they have a slow network connection. The whole school has a connection maybe as fast as the superintendent's home connection, so simple tasks like web browsing feel slow.
Rather than looking at the situation logically, the superintendent believes everything is because of his shiny new Mac. Clearly that Mac is the reason everything is so good. Thus the solution is for everyone to have one! Things would be so much better. Nothing would ever break, because his never has. There'd be no problems, because he hasn't had any.
That's my bet. Nobody bought him/her off, it was just a case of someone who knows fuck-all about enterprise computing. They figure since their sample size of one is perfect, that will hold true for all the rest.
Proverbs 17:28
***Wait... you expected more of IBM than that they give us a standard connector for mice and keyboards that didn't require thumbscrews***
Well, a different manufacturer might have used different connectors for the mouse and keyboard since the sockets were wired differently for the two functions. There's a reason that many techs refused to service IBM PCs in the 1990s. It has a lot to do with whacky design decisions, deliberately non-industry standard component layout, and other idiosyncracies. It didn't help that parts like power supplies tended to have about seven different part numbers stamped or embossed on them and none of the part numbers was the one that was needed to order a replacement.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
It's more like they are hired to write grants, so they find an excuse to get a grant. Bureaucracies can absorb and infinite amount of money--even more if there are kickbacks like free laptops for staff involved.
Depends on whether you want your kid to get computer education, or merely training. To illustrate the difference, would you want your kid to get sex education or sex training? The important thing is to present the theory and introduce practical concerns, not hold their hand through every step. They can figure out how to actually do it on their own.
8-bit PCs have CPUs, RAM, storage, displays, etc, just like a modern computer. Removing all those layers puts you right next to the metal, where you have to know what you're doing or you won't get anything done. Sure, you can crank out an Excel-monkey who doesn't know the difference between memory and a hard disk, but why would you want to?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Surely there's something amiss here, imposing what is for all intents and purposes a $900 tuition fee on public school students.
In your sample size of one you have no Mac problems. However by that same logic, they should all buy MSI laptops. Why? Because I have an MSI laptop and I've had no problems with it. Thing has been great. It is blazing fast, runs all the programs I want with no problem, I've had no hardware troubles, no software troubles, etc. I couldn't be happier.
Now, do you think that means that all MSI laptops are flawless, or that I've just had a good experience? Because you are arguing the same basic thing.
Sorry, in the real world, Macs have problems. Hardware fails, users screw up the software (or some times it gets screwed up itself), shit happens. They need support just like any other system out there. If they didn't, well then there would be a massive set of Apple support centers, now would there?
To claim something is going to be cheaper support wise, you have to actually do some research. You have to see if they actually have less faults, how much repairs cost (both money and time) and so on. Then in term of software it isn't just how often there are problems, but can you get the tools you need to do the administration? If you have less problems on a system, but have to spend more time on the overall support and maintenance at an enterprise level, it isn't a win.
What is true at your house has nothing to do with what is true in a large enterprise.
I bet this is a case of the superintendent or someone on the school board being a rabid Mac-head, and like all rabid Mac-heads, trying to convince as many people as possible to join the "one true way" by whatever means necessary.
And let me be clear, I have a Mac and an iPhone. I like them both quite a bit. But seriously, some of you Mac cultists creep me the hell out.
FTA:
"High-tech school: In Beverly, the new high school academic wing includes a built-in wireless infrastructure designed to support laptops..."
HOLY CRAP THEY HAVE WI-FI! OMG they're l337! wait... what year was this written?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Wow, if you're going to post something and purposefully come off like an arrogant asshole, you think you'd at least post about stuff you knew about, where the guy you're responding to is actually *wrong*.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I'd surmise the reason they are specifying a particular laptop is that they are planning for the possibility of having to offer at least limited support. This way, they don't have to worry about the myriad hardware configurations they would deal with if they simply required something that's a laptop.
So far as why it was Apple and not Microsoft, what difference does that make? If they were all Dells we wouldn't be having this discussion. Not because Dells are objectively all around better than MacBooks, just because going with Windows is subjectively considered standard and anything else weird or not worth of "real" use. From my experience as a user of Apple products, the MacBooks will be fine for anything they'll likely have to do for school.
So far as real world preparation, the real world operates on a number of different systems. Contrary to popular myths, many businesses don't run on Microsoft alone. Exposing kids to one of the larger alternatives is hardly a bad thing. Especially considering that if they really want to, they can always run windows on their Mac.
And burn the school down with that thingamajig they left on to draw electrocucity elves through the wires so they could HACK into school computers?
Are you insane!
Seriously now...
You are overestimating technological knowledge and abilities of these kids as well as lenience of the school staff and rules. Probably their knowledge and abilities as well.
They are DEMANDING that all students use a single platform and suffer additional costs, monetary or otherwise, in order to do that.
THAT is how lenient AND pedagogical they are.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Wrong then, but I'll gladly admit that. (But now im going to follow that up with a bullshit excuse to cover my ass)
Rather than being a troll. (OK I am going to be a troll but if I say Im not then maybe no one will notice it)
I guess I expected higher of IBM. ( How dare they name something that I would not remember. I dont have time for their crap when I am trolling around being a Correction Nazi. They should have consulted me before naming anything)
* Dear Correction Nazi Please Choose 1
A. Get a life so that correcting the minor mistakes of others no longer is the main joy in your life
B. Pull Your Bottom Lip Up Over Your Head Then Swallow.
I'm sure this is going to go over well in a few years when Alice and Bob can't do high-school level math nor write proper essays. If the objective of this exercise is to help students who will go on to higher education be better prepared, then they should start with improving the curriculum. Focusing entirely on a computer based education without the right foundation is going to change squat. There's probably a reason, as I seem to recall, that North American students on average do not test as well as their counterparts in other countries on math and science.
is that the platform is NOT a Windows machine. That has been happening in workplaces and schools across the country for many years now ... "sorry, our standard platform is Windows, and you'll just have to conform."
Now that it's NOT, well, that's kind of like a "man bites dog" story, it seems.
I'm from the area, and I can assure you that this is not true. Sure, Beverly has some very affluent sections, but it also has some very poor sections. They were also in quite a bit of hot water a few years ago when budget shortfalls precluded required maintenance that put the high school on the brink of loosing its accreditation. They now have a new high school, but it's been a very rough road. My guess is that this is a case of reactionary posturing to try to paint a picture of some grandiose recovery... but with OPM (Other People's Money).
The product name was: IBM Personal System/2 hence, IBM PS/2.
This is the same high school that apparently could afford to have the prom at Fenway Park...
rm
Sci-Fi Storm
Well, whoever really said it, we can safely attribute it to Oscar Wilde.
What do you think, sirs?
This is no different to when I was at High School and Computing classes were all held on Windows machines, all apps were Windows apps, but I had a Mac (good old SE/30).
The difference here is that the kids can actually afford this shit, and if they can't the school should provide them.
Or, the US could take a queue from Australia and supply schools with government issue machines.
The Bible predates Socrates?
iWhooosh!
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
Step one: remove battery, slide hard drive out.
Step two: insert hard drive into SATA docking station.
Step three: run any of dozen different drive imaging tools on Linux or MacOS, at drive speed. For extra speed, use a partition that is slightly larger than the installed files, then boot the machine and use disk utility to expand the HFS+ partition; it only takes a minute or so for the expansion, and it can be done 'live'. Your imaging tools don't even have to be aware of HFS+; just GUID partitions.
Copying 15GB over SATA for most drives should take less than 300 seconds (at the start of the drive, 50MB/sec shouldn't be a problem), and that's about how much disk space you need for a base image. Figure another five minutes to pop the battery, drive, connect stuff, AND boot the copy host (if you don't have hot-swap SATA ports.)
For a few hundred dollars you could build a duplication host, complete with docks; most motherboards have ~6 ports already, though you might not get full wirespeed from them all, so add in another $15-30 for some SATA PCIe cards. Use an SSD to source the images...or better yet, ~16GB of ram.
Please help metamoderate.
What about running a desktop virtualisation system like Citrix? Then you actually control the whole environment, and the students can have a properly uniform experience. And whatever laptop they like.
Also, the fact that the damn thing won't let you get at stuff in a way that lets you at least feel like you're in control. In any vaguely DTP-like software I've ever used there's a menu bar option of insert>image>[from file] or similar. In pages? No. The only way to get images in was to drag and drop them, and because the iphoto library is not stored anywhere obvious on the disc, I had to have both iPhoto, and finder around at the same time, depending on where I wanted to get the image from. I also had to keep space of screen for both applications
Then, when I came to try and do some manipulation in the GIMP, not only could I not just install the software, but I couldn't find the files that I wanted because they were on a network drive, which is not exposed in any sort of tidy way to third-party software.
The whole thing is a complete mess the moment that you put a foot outside that very carefully polished, very closely controlled and very small area that Apple wants you to see. It's like Portal, infact.
FGD 135
No ragging on the PS/2 - those machines were TRUCKS. Several times in 1988 I checked a PS/2 Mod 80 as baggage on American Airlines without packing it in anything, just lugged (and I do mean lugged) it through the airport by its handle. And it arrived working just fine.
Luckily, I spent my time in school learning how to learn for myself. The transition wasn't that terrible. Many other people where I work learned by memorizing where the menu options were and ended up being completely lost in Office 2007.
Education can stop people from being ignorant. It cannot stop them being stupid.
FGD 135
I don't see the point in dictating one closed platform over the other. Apple's inroads to innovation are just as absurd as Microsoft's. The issue I see is that there's an ignorant person in power making decisions that affect a lot of people. Not just on an educational level, but on a monetary one as well. Sound familiar? No wonder people are pissed.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
this is so true. instead of forcing people to buy computers they may not want, i love my old powerbook btw, why don't they choose cross platform standards like odf. that way they could use almost any computer they want.
lose != loose
That's bull. There's no reason at all they'll need Windows Ultimate. Or $500 of applications. Yeah, you might say they might need Office, but the $900 Mac Book doesn't have Office either so you're either paying (or not paying) either way so what's the difference? As for anti-virus, there are several free Windows options, including Microsoft's own, and besides it would be wise to get anti-virus for the Macs anyway.
You might also want to keep in mind that with Macs, they're not going to get 4 years of support from Apple, so they'll need to upgrade somewhere along the line. But Windows 7 will still be receiving patches and updates the day they graduate.
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.'"
Please call and complain and remember to vote them out come election time. Your tax dollars should not go towards teaching kids how to use the current version of one (closed) vendors software. More math and science, less Britney, Bieber and iPhoto.
Well I switched from PC to Mac and I have to say it took me all of a day or so to figure out how to do anything I needed to do. Most of my software is OS and I found suitable tools. Sure, there's the odd thing that I have come across since then, but nothing that decreased my productivity noticeably. Actually its more likely the other way around. Once I figured out that in OS/X the most likely place to find something is where I would expect to find something, I realized the biggest barrier to adapting was unlearning the wierd convolutions I got used to under Windows. I will never voluntarily run a Windows system for anything more serious than games. Its a crappy OS with a horrible history. OS X for the win without any doubt
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Heh, while my math textbook here in Norway had such guides for the calculator this was in an appendix. It was pretty much cut-paste from the TI83 calc manual translated to Norwegian..
If the teachers fall back on this as a teaching aid this is hardly a problem with the technology. The problem is shitty teachers.
My father teaches math and science classes in a middleschool and the kind of arsehat teaching you describe pisses him off to no end ;)
Parts of it does anyways. The New testament stuff doesn't unless it's referencing the old testament but then it's restated after the fact. I guess if you consider the bible as the modern compilation of scrolls into a book, then all of it was after Socrates (as well as many others). Socrates was 400 years older then Jesus but Jesus is only half the story. The first half can be traced back 2000 or more years before that.
.. but I'm just advocating that all news sources discuss the latest apple releases together with the latest tween toy trends.
For example, you really needed to contemplate the iPad together with vajazzling if you hoped to comprehend either. I assure you that Apple's engineers were intently involved with bedazzling their phones while designing the iPad, just like the vajazzling developers.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
When 2 extra key on your keyboard fucks you up for months, I don't believe it's the platform's fault.
Are you a fanboi or just deliberately misunderstanding me?
Here is a list of all the keyboard shortcuts on Mac.
There is a similar list for Windows, except the Mac keyboard doesn't have a bunch of keys that the PC keyboard does that PC users rely upon. Like home, end, delete, page up and page down. You need to memorize key combinations on the Mac for those functions.
That's just the really obvious stuff. There are other differences, such as Command-L to start typing a URL, as opposed to Alt-D. Command-, for preferences? WTF?
I'm not saying it's bad. It's just different, and it takes time to learn. I didn't mean that I couldn't make the Mac do what I wanted. It just took a while before I could do what I wanted in the same amount of time as the same task took me in Windows.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
I switched to the Mac for a while and couldn't wait to switch back. The Mac was never the better experience. It always felt like a dumbed-down interface to me...
I have to disagree with that assessment. Expose combined with the multi-touch pad rocks on a laptop.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
He did say "Bible," not "Torah."
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
just build their system around some cross platform technology? I'd find it much better for teens to be able to choose the computer they want, Mac, Windows, or Ubuntu, it shouldn't matter... Forcing them all into one system is junk.
Now if you'll excuse me, I must get back to doing my school work on my laptop, which is running Ubuntu 10.04 ;)
(16 year old homeschooled dude)
Please don't use anonymity as an excuse for being a butt head >:(
They most certainly could, and would be well-advised to do so, since it saves everyone licensing costs. But, cost-wise, the difference between Windows and Linux is software cost. That's nothing compared to the "Mac Tax".
I run Linux Mint at home (I'm typing this very post on it, as a matter of fact). :)
Of the three choices, Mac is probably the worst. I mean no offense to Apple in this, they make a great operating system. But it doesn't take a math genius to say that giving a high school student a $900 laptop is a very poor decision when a perfectly adequate learning tool could be had for under $300, or may already be lying around the house.
But, yeah, if the school wants a consistent image to start with, it would actually be a lot cheaper for them to hire someone to make up a Linux distro custom to their school. They have loaner computers for use inside the classroom, imagine if they could buy Asus eeePC netbooks at $300 a pop. If they need 100 loaners, the difference between the $300 eeePCs and MacBooks is, wait for it, about enough to hire an entry-level IT administrator. Which they'll need no matter what anyway.
And what parent wouldn't like to hear "that old Pentium Thinkpad with 256MB RAM? Oh, heck, that'll work just fine, you don't have to spend any money. Boot the old machine to this $5 memory stick and follow the bouncing prompts."
Of course, the real reason is the kickback Apple gives to the school. It's hard to resist forcing parents to buy $900 machines when (guessing) $100 of that goes back into the school budget.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
No, the poor kids will have MaxiPads...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Neither is the Mac. But let's assume the Mac is just as durable as the 2100, and they both last your supposed three days.
You have a choice of $369 divided by three days ($123 per day) or $900 divided by three days ($300 per day).
Go through the average school year of 180 days at that rate, and the Dells will set you back $22,140.
The Mac? Keep in mind that the $900 represents a discounted price. But, assuming Apple offers the discount to all parents all year long no matter how many purchases they make, that's a cool $54,000.
Silly? Yeah. But so is overspending on something that stands a decent chance of being broken. Personally, I'd go for an MSI Wind or Asus eeePC. Longer battery life, does great on Windows or Linux, and it's light and small enough that I could put it in a pretty durable case and still have it easily portable. And about $300 for a good model.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Seems to me that anyone who would require only one brand of computer must have a vested interest in this deal. Come on, what can a Mac do that Windows or Linux can't?
be shiny and expensive.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
You must have a different definition of poor than I do. ;-)
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
So, they'll prepare on a minority platform, which will provide no additional real-world experience at all. Unless they're an artist or writer, they need to learn the dominant platform and tools.
So high school is now a vocational school for training workers, not for educating thinkers?
As much as I dislike M$ they have 90% of the market share for business, and EVERY employer requires M$ Office experience...
You do realize that MS Word is available for Mac OS X, right?
In the US that's called school choice, and too many people oppose choice.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The subversive kids will go along with it - then install Windows on their MacBook. That'll show 'em!
I don't get that, trains can carry more cargo for less money than planes. The only thing I know that has a better efficiency are barges on water. The problem is rivers don't go everywhere whereas trains can cross water.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Ugh, your wrong!
My wrong?
So, they'll prepare on a minority platform, which will provide no additional real-world experience at all. Unless they're an artist or writer, they need to learn the dominant platform and tools.
So high school is now a vocational school for training workers, not for educating thinkers?
Workers, no - slaves, yes!
As much as I dislike M$ they have 90% of the market share for business, and EVERY employer requires M$ Office experience...
Let me fix it - As much as I dislike M$ they have 90% of the market share for business, and EVERY STUPID employer requires M$ Office experience, others require the knowledge of word processing. Or - maybe they also require three years experience how to use Bic pens, not just any pens? And I'm not even going to who makes most toilet seats used in business buildings, how many years experience needed?
How else will the school be certain they have cameras, so they can spy on the kids? It's the Lower Merton Technology Plan! :-)
For years we and our kids were forced to use sh!tty Microsoft crap. And everyone was OK. Now, when kids are gonna use real Unix that is registered in OpenGroup, there appears some strange entities @ slashdot that are dislike that. Can't understand that.
Why not Linux? Good question though. But I assume since there should be an infrastructure built for it: somebody should support Linux on *any* hardware and make sure that this OS understands all the hardware and works properly. And that's is not any simple and cheep to do. A documentation also involved: Linux area chronically lacks good documentation (just compare Big Admin from OpenSolaris and any Linux distro docs and you will know what I am talking about). Getting macs for $900 USD looks costly, but at the end I understand this decision: it is way cheaper to upkeep them. I mean, here is also included all the learning documentation for the teachers of the School.
There are also thing that geeks never understands those, who barely know how to properly use mousepad. For geeks Linux is uber-brilliant, but when it comes to real world life, I always struggle to see how users are blown away and dislike to continue using it. :( However, everybody loves shiny sexy Macs that works out of the box. Be realistic: Mac OS X so far is the most usable for "average Joe" Unix and there is no any equal OS by the usability on the market yet.
P.S. Yes, Canonical does a *very* good job. But they are still not there yet. And that's unfortunately and still pity, although they are really good at UI improvements, I have to admit (although I am totally OpenSolaris user).
When I was in high school I learned to use computers that ran DOS on monochrome screens. When I was in high school the entire industry in which I now work--building websites--did not exist.
There are a lot of reasons to oppose this program but trying to turn it into an OS war is stupid. By the time these kids reach the workforce, any OS in use today will be laughably out of date.
The whole idea that computer skills are OS-specific is laughably out of date. You know who has trouble jumping between OS's? People over 40. Most kids going into high school today have no problem sitting down at a computer and figuring it out. They've grown up interacting with computers of all shapes and sizes their whole lives.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
May I please be the first to say...
Whoosh
but seriously, how useful is a laptop in high school math?
Mathematica doesn't work to well on construction paper.
IBM didn't offer a "standard" mouse interface until the PS/2, and even then it took several more years to weed out the proprietary "bus mice" and RS-232 rodents from the marketplace. This was partly because common AT cases didn't include a knockout for a PS/2 mouse, combined with the fact that motherboard makers always seemed very reluctant to move the PS/2 interface (if they even offered one) to a blank ISA panel.
Really, it doesn't seem that PS/2 gained wide acceptance until ATX made back panel knockouts useful and replaceable, thus providing a good place for a PS/2 mouse connector. And since, IIRC, IBM had nothing at all to do with the ATX spec, I don't really think they deserve much credit for the PS/2 mouse's eventual widespread acceptance.
So, though I myself think that IBM contributed a whole lot more than a couple of peripheral interfaces to the development of the PC, I must conclude for the sake of argument that your post is, at best, 50% correct.
Kid-proof tablet..
If things did go as badly as you say, it's more likely that there was little or no money spent on professional development. Too often schools buy technology but fail to back it up with effective training, thus wasting their investment in hardware.
It always felt like a dumbed-down interface to me...
I was thinking the same thing the other day when I went to search for a file and, instead of a text entry box, I was presented with an animated puppy.
Can't you just run OS/X in a VM on your Windows 7 Netbook? Or is the school policing licenses also??
Seriously, guys, take a deep breath
:)
OK, I've been maintaining Macs in business environments since the Mac II. First for a printer (first in the province to use a Linotype imagesetter with PostScript RIP) and now for an advertising agency. I also have to do a little Windows maintenance as well (accounting department uses PCs, and there are some PCs in the production department to check websites out on Internet Exploder). So I have a fairly good idea of why this school board made this decision. Their administration and software costs will go WAY down. I'll explain.
Macs hardly need any administration at all - some quick setup for printers, and some basic filesharing rules, and you are good to go. You do not need to worry about self-propagating viruses. You don't need to worry AS MUCH about the kids installing strange and harmful software off the internet. You don't generally need to worry too much about the kids running games when they are meant to be doing work on the things. The Macs come with a very good suite of basic software to do document creation (Pages), presentations (Keynote), spreadsheet work (Numbers), movie editing (iMovie), disc burning (built into the Finder). There are a number of very high quality educational products for the Mac. And everything works very well with each other. I imagine that for most of the tasks they are going to have the kids doing with their Macbooks, there will be zero software to purchase.
From an educational standpoint, Macs have a full BASH terminal, and comes with a full software development package, so there's teaching all that nifty UNIX stuff that is actually useful in the "real world."
More importantly than all that, Macs need very little on-going maintenance. There's very little that a combo of Onyx (free), and Disc Warrior (not free, but not expensive) cannot cure on a Mac. If you set the kids up with non-administrative user-accounts, they cannot destroy the application software or the operating system. No need to ghost the OS and apps, and re-image the computers at the end of every day like I know a lot of school computer labs do with Windows machines. I imagine that a school will only need 1 "computer guy" around, and he will not be busy full-time. Macs are a breeze to maintain.I think the last Mac virus I had to deal with was back in the OS 8 days.
I live and work in the "real world" and we use Macs every day. Dunno what kind of world you all work in, but I bet your fonts are awful and kerned funny.
planet texture maps and more
Didn't they ever hear what happened and still happens in Universities ?
A generation ago, academia embraced the laptop as the most welcome classroom innovation since the ballpoint pen. But during the past decade, it has evolved into a powerful distraction.
Agree with you 100%!
Want to know why certain schools are forcing kids to buy an overpriced laptop from one specific supplier?
Occams Razor would suggest that the only reason for doing this is that the schools are receiving financial incentives (bribes) from the single supplier of overpriced laptops.
If the school wanted to take a position against the Microsoft monopoly, then the only answer is to standardize on a single Linux distribution. Stable, does everything you need and free from Apple/Microsoft. Perfect.
I can see requiring a laptop for students in the 21st Century. It's a lot cheaper to deliver textbooks on that platform and it's easier for students to carry a dozen textbooks if they're all on a hard drive and weigh nothing over and above the weight of a laptop.
I think at least one 21st century child per class would ask "Can't you put a WiFi router in every classroom and get those cheap tiny laptops with long battery life? Then just download the class textbook, or anything else we need, and stuff?"
Then the teacher would be forced to say "Well, yeah that would be cheaper, I suppose." And then the class would realize their educational system might be constructed poorly and care less. So, I don't think any mention of laptops' effect on textbooks will be advisable..
carry a netbook than a laptop boat anchor... and since I am not a public school student, I do.
And you're right about a netbook making a lot more sense. Create or select the apps to run on anything that's 1.6G or faster.
As for the secret that the superintendent and his IT staff are incompetent at best and crooks at worst, 'that ship done sailed'. If for no other reason, that some of those students are probably here.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I remember the keynote, wasn't Steve's "one more thing" him reaching into a schoolbag and pulling out a Macbook, touting that as a feature?
No, it wasn't.
Un, no. it's completely different.
You were most likely the only mac user in your class; it would be reasonable, like with my kids school, to keep a few windows laptops for kids either too poor to afford one, or nonconformists like yourself.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Because then he couldn't tell us how awesome apple products are.
Required reading for internet skeptics
No, it's whatever Steve Jobs says it is.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
The standard school "computer" when I was growing up was a slide rule. I adapted to other systems easily enough. :)
Of course you did - computers are much easier to use than slide rules. I was given one by an old friend of the family when I was a kid, and I still can't figure out how the damned thing works.
IBM PS/2.
Ugh, IBM PC/2! PS/2 is the connectors, PC/2 was the overall product, PS/2 does not include a computer, it's just a connector. Or wait, are you saying they are going to stare at a PS/2 connector?
this is one of those classic mistake posts with an added arrogance bonus that will haunt that UID forever..
There are poor kids in Beverly.
I can't believe a PC with XP and open source software (OOo would be the biggee) wouldn't be cheaper that a Macbook. Macbooks would be the computer of choice in the Graphic Arts stuff; but the majority of the rest of the world is PC. Mac's are used by 6.6% of all computer users (http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/article.php/3704431/OS-Horse-Race-Windows-vs-Mac-vs-Linux.htm) The TCO for a PC is lower, again, especially if OOS forms the background of your software package. Since they're training teachers anyway, training for a PC would be no more effort. I'm a teacher, and I've seen this in my district. Apple was big player in educational computing way back when. The school's infrastructure grew up around Apple. Now they feel they can't make a change.
And since, IIRC, IBM had nothing at all to do with the ATX spec, I don't really think they deserve much credit for the PS/2 mouse's eventual widespread acceptance.
Before we had ATX, we knew about the necessity of it because manufacturers were all starting to do things like ATX, with all the ports removed from risers for reduced cost of manufacturing. Manufacturers building PCs intended for GUIs, which again predates ATX, overwhelmingly elected in favor of the PS/2 mouse interface because it more or less made sense. Now, a quick look at the back of the PC tells us that it was actually an incredibly stupid choice, because you could plus mouse into keyboard and keyboard into mouse and have neither work since they used protocols incompatible in every way but voltage, which at least keeps you from frying things this way. And of course, intel (and possibly other manufacturers) built ATX board which would autosense what was connected to which port and swap the interfaces. But long before ATX I was working on Packard-Bell, Compaq, Tandy (once they got over their own interface) and other computers with PS/2 mouse ports on them.
Other manufacturers could immediately see the value of a standardized interface just as they had seen the value of the ISA expansion slot. Thus I conclude that you are wrong, that IBM is responsible for the adoption of a specific mouse interface simply by introducing one at the right time, especially since its success predates and thus has nothing whatsoever to do with ATX.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You're probably just getting confused by the fact that the original IBM PC is known as the PC-1 colloquially, because ALL the machines in the line (PC, XT, AT, etc) were all sold as an "IBM Personal Computer". So therefore we ended up with cumbersome names like this: "IBM PC", "IBM PC XT", "IBM PC AT" etc. So we called them the PC-1, the PC-XT, the PC-AT. My PC-1 motherboard may be still hanging on a friend's wall, it was upgraded to 64kB RAM and has the upgraded BIOS that supports fixed disks. But you're still confused.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Even assuming a laptop is required for learning, why does it have to be a uniform platform, and even if it does, why not a FOSS platform?
Octave lacks symbolic calculus, which (apart from general arithmetic and playing a Doom-clone) was what I used my calculator most for in high school. To be fair, though, they have since banned those calculators in final-year high school exams in my state, and in all university maths exams, and only a few schools used them, even though they were very good value-for-money, and fairly cheap.
I think scilab might have a symbolic toolkit, although last time I wanted to use it I gave up trying to translate the documentation from allegedly-English to actual English and sshed into a machine with matlab. The trouble with scilab (at least around 2 years ago) was that while it seems like a pretty good system, it had a gui straight out of 1990 (rather, there was a big edit box with command-line scilab, a few motif widgets for fairly trivial operations, and a pretty minimal editor: they almost needn't have bothered, curses would have served them better) and the documentation was pretty appalling (although the French documentation is probably a lot better)
This reminds me of another story not so long ago of a school that required Apple laptops and then used the built-in camera to snoop on students at home, in their bedrooms, in their showers. They might have gotten away with it, too, if they hadn't overreached and tried to bust a kid that was seen doing something in the privacy of his own home that violated a school rule.
I can just hear it now... "And we would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those damn kids!!!"
Scooby dooby doo, where are youuuuuuu?"
"Variously attributed to Lincoln, Elbert Hubbard, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin and Socrates"
It's just a rephrasing of Proverbs 17:28 - all of the above have read that (except maybe Socrates :) ...
Dumb to do homework on...
Dumb in general considering the expense...
The truth is, the following is all that is required for a first class education.
1. Teacher, knowledgeable in subject, good communication skills.
2. Textbook, high quality, long on information, short on bullshit.
3. Student, appropriately prepared with pencil, paper, eraser, good breakfast optional but recommended.
4. Desk, comfort may vary.
Anything else just gets in the way.
Seems you're from an even poorer district than the ones metachimp was talking about.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hi's bad.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The difference is in teaching diversity. I your school (like mine) had both Macs and PCs, then you learned to adapt early on, you learned the concept on an OS and that different ones had different paradigms, etc. I don't think this can be seen as a bad thing in any scenario. If you force PC onto students, then you take away this teaching (adaptive thinking), but at least you're getting them accustomed to (most likely) the environment they'll be using in the workplace a couple years from now. If you force Mac on them, you're not effectively teaching them to "think different", you're teaching them one way of doing things, which probably isn't the way employers will expect them to work when they graduate. It's setting them up to hit a brick wall.
From a Mac (and Linux) user. Also switching from PC to Mac is relatively smooth, not so sure the other way around would be as easy.
The case you're trying to put together here just isn't compelling. I really doubt that a significant number of high schoolers are getting training in AutoCAD or Micros POS, and apparently the AutoCAD gap may not be long for this world anyways. But I do think it's telling that, when asked to come up with examples of critical Windows-only software, you replied with:
1) a CAD program that costs thousands of dollars per seat, which you'd be lucky to find on ten or twenty computers in even a well-funded high school.
2) a point of sale system designed to be usable by people who have never had meaningful interaction with computers.
I don't consider .NET a compelling argument. First, because Microsoft developed it specifically to keep software development tied to the Windows platform. Second, because I -- a Linux user for eight years before I finally lost my senses and bought a Mac a few months ago -- have never once found myself thinking, "Maybe I should try Mono so that I can try out NiftySuiteX."
By the same style of argumentation, you could say that if a high schooler aspires to a career where Macs seem especially strong, like graphical design, filmmaking, music composition, or web design and development, a school that requires a PC is hamstringing her future career prospects.
I speak from experience when I say that the "huge training costs" just don't exist. My work runs a Mac-only shop*, not because of some inherent superiority of the platform, but because we're a non-profit and somebody donated a metric buttload of Mac hardware to our parent organization about ten years ago. I've seen plenty of volunteers and staff come through over the years, and despite the fact that most of them have virtually no Mac experience, I've never seen these huge training costs you've been rambling about. It's not like you have to teach people how to use Finder. It's not like it takes weeks to say, "It's apple-v to paste and apple-c to copy**". All the major end-user concepts (desktop, file browser, drag-n-drop, trashcan, web browser, office suite, etc.) are cross-platform, and don't really require explanation. Nor have I seen a non-coding environment where people were expected to install their own software or otherwise maintain their own computers. That stuff falls either to a specialized IT group, or to some self-appointed guru.
What little burden exists is minuscule compared to the burden of teaching the specialized applications that proliferate in any office environment.
"Giant waste of time and money?" I doubt it. You'd be right to be torched that a high school would require parents to buy kids a laptop, and worse, an especially expensive type of laptop, and double-worse when you consider that it's a public high school. The one-laptop-per-child concept*** is an expensive boondoggle, unless they're doing something really innovative with those laptops. Most schools don't; they just use the laptops as adjuncts to the traditional model.
But I'm sorry, the idea that teaching kids on Macs puts them at some huge disadvantage in the job market still strikes me as unlikely, even laughable.
* Okay, except for that one Ubuntu box I installed for volunteers to use.
** I've decided that these are the only two shortcuts most people know. I've done everything in my power to popularize apple-f and apple-a, but you have to choose your battles.
*** As opposed to the One Laptop Per Child program, which I'm a big fan of.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I see your Proverbs and I'll raise you a Genesis 1:22
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Must be good if people are lining up across the Pacific to get it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I hope they're running a tighter ship these days.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If we can't do so now, it's just a matter of waiting a while.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Parent post got part way there - yes, the web and HTML is a great way to deliver content.
However, the key here is what _software_ the students will be expected to run in order to _author_ content.
For those of you Windows zealots that haven't bothered to try a Mac, please be aware that it's perfectly possible to run MS Office. But it's also possible to run Apple's iWork suite, or OpenOffice. Or Google Apps in the browser.
It's very common for IT departments in all types of organizations to choose to support a single OS platform. It's equally common for competent power-users in those organizations to opt-out and use the platform of their choice - but to take on the responsibility of self support. Those policies are usually written in draconian tones "we only support X, you must use X" - but in practice it's easier to keep the power users occupied self-supporting their unapproved platforms than have them hacking away at your standard ones.
The thing that makes or breaks this situation is the software platform chosen. I'd be a lot more concerned about requirements to submit classwork in native Pages (the iWork word processor) format than I am the choice of official supported hardware. If the software and data formats are reasonably compatible with multiple platforms, things will work out.
It's fine for them to choose a supported platform. It's not fine for them to make it gratuitously difficult for others to self-support. If a group of determined parents and students want to use Linux environments instead, it should be possible - not supported, but possible. Similarly if they want to have a Windows group, so be it. This school hasn't made the mistake of blocking this - yet, or at least according to the data available to us.
Now, for those who haven't actually laid hands on a MacBook side by side with an equivalently equipped other laptop, you really ought to do so before asserting the value for your dollar spent. Heck, run Linux on both for a week, taking the OSX out of the equation, and see what think. It's premium hardware, and sometimes that's worth it and has a lower TCO. Looking only at the initial purchase price is foolhardy.
Much of the Old Testament does, yes.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
But then I realized that many schools, universities and workplaces around the world have Windows-only software that requires you to buy a >$100 USD Windows license which goes to Microsoft and only to them.
Same crap.
o hai
And I suppose they ran DOS/2 ?
Kindly present your geek card to the nice sharks with lasers on their head over there, who will burn it.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
It's pretty rugged. I wouldn't put it up against my olpc but I'd stack it up against a macbook any day. Nevermind the fact that it doesn't need to go into a backpack, since it has a strap.
--- Do you believe in the day?
Oh look, a tourist. How quaint. Might I interest you in some local seafood, or perhaps some maple syrup? You really must try the salt water taffy, it's pissah.
"Taxachusetts" actually has overall tax rates that put it near the middle of the pack. Most taxes here are well-known to citizens and consumers, because they are directly levied on them, so people *feel* like they are being more heavily taxed than elsewhere, but in reality they are not.
Why don't you take that sour grapes BS and screw off to New Hampshire. They're conservative, and they like whining about how stupid and backwards and overpriced Massachusetts, and how we're all stupid for living here... then they drive to the STATE-OWNED AND OPERATED liquor stores to fuel up for the next anti-commie rant. Plus they've got nice low taxes and corporate-friendly laws which ensure that the gravy train will be rolling into town any day now, it's right around the corner, really. Charming place, and the infrastructure is very close to not being laughable. You'd fit right in.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
I'm trying to picture this: Tech:"I , a tech, refuse to service this IBM PC because of it's Whacky design decisions, deliberately non-industry standard component layout, and other idiosynchracies" Boss: "I , your boss, refuse to keep you on my payroll because you're not doing your job" Tech:"Dammit!"
FUCK OFF!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Lol.. The bible is the Torah- extended version. Even the Torah has been extended over time. Neither are a specific book that is written but a collection of stories or books compiled together for your convenience. The part about this in which the Bible (or the Torah) is concerned would be proverbs (although similar sayings are in Ecclesiastes and Job) which is in the old testament. Most of Proverbs was written or recorded to have been said/coined during the reign of King Solomon Ca.970-930 B.C.12
Think of the bible/Torah more like a history book and less like a murder/mystery novel.
Sorry, but how is this offtopic? This is a meaningful reply to the parent. Alas, I have no mod points to make a correction.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Perhaps it's time for the school to educate itself on the joys of interoperability and just say that some sort of laptop is required be it Windows, Mac, Linux, or *BSD. It will be a good educational experience for all involved.
If the school wants a particular brand name laptop, let it supply them. I'm guessing if the school actually had to buy the equipment, they'd choose a less expensive option.
It occurs to me that selecting any one platform for teaching is really counter-productive. So many people come out of school having been taught to use a "computer", when actually they've been taught to use Windows. This is surely no better. Teaching people to be intuitive when faced with new technology might be better.
Do you see what I did there?
"Schools should teach students how to think, learn and figure things out; not how to use one particular program or operating system. Then the platform used for teaching wouldn't have to be the same one used in the real world."
This type of "full abstraction solves all problems" thinking is fatally flawed.
"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." -- Lawrence Peter Berra
"All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky." -- Joel Spolsky
In your case, the related ideas that (1) You used MS Office in school, (2) You used MS Office at work, (3) You think that "anyone graduating... is going to have used MS Office" are telling. If someone was very poor, only had an opportunity to see Office at school, and was prevented from doing so, then they would be at a disadvantage in proficiency with that particular tool.
I teach CS, I'm down on MS, and I'm anti-required-laptops. However, tools matter; full abstraction is not a panacea, and usually not remotely feasible in basic education.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
This high school is being placed under the jackboot of an iCult that worships at the altar of Steve Jobs. The Mac-only trend is a systemic problem. What follows is lengthy, but please read if you value the web's free exchange of information, and your own creative freedom of choice.
Here are some facts, not just personal opinions. For years, Apple has been placing its spies in key positions throughout government, media, education and private industry. When ascending to power, they always force their departments into Mac-only environments and invariably deplete budgets for Apple's grossly overpriced products, which offer far fewer capabilities. Many functions are not possible on Macs or very restricted due to the limited options of its software. Apple spies responsible for forcing this Mac-only lunacy will foolishly respond by saying those functions cannot be performed on any platform if Macs can't do them.
I work at a radio station where directors were misled by Apple fanatics who hijacked the IT Department. None of the staff was consulted and all the station's PCs were replaced with iMacs; this has been a total disaster. DJs are no longer able to digitally record their own radio shows! They can no longer dupe station library CDs to use for producing their programs. This is because Apple's dumbed-down OS won't allow standard file sharing, downloading or audio stream recording. Jobs recently made a pact with billionaire music henchman David Geffen to make Mac's already restrictive OS severely hamper these basic functions.
In typical Apple fashion, the IT Department is more concerned with regulating station DJs than answering any of its needs. It's only a matter of time until these Mac fanatics try to ban the broadcast of any music produced on a PC or outside of iTunes.
With internet music, Steve Jobs wants to force everyone into iTunes. But his longer term goal is far more sinister: putting Apple in control of all music publishing, with the power to selectively deny anyone in the world the right to post their own creative work, if it deems.
If this sounds paranoid, do a web search on Lala, an independent music subscription service which Apple purchased and just shut down. With Geffen bankrolling him, Jobs is now in the position to buy and shut down any independent music site he chooses. Paranoid more accurately describes this guy and his nutty Mac followers, who are control freaks out to eliminate freedom of choice.
Apple sights "copyright" concerns to justify its actions, which is totally fraudulent. Most internet music is posted for free download by novice musicians seeking publicity for their work. These are unsigned musicians governed by the Creative Commons Licensing, which says music can be freely downloaded and shared. Apple is using copyright as an excuse to control music publishing the same way record companies have in the past. These are the same companies who've repeatedly ripped off smaller artists for decades by cheating them out of their royalties.
Another Apple-only conspiracy is happening at the University of Southern California (USC), where Mac fanatics are forcing that platform throughout the school. This includes several research departments, whose scientists are throwing a fit at such a stupid decision. Apple offers no software that's needed for their work because much of it includes custom written programs for Unix and other platforms. Never let facts get in the way of a Mac fanatic.
Assisted by media sympathizers, Apple is alleged to have surpassed Microsoft as "tech king." Recent stories in the NY Times and LA Times were written by Apple fanatics, who used that company's grossly overpriced stock price to justify their nutty conclusion. They also omitted key facts, like 90% of all computers sold in 2009 were PCs, and that Apple is non-existent in the server realm.
Other blatant examples of this company's dishonesty include its intransigence against Flash, deliberate incompatibility with other platforms, goofy proprietary
School is the opposite of work. At work I am paid for providing value to my employer. At school the school provides the child with value: and education, in other-words the exact opposite.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Here in the US it's not a teaching aid, really, but the core material. You're not being taught math, you're being taught calculator operation, and to the best of my knowledge use of the prescribed calculator is part of the national testing that determines school funding and college admission. I think America will have a new generation of engineers, but it will be entirely despite the best efforts of the public school system.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
New York - poorest state in the USA, NYC - poorest city, when calculated by purchasing power parity.
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
I completely disagree. The skills they should be learning at school should be generally OS agnostic i.e. how to use a word processor, write a simple program, look up information on the web, use a basic graphics program etc. It does not matter what system you learn this on: Linux, Mac or Windows the concepts are very similar between all of them even if the GUI varies. If they are not teaching the concepts then they are doing the wrong thing and it would be almost just as useless on Windows as on Mac since there is no guarentee that the version or even program would necessarily be the same as the one they used at school.
However if they are going to force parents to purchase a laptop then those parents should be free to choose one they want to support. For example if my kids were affected they'd be getting a cheap NetBook with Linux on it using OpenOffice - they have zero need of a MacBook for simple word processing, web browsing etc. Not to mention that I'm not sending my kids to school with a $1,000 piece of equipment in their bag unless the school undertake responsibility to replace any loss or damage.
Do the students go home for lunch? The article just stated they have laptops for students at the school who don't participate in the 1 to 1 program.
I would assume it's very similar to the school district where I work. Our district is all-Mac, with our school in particular having a voluntary 1 to 1 program, with 8 mobile laptop carts of 30 MacBooks each that serve the whole campus for students in each class who don't participate in the 1 to 1 program.
There are no problems with students using the laptops at school, during lunch, break, or even after school so long as the laptops don't leave the campus. When they get home, they're perfectly welcome to use whatever computers they want, be it a Windows or Linux PC. The students just bring in their classwork on a USB thumb drive, or, do their work on Google Apps for Education which we administer on our domain. With the Google docs they can do their work at school or home and have easy access if they don't want to bother with a USB stick.
Only about 1/3 of the school participates in the 1 to 1 program, and the other 2/3 are doing just fine. There is no pressure on any student to participate in the 1 to 1 program except out of convenience.
Like multitask
And plug in USB devices
And run software that's relevant to their curriculum.
When I mentioned to their proud teacher that the iPads didn't multitask, can't use memory sticks without adapters, and don't run a lot of software that the kids are already used to, her eyes popped. It was obvious that none of the IT-savvy parents had been asked about this, so someone, somewhere is pushing the Apple barrow. All the windows boxen in the admin office have also been replaced with iMacs. Interesting times ahead. Currently I volunteer as an in-class tutor for IT & multimedia classes - good luck getting someone, anyone around here with Apple experience & skills to do the same job - so it will fall back on the teachers to get educated about Apple hardware & software.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
This way of educating will probably create the kind of engineer you get from India.
The kind that can follow orders and regulations but has no creativity whatsoever. No ability to improvise when things dont go as you expect...
So... they do the grunt-work and they send the tricky stuff over to us up in the north ;)
It says right on the front page of the Beverly High School website; "We need feedback from the general school community on a technology initiative that is in the planning stages for the new BHS." Perhaps we should all email our thoughts to the school Principle, Mr. Gallagher sgallagher@beverlyschools.org
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
In your case, the related ideas that (1) You used MS Office in school, (2) You used MS Office at work, (3) You think that "anyone graduating... is going to have used MS Office" are telling. If someone was very poor, only had an opportunity to see Office at school, and was prevented from doing so, then they would be at a disadvantage in proficiency with that particular tool.
Sadly, In the US anyone who is not able to afford a copy of Microsoft Office (or a computer, or whatever) is probably not going to be graduating from anything but High School.
I teach CS, I'm down on MS, and I'm anti-required-laptops. However, tools matter; full abstraction is not a panacea, and usually not remotely feasible in basic education.
When the UI change from Office 2003 to Office 2007 took place it did not matter what office suite someone was used to working with before. Students taught using OpenOffice would have had an equally hard time making the transition. The problem with comparing software with physical tools is that software's operation changes much more frequently than the operation of a wrench. I have no issue with having a class focused on the use of a particular software tool being offered at a post-secondary institution. What I have a problem with is high school English teachers (or typing, or whatever) focusing on teaching students Microsoft office instead of how to write (or type.) Another good example of why this is bad was noted by another poster. I once had a math teacher who focused the class on teaching how to use one particular model (now discontinued, of course) of calculator. I would have been much better off if the use of calculators would have been optional in that class and the focus was on using your brain along with a pencil and paper.
I teach CS, I'm down on MS, and I'm anti-required-laptops. However, tools matter; full abstraction is not a panacea, and usually not remotely feasible in basic education
The best CS teachers I had did not care what editor or IDE was used by their students as long as the code worked correctly. This was beneficial to me as a student as I spent less money on tools (I used FOSS tools) and the class was focused on teaching programming rather than teaching the use of Visual Studio.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
A quote right from the schools home page; "We need feedback from the general school community on a technology initiative that is in the planning stages for the new BHS." So... make em happy. Send your constructive thoughts to the school Principle, Mr. Gallagher sgallagher@beverlyschools.org. View the faculty directory http://www.bhsonline.org/directory.php
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
This is absolutely RETARDED. You can't FORCE the students to buy a brand new portable computer; that's simply not fair to the students who can't afford one, or to those that already have one. It's a $1,000 tax on poor students.
However, the key here is what _software_ the students will be expected to run in order to _author_ content.
I disagree, and respectfully I think that's an old-fashioned view point. The students can author content using the web quite easily - most of them will be happier doing that as they'll have grown up doing it on Facebook, twitter, blogs and sites like this.
The advantage to the web is that no matter what devices students pick now and in the future, your software will run (if it is architected carefully). That is a huge game-changing advantage for somewhere like a school which has a tight IT budget and limited resources. The disadvantages are the many small niggling failings of running a web platform, lack of performance compared to binaries, etc but compared to managing multiple binaries on any OS and trying to support student's hardware, they're trivial. Use the web and you don't even need to support hardware at all - that's up to students, or if you do choose to, you can give away some cheap netbooks switch hardware at any time (though I'd question whether this is really the best use of school resources).
Likewise with submission formats - use the web and suddenly students can submit using their phone, their tablet, their PC, or even their toaster (for certain values of toaster). Crucially, this also deals with any hardware/software developments you haven't even thought of yet.
Don't assume that everyone critical of this move do so because they're partisan. I happen to think OS X is a better operating system than Windows, and that mac hardware is better that most PC offerings, but it doesn't blind me to the clear dangers involved for a school (or any organisation) in standardising on a single hardware/software platform, imposing a monoculture, and tying themselves to the future direction of a single vendor. Quite apart from anything else it allows dependencies to creep in that you don't know you have till you need to switch - binaries which only run on OS X 10.x.x, websites which only work in browser x, file formats which cannot be opened by new software without glitches, etc, etc. Businesses have been discovering all this the hard way for the last decade after they standardised on Windows. Doing it with Windows was a stupid idea, and doing it with OS X is also a stupid idea.
The software platform chosen should be the web in this case.
Inequities in a tax like this cut right to social status and will be met with litigation. The expense of the litigation alone would just pay for the things.
At what point did it become legal for a bureaucrat to levy a tax?
Not as silly as the computer SCIENCE department teaching MS Word and MS Excel....
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
ok .. buy the Apple ..
Install windows on it and see how the school administration freaks out ... great plan!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Linux just works, and it just works RIGHT NOW.
For you and me - tech people.
Linux still doesn't have reliable inter-app drag & drop (neither does windos). The package managers are mostly good, but installing a 3rd party tool that's not in the repository is not something you'd challenge a non-geek with. There's more.
I'm saying that as someone who did give his mother a Linux PC, and set it up so she could use it. I'm speaking from experience. Do you?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
and we know the Mac takes beautiful pictures of under-aged teens...
Forcing people to buy them is what makes this different. I don't care if I can afford it or not, if I already bought a Linux or Windows laptop, I'm not buying ANOTHER laptop because my state-funded school decided I should.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
I can't wait for the interview.
"I know how to use a Mac!"
"Uhhh, that's great."
No, you can't :). Sorry.
To do list for Windows
There's nothing these kids are likely to do on a low-end Macbook that wouldn't work just as well on a Netbook... but even with Windows, you can buy a Netbook for as low as $200. My kids' High School (Woodstown, NJ) has been providing Netbooks to kids for years now. We have to pay insurance, that's it.. but even if we had to buy them, that's far more affordable, and just as functional.
Were my kids in this situation, I'd start a Hackintosh club in town.
-Dave Haynie
I guess they think the kids still need training wheels.
I can only assume that the reason they are requiring macs is because they have software that runs on OSX that they want every student to have access to during the schoolday. Be it software for Textbooks, Backup, Moinitoring, or whatever.
/. don't get this restriction in our usual lines of IT-based work as much as the rest of the world does)
That is the only reason to require macs.
Even if they were requiring PCs for this purpose, and PCs being the dominant in the market, so a reasonable choice for this, I'd still have to disagree
If they are going to require computers, for any purpost, then they must make it platform non-sepcific. It needs to be software (or cloud-based browser run apps) that run on all systems with a reasonable market share.
This includes, at the very least, Mac, PC and *nix.
Both backup and problems are easily controllable in a platform-agnostic fashion.:
Full HD backup (which can be done automated, and really is not that much more expensive storage-wise than any other backup version) and full HD restore. If a student screws up their system, then you restore it from last backup, or do a clean drive imaging of the basic setup.
Regardless, kids should be directed to back up their work files independantly, USB storage is cheap as dirt and ideal for this purpose.
And finally, to be fiscally responsible, they should really purchase (out of their own pockets) a netbook per child. Running *nix. Any special school software (assuming it is platform agnostic as previously specified) would run fine, the systems would be cheap.
They can allow the students to puy/lease the systems off the school should they want to take them home, but the lease a student would require would be a flash drive to save their files to.
They can copy their saved files at the end of class/end of the day, and take them home to work on their own systems with. Or just keep them safe so they can reuse them the next day at school.
Any system gets any sort of security issues, the system gets restored.
It's clean, simple, cheap, responsible, and will still prepare students for the real world, where (even if many employess ignore the rule), most companies disallow modification of their work computers. (And yeah, we at
In any event, I am baffled as to why any school would either a) require students to purchase a laptop (assuming they didn't already have one), b) Require any student to buy a specific platform (regardless of if they already have one), or c) pick Mac as that platform.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
Who did they play against?
I guess I'd just willingly forgotten about the Tandy, Packard Bell, and Compaq atrocities of the past. I never did give them any respect, since it always seemed at the time that there were always less-proprietary computers available that always seemed like better options.
I'm very glad that we've (mostly) moved on from there. Damn you for reminding me of these relics, but you're right.
Kid-proof tablet..
...Not to mention that the same software is still expensive on PC.
Not if you use Open Office.
I'm just worried that the poor kids will be distracted from texting and gaming on their phones by having those damn laptops sitting in front of them.
Please - think of the children!
Sure, give them computer education. But I still don't see how learning about an ancient machine is going to help modern kids. I learned about fortran and punch cards when I was in school and I really don't feel like any of it was that valuable. If anything, why not just have them mess around with a modern computer? If the goal is to just familiarize them with components. Showing someone an ancient machine seems like a waste of time.
www.samuraidreams.com - My Blog
www.samuraifiles.com - Get Some Videos Here
... I was presented with an animated puppy.
To add insult to injury, when you click on get this animated abomination out of my way, I need to search for a file, not a bone or a chew-toy the damn thing slowly walks away, waggling its rear end in your face...
It's the public school administrators who oppose choice,
Public school administrators, some but not all, do oppose school choice but many parent have concerns. One concern is transportation. How far are parents willing to let their children travel to go to school?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?