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Minnesota School Issues iPad 2 To Every Student
tripleevenfall writes "Thanks to a federally-funded grant for magnet schools, every student at Heritage Middle School in West Saint Paul, Minnesota, now has an iPad 2." Why in my day, we had to buy our own graphing calculators — in the snow, both ways, uphill!
Maybe it works better at middle schools than research has shown it doesn't work in higher education.
http://chronicle.com/article/iPads-for-College-Classrooms-/126681/
Used to be that teachers got apples.
Unfortunate for all those non-magnetic kids though.
:T:R:A:N:S:
I for one welcome our Apple over... OOOOOOH it has Angry Birds!
Aw Frell this
I suspect there are stricter privacy laws regarding minors. So if these are the 3G versions which end up tracking the user...who's responsible? Apple, the school or...? Just curious. For example, if the iPads sync with school computers but are free to go with the student when school's not in (no, I didn't RTFA...), then there could be very personal data on the computers which may not have encrypted home partitions. Makes a whole lotta minors' personal data relatively easy to collect.
Just wondering out loud.
I'm all for 'technology in the class room' but I'm not sure if this is a good use of a federal grant.
I know you can get a keyboard for them but all things considered I think a netbook would be more suited to classwork and homework. You can do an essay on an iPad but I don't think they are optimal for that.
Completely unrelated to the question of which technology should/does support education is the proximity of Minnesota to Wisconsin.
yet another distraction.
You want kids to learn mathematics, proper grammar, etc., then assign the homework. For those students who falter because of too busy / too uncaring parents, offer after school support with the money wasted on subsidizing Apple Inc.
It won't. It's a waste of money that's not going to do anything to further education at that school and will likely do some harm.
In my day, we had to wait until we got home to play video games.
http://slashdot.org/story/11/04/08/2157238/Gaming-Is-the-Most-Popular-Use-For-Tablets
Heritage is distributing 685 iPads to students this school year, with plans to boost that figure to 730 by next school year. It is installing more than 100 educational apps on the iPads, and tying the devices to facility-wide Wi-Fi and Google-branded Internet services such as Gmail.
More consumers for Apple and Google I suppose. Would not the money spent on 685 iPads be more productively spent by hiring teachers, even if it were just one additional teacher? One good teacher can make a world of difference to child's education. A difference that I feel confident eclipses anything that either Apple or Google have to offer.
I went to a magnet high school. Ours was math, science and technology. All our science classes were in rooms with lab tables and computers at each spot. Guess what we did all day? Yep. Internet games(pool, miniature golf, etc). All they're going to do is use these things to play games in class.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
With public school issued ipads? Are these bone stock ipads? Or are they loaded with some sort of locked down ios that prevents 12 year olds from using the thing to play Angry Birds when they're in class?
If they're somehow locked down to make them only useful for the curriculum, I get it. If they're just off the shelf ipads, I don't get it. They're just giving out toys with our tax dollars.
The improvement starts at one textbook replaced. I can't recall many texts that weighed so little as an iPad.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The schools could gotten laptops for less with a bigger screen, more ram , more hdd space and more software.
If we just throw more money at the problem we can fix it. Giving an iPad 2 to every student is just that kind of a "solution". Until our culture and our parenting change, we will continue to produce kids who aren't interested in school and learning.
Successful immigrants show us what is really important. I can think of 2 Chinese women who I know very well. They came to New York City at age 7 and age 12. Parents were dirt poor, didn't speak English, could only afford the rent in the worst part of town or a housing project. Never had a computer or a fancy graphing calculator. Parents worked upwards of 100 hours a week to put food on the table. But what these parents did was fairly simple, they actually looked at their children's homework every night and made them correct their mistakes. And if the essay had sloppy penmanship, it was torn up and they had to re-write it. The parents kept track of when tests were and made sure their kids studied for them. They were involved, they cared, and their kids both made it into the Ivy League and eventually graduate school.
I know this is a bit of rambling post, but I hope you get my point. No magic gadget is going to fix the problems our culture faces. No bag of money is either.
Stuart Eichert
Having sat on a couple committees for primary (meaning K-12) schools back when my mom was a teacher I can tell you that many of them have a shitty technology process. They don't hire a competent IT department or anything to oversee it, it is just kinda whatever teacher or administrator likes to play with tech gets promoted in to it.
So what happened here is the school tech person is an Apple head. They love their shiny Apple toys and think they are just great. The school gets a grant, and the grant probably specifies it has to be used on something like "Technology directly supporting the education of students." So the district goes to their tech person, who is in fact just an administrator who likes Apple toys and says "We got this grant, what should we get?" and the person says "iPads for everyone!"
Sadly, it really is how it often works. Even more often when you deal with people who are fanboys of a particular technology, as Apple people are known to be.
We've actually seen that at the university where I work. Our department charges differential tuition, meaning you pay more for our major so we can use the money to support your education better. The only real restrictions on it is it has to be spent on things for the students. So we can't go and buy office furniture with it or something.
Well, we have a few Mac zealot type professors and they were pushing to use it to give "free" Macbooks to the honors students. We don't charge enough to give it to everyone and of course it isn't really free since they pay more tuition but they thought it would be a great idea. They claimed it would attract better students and help with education. I claim they just like Macs and haven't though it through (like for example the fact that much of our software is Windows only).
In our case wisdom prevailed and it has been used for things like upgrading computers in a lab, that ALL students can use and that can run all our software (not all software is licensed for personal laptops, unfortunately) and for new measurement and test equipment (oscilloscopes and such) however the push was there to go for the toys for students and it was a knee-jerk "This is nifty," thing rather than a well reasoned "This is what would be the most effective use of the money," thing.
With the speed in which ebooks are taking off, it's perfect. To quote Rage Against The Machine, "They don't gotta burn the books, they just remove'em!"
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
This is exactly what I was thinking. This is miles away from, say, Maine's laptop program. I've seen what those kids are doing with their laptops. You give kids a powerful tool and you get amazing products from them. Sadly, people are going to be impressed by what these kids do with these tablets, not even realizing that they've been hobbled by the limitations of the platform.
I like my iPad for certain specific tasks, but "powerful tool" it isn't.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
And what Apple is pushing with the iProducts is that "you don't own your computer, we do." It'll interest them enough to mess with what they have at home, but then they'll find that they have to pay Apple again to access the mobile device, and only on extremely limited terms. Everything that I learned about computers was on hardware that never fought me or got in my way. And if Apple et. al. have their way, they'll undo the terrible mistake of DRM free, unrestricted computers being available to the average person.
The worst part is taxpayer money feeding into Apple's OCD, and their insistence that "the mobile space is only for thus and only those who pay us to bless them."
Sure, why decline when you can accept their offer and flip them on eBay legally and make money on the deal?
For a better deal, say that they can have their required materials sold in electronic format for half the cost, but they're only tied to the registered account of the device? (Skipping for a moment the whole thought of broken hardware). At least then, the students would actually have to use the devices.
Bye!
Yes. Shiny new ipads are obviously going to increase test scores. Much more than hiring competent teachers, or funding academic programs that foster learning.
No, They got a government budget surplus, and they blew it on something shiny that makes them look technologically savvy. Kinda like useless people in suits blow money on a shiny sports cars and other status symbols. "Look at our school! We have all this awesome technology! [of course, none of our staff knows how to properly manage it anyway, and we will sue you when your children demonstrate superior control over our shiny status symbols than we do-- But pay no attention to the incompetent people behind the administration desks!]
This is why dumping money on the public school system wont work. Public schools lack integrity, and as such, cannot be trusted with public funds, really. Unless there is accountability, there will be no integrity, and as long as teachers are treated like martyrs even when they fail their students by continually failing to ensure that they gain basic literacy (AND basic math, AND basic science) at an alarming statistical rate, that accountability will never come.
In terms of school administrators, there is more incentive in looking like they know what they are doing, than in actually investing the time and resources into actually gaining competence. This is especially true when there is flagrant incompetence and other serious shennanigans going on courtesy of the teacher's unions, and liberal arts majors trying to create education policies.
This money would have been much better spent on refurbishing the school's science labs, or on funding extracurricular academic activities. (no, not fucking sports activities. Those get enough money and time already. They dont need more. What needs more time and money are things like physics clubs, engineering workshops, and the like. Things that get kids interested in learning, rather than interested in kicking balls around.)
Good thing school doesn't involve a lot of typing up papers and reports, then.
Of particular importance is exactly what you consider "pretty fast". I know people who have iPads, and who have advised against buying them if your desire is to do anything but passively absorb information from the device, specifically because the keyboard is such utter garbage. This echos my own personal experience with all touch-screen keyboards -- I would consider myself a fairly accomplished typist, normally being able to bang out 60wpm without much difficulty whatsoever (and in my heyday, 90wpm was no big deal).
http://www.surl.org/usabilitynews/122/ipadtyping.asp
There's a link for you. Two things to note: firstly, that holy shit, people actually can type >60wpm on a netbook keyboard, and secondly that those same spectacular people are barely able to break 40wpm on an iPad's virtual keyboard. Now, being a manly man of excessive manlitude, I've got a large pair of paws that will simply never be able to properly use a netbook keyboard (I'm about 4" across at the knuckles) -- I think I'd have to consider myself fortunate if I were ever able to break 30wpm on an iPad keyboard, and even that would need to be done by a furtive hunt-and-peck method.
tldr; the younger generation has absolutely not learned to use touch screen keyboards at full speed, unless your definition of full speed is the fastest speed at which the younger generation is capable with the caveat that that speed is but a fraction of the maximum typing speed capable on a traditional keyboard.
Here's another link for you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZW900ITmbo&feature=related
This is a video from MacLife. A few things of note.
This girl is a pretty amazing typist.
She also has pretty small hands.
She also states at the end that mashing on the iPad, even for such a short period of time, was uncomfortable. That's the little secret nobody likes to mention. When you're using a real keyboard, the full force of your fingerstrokes is never actually transmitted to your fingertips due to the motion of the keys themselves. Energy is lost depressing the keys over the distance the key travels, and after a bit of use you actually become aware of the distance you need to press the key from "unpressed" to "fully pressed" and will not mash as hard near the bottom of the keystroke -- this was a bad habit that previous generations had to overcome on their traditional typewriters, in fact, because it's simply natural to human nature!
Oh, and of course there's the energy-absorption of the keyboard itself at the bottom of the keystroke. It's not a hard surface at the bottom, there's quite a bit of give.
iPad keyboard? No such thing. Every keystroke strikes a flat, hard surface with full force. That full force quickly works to numb your fingertips. Unless of course, you are merely hunt-and-pecking at a blazing 25wpm. You can probably avoid that issue if you're just dicking around.
But hey, like I said, good thing school doesn't involve writing papers and reports!
(ps, i see you astroturfin', i rantin'.)
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
A few years ago, the school I went to gave out tablet computers to every student (not portable tablets, but laptop PCs with touch-screens to be used with styluses). Not only did I use one on a daily basis as a student, but I also voluntarily helped out with the "tech director" (or whatever his position was) of the school, doing things like troubleshooting computers and helping to set computers up. As someone who has worked with this kind of program before, let me just say that there's a VERY, VERY, VERY SMALL CHANCE that this could work well. The tablets that we used were expensive, about a thousand dollars per student and teacher. We'd have to ship out pile after pile of busted tablets every week to get replacements, and we used CloneZilla and Deep Freeze to make sure that all of them were the same. Kids fooled around on them in class (I even participated in a school-wide Halo deathmatch during Biology class), and it was very poorly managed. The tech, while the teachers found the technology useful, never added more than the students would get by simply using pencil and paper (they even had digital whiteboards with a projector in every classroom, called "Smart Boards" or something like that).
For iPads to work in a school environment, they would have to be very locked down and very well-managed. What can you possibly do with an iPad, besides use the internet or a specialized research application, that you can't do with pencil and paper? It's a huge cost to support, it doesn't add much, it's more complicated than simple pencil-and-paper, and, unless it can be well-integrated into the curriculum, would be totally useless. Take it from me, as someone who has dealt with this before. Schools just seem to think that, by adding random technology, grades and learning will somehow improve. It doesn't work like that; not one bit. I know this from real-life experience.
PS: Yes, I know that Deep Freeze isn't exactly a very good solution for computers that students keep with them all the time. If I was them, I'd use Linux with limited user permissions, and the "tech director" there agreed with me. Management wanted Windows and that's what we got. Sigh...
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
From the article: "The cash transformed Heritage into a magnet school emphasizing science, technology, engineering, the environment and mathematics."
So, why did they drop there cash on iPads, which are not oriented to any of those things, but rather to media consumption? I could understand if these devices were set up to be used as general purpose computers, but iPads are not, so I view this as somebody's vanity project at best.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
About 10 years ago a brand-new high school and surrounding campus were carved out of the hills of eastern San Jose, CA. A big ballyhoo came issuing forth from the powers that were that every kid in the shiny new school would be issued with a shiny new laptop computer. It came to pass within 3-4 months of those being issued that so many of the laptops had been broken, lost, stolen, or sold that the grand experiment failed.
Beware spending all that shiny money on shiny baubles.
Bribing them with shiny toys only turns them into entitled little shits as many bad parents have found out to their cost.
$7 million FEDERAL dollars to give these kids iPad 2s, while some inner-city schools in Detroit can't even afford teachers. Ridiculous.