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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!
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.
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.
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 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.
Listening to a guy talking and taking notes is a terrible way of learning in of itself. It is much more efficient sitting with a book on the subject and practicing. Over the years I also have found most topic forums to be way more helpful than every professor I had through my degree when the point comes where you must have questions answered.
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.