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!

Comments

Unfortunately this stuff is rarely thought through

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Seems like a movement

[arb phd slp]

What disappoints me is that these are consumption-only devices -- No User-Serviceable Parts Inside. This won't help students learn how computers work or how to write software.

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.