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Maine School District Gives iPad To Every Kindergartner
An anonymous reader writes "'An Auburn, ME school district spent more than $200,000 to outfit every one of its 250 kindergartners with [iPads], along with sturdy cases to protect them. School officials say they are the first public school district in the country to give every kindergartner an iPad. Mrs. McCarthy says the tools give her 19 students more immediate feedback and individual attention than she ever could.' Will this improve low test scores, or be another case where spending more money does not produce a better educational outcome?"
$200k / 250 students is $800...why would you pay more for less?
I thought we discussed this two weeks ago, when the New York Times published an article about how all the computers we have dumped into the school system have had negligible results in terms of improving education. Now we are trying the same strategy, but with a different form factor? Are these decision makers even bothering to give thought to how iPads are going to help kindergarden students?
Palm trees and 8
That depends entirely upon the software/content that the kids will be running.
Otherwise it will only be a distraction.
Also, has the school invested in some means of recovering these when they are stolen from the kids? Or is it a distraction toy that also makes them a target for crime?
This is crazy, as in a crazy bad value. iPad is just a toy. An $800 toy that spies on you for Apple Corp. Instead, and for half as much, they could have given every kid something like a Dell Mini with Ubuntu.
I'm not at all apologizing for our horrible public education system, but there's much more to it than per-student spending. Books are much more expensive, wages are much higher. Those one-room schoolhouses were often owned and operated by the one or two teachers that ran the joint and they were able to handle what little administrative needs there were by themselves. Nowadays we have big schools with scores of teachers, large administrative staffs, etc. Plus you need to keep the facilities maintained and have a maintenance staff on daily duty. The districts have their own administrative buildings and staff as well as the need to maintain a fleet of buses, etc. There are nutritional programs because kids often get their food at school rather than packing lunch, etc.
That all being said, our educational system sucks and is in dire need of improvement... but again, it's not just "per-student spending".
Meanwhile, I'm still having to supply basic community-use classroom materials that the school should be supplying (kleenex, hand sanitizer, paper towels, etc.).
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
I work at a school, and a few months back we did an interesting school trip.... to an Apple store. Where the students all got told glowingly how wonderful Apple products are, and were given a chance to try them all out. School trips are not my department, but you don't need to be much of a conspiracy theorist to make the connection between that trip and the new iMacs that soon equipped the photography class.
It's no great secret that tech companies target schools intensively in their marketing. Microsoft has been doing it for years. So has Apple. So has just about everyone else. Sometimes they do it by offering equipment or software at a discount, even to almost or entirely free at times. Sometimes it's by lobbying, pressuring curriculum writers to mandate a particular vendor's technology or urging administrators to buy it.
Schools are just irresistable. Get the students familiar with something, and they will go buying it once they get out. Teach them Office, they buy Office at home. Teach them to use iPads, and they will want to buy iPads - or in this case, tell their parents how cool iPads are. Simple, highly effective marketing. Business sense says a vendor needs to get their product into schools, and so they will - even if it means intensive lobbying and selling at a loss.
Another school system that just throws money at problems? I never understood the rich/poor school district thing. Most knowledge is free, and with the amount of free information on the internet, public libraries and such, why can't schools just get by on redistributing free material and then working off that? Is there a need for the multi-hundred dollar textbooks, software packages, OS licenses, mega-calculators, mongoloid gyms and sports-programs, massive administrative overheard, super expensive art-decko modern design crap, and all that other new-age school bullshit? I'm pretty sure all that crap is extraneous, but the DoE has blossomed into a monstrosity, and schools now operate under the assumption that we must get great standardized test scores to get more money and once we get more money we can buy more shit to get better standardized test scores to get more money to hire more administrators to plan us getting better test scores.
There is a reason home-schooling is on the rise along with the growing demand for vouchers and more private-school flexibility.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Yes, all that rote memorization of facts and processes led to nothing - no semiconductor development, theoretical physics, nuclear power, aeronautics, travel to the moon, or even this thing called The Internet. Yeah, nothing good ever came from that approach of having young minds - too young to really perform complex reasoning - just memorize basic facts and simple processes like long division and multiplication. Who needs to build a foundation for sound logic and reason - let them try to learn how to reason on their own and discover the facts and foundation at a later date!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
schools just buy ipads so when the teacher asks the question you are graded on how fast you can google the answer rather than any comprehension or memorization skills.
the movie Idiocracy was a very perfect prediction of what this country is turning into... everyone singing commercial jingles, while everyone gets dumber and dumber. Computers shouldn't be allowed in normal subject classes.
I graduated college in 1995, and even then you were not allowed to bring a laptop to class, unless it was for your class, since I was a computer science major, which I got my associates degree as. But my core subjects, math/english/science laptops weren't allowed, and only basic calculators in the mathmatics classes. I remember professor made it very clear only old style calculators would be allowed, everything had to be worked out on paper and work shown and no graphing calcs or laptops could be used.
But even a decade later look at schools now, ipads in kindergarten? that's stupid waste of money, and would be a waste of money at any grade level unless it's computer specific classes such as college computer science, microcomputer specialist, or the multitude of programming classes that one could be required.
But yea, learning it first before relying on computers in normal subjects will always be better, and which is why private schools that don't allow such devices usually average higher test scores, at least going by Georgia and Florida Dept of Education sources.
Even if it runs all the right software, the question isn't can kids use it to learn on, the question is if they learn more efficiently or better than with cheaper means. Remember these things are pricey. So to be worth it they can't be as good as what you had before, they have to be a good deal better.
where life isn't a constant struggle for survival. I'm just sayin'...
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