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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?"
be another case where spending more money does not produce a better educational outcome.
Unfortunately, making classrooms wired has very little to do with overall learning going on in the classroom. It is amazing how much learning actually went on in the one roomed school houses of 100 years ago with a much smaller budget than is spent per-pupil today by even the poorest school systems. If you doubt me, go read early high school text books. Many are sophomore+ college level today.
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?
$300 for a sturdy case? So, they bought them from a defense contractor?
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.
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.
Maine has already been giving every junior-high student in the state a laptop for the last 10 years. From a relative who works in a school district there, I understand that there's a shipment in & out every morning of broken laptops and replacements.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25782209/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/maine-laptop-every-middle-schooler/
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Well, when you are a kindergarten teacher and you are worried about test scores.... there is something wrong.
My tests consisted of drawing the alphabet (which was above the chalkboard), and sleeping during nap time.
You must not be familiar with the kindergartner animal and the damage they can do.
I've always been annoyed by the Apple fans in education and the iDevice thing has taken it to a whole new level. The reason is, as you point out, our education system is perpetually underfunded. That means what resources they do have need to be used to the best degree possible. Now I'm not saying Apple is never the solution, but given that their products are rather costly, I am going to venture to say usually there is a better solution.
This is clearly a case of a fanboy saying "Oooo, these shiny toys would be so cool, let's get them for the kids!" I see no evidence that iPads are useful for educating youngsters. While I'm sure they like them, that isn't the same thing. Even if they do work, one always has to ask if there are other things that work just as well and for less money. I mean sure, you could have software that does things like colour identification. You can also do that with crayons and they are $6 for 24 of them ordered at retail prices.
It is very sad when districts pull shit like this. It hurts education. Reminds me of shortly after I went to university my mom called me (she was a teacher) to tell me of the stupidity of the district: They decided high speed Internet was important for education so bought a T1 line to the district office. Ya that helped schools a whole not at all.
I can see the fanboy that pushed this program trying to justify it as such. One of our student workers is an Apple fanboy and it is funny to listen to him talk about the iPad. He spits out the marketing literature and listening to him talk, you really would think that it is some revolutionary new device, completely different from anything we've seen before. He really believes it too, he has some strange cognitive dissonance going on in that he knows it is just a large smartphone, more or less, or a simple computer, but he's convinced it is something completely new all the same.
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.
When I was in Junior High School in the early 60's, I was allowed to maintain the school's public address/intercom system. All vacuum tubes. Lethal voltages.
I knew that. Just as I knew about the power saw in shop class. I knew what guns were too. And explosives. I knew what they were and treated them with due respect.
I don't think anyone gave the situation a second thought.
Its called living in the real world. Common sense. Who of us were not aware of the kinetic energy of a moving car? Even dogs and cats knew of these things.
My school made available to me stuff of a very expensive nature, and let me open it up and see how it worked. I am very grateful to Glenn Peterson, the principal of the Junior High School I attended for the trust he placed in me. I kept that machine working the whole time I attended the school, and that prepared me for my summer job of fixing things at my neighborhood radio repair shop.
I am also aware of just how fortunate I was to be schooled in that time frame. There is no way I could ever get *that* kind of education today. I would have never seen the power of "nature in the raw" that my teachers were able to show me.
Yes, it was dangerous. I could have killed myself touching the wrong thing in that chassis. I could have cut my hand off with the power saw. I could have blinded myself with the drill press. But I didn't.
The worst damage I did to myself during school, all the science labs, all the shop classes, all the experience with guns - the worst was I snapped my ankle during a wrestling match, and to this day still walk with a limp.
I don't think an $800 thingie way beyond my comprehension would have helped much. It was my teachers, and my relationship with them, that made the difference in my life, and that is what I remember.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
It's a new age, American children need to hit the ground running out of the womb in order to compete versus the vast numbers in China and India. We have to build better everything, and that includes kids. Now if only we are smart enough not to hold these kids back as they blossom and grow under the tutelage of our machine friends. Get with the times Grandpa.
Really? You think an iPad will give Western children the competitive edge they need? Here's a free clue:
Indian and Chinese students have one deadly advantage: motivation.
Basically, Western kids can aspire to being mediocre at everything they do, knowing full well that they will thereby enough income to live comfortably well-off for their entire lives. Chinese and Indian kids know that if they aren't amongst a very small percentage of the best of their cadre, they will earn poverty.
Western kids don't need to be taught how to multi-touch gesture-smear on an $800 doo-dad. They need someone to motivate them to compete. Angry Birds and fart apps won't help with that.
"Oh no... he found the
I blame parents, because frankly they have no clue, they have been spoon fed reptile brain tripe about how capitalism is their God and proceed to bang their heads against a wall waiting for that "lottery ticket" of sorts to project them to their place in the circle of idols. Hence the values they impart unto their children are lacking because they frankly are lacking any good ones to pass along to them. We are vastly outnumber, and unless we work together as a nation, with goals and utilize all of our assets in concert, we will pass like a shooting star.
Your libertarian outlook is one of a long gone era of frontier-ism. This is a modern world, a smaller world, with limited resources. The days of robber barons setting on top of the heap have to end, lest they will be setting on a heap of burnt trash. If you haven't noticed, China has put the major hammer to us with Capitalism, oh the irony and karma. It seems that we haven't learned the object lesson that "business is war" or "trade is war". We have let our officials whore themselves out to out of control multinational corporations, whom have become the real power on this planet outside of some elements like China, and even that is questionable.
You have been rendered obsolete, American worker. All you are good for now is to wring the last of your countries wealth out of you, so that more of your land can just be bought out from under you with your own money. Please keep cutting the throats of your own people in order to keep your head above water, that is just less that China has to evict when at last you default. Those at the top will just skip off to their luxurious retreats; you don't think gold is at a all time high for willy-nilly reasons do you?
So by all means, keep bitching about education programs, it makes it easier to dominate dumb fucks if they are kept ignorant. I hate to break it to this forum, but just because you post here doesn't make you a genius. Most of you don't even have an original thought, when it comes to these national issues. Factor this, at least they bought IPads, and kept the money here SOMEWHAT in America with Apple. Of course the object lesson of this; tending to the ecology of one's national economy is lost on this generation. It will serve as a cautionary tale for other countries of course, but frankly I am pissed I am going down with the ship with a collective bunch of retards led down the path to destruction by their own greed, played by the Pied Piper of Corporate Greed and the back up band, Government Lackeys.
Take your heads out of the sand, this is the era of "Slash, burn, and liquidate" in American business. They start at the bottom and work their way up. The canary in the coal mine isn't just dead, the damn thing has rotted to bones in it's cage. We've lost something, besides our minds; we have lost an identity as a nation. We aren't a people, we are a collective of fuckers trying to get theirs. That doesn't cut it in the modern world. People need to stop sucking the propaganda tit and look around at the world and get an objective bearing on just how low we have sank. Once it sinks in how fucked we are, we need to examine why. Why is because we have some faulty thinking. Why do we have faulty thinking? Garbage in, garbage out. Figure out what the garbage is and who's shoveling it in your trough. First clue, follow the money.
Take the Red Pill.
Did somebody seriously just accept and then promote the race to the bottom? Maybe if we starve our children or force them into abject poverty they'll work harder! *flexes his austerity muscles* Or perhaps we simply need to accept the reality of western society as a whole (which frankly includes India and China) are moving towards a middle-class consumer culture and that hard work has always been a questionable ideal since we have millions of accounts where workers since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution did just enough work to live comfortably/feed their families and no more. This whole "work yourself to death" ideology is a propaganda tool used during two world wars where the US had to go 24 hours a day to keep up with demand for war implements with a precursor in the protestant work ethic. Of course the protestant work ethic never existed either, it was merely a tool by protestants to justify their position over other Christians and non-Christians.
I remember as a kid thinking a computer in every classroom would aid and I still do. iPads are relatively costly compared to a desktop but for sheer mobility and the fact that that form factor is beginning to dominate our world then we need to learn to accept it and welcome it into our society. Course test scores aren't everything and the average slashdotter had above average grades but won't stop them from whining about the new aids that show up in the classroom even though they mostly had the advantage of better computers, teachers, and standards living in suburban/exurban US.
where life isn't a constant struggle for survival. I'm just sayin'...
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