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L.A. School District's 30,000 iPads May Come With Free Lock-In
lpress writes "The Los Angeles Unified School District will spend $30 million over the next two years on iPads for 30,000 students. Coverage of the announcement has focused on Apple winning over other tablets, but that is not the key point. The top three proposals each included an app to deliver Pearson's K-12 Common Core System of Courses along with other third-party educational apps. The Common Core curriculum is not yet established, but many states are committed to it, starting next year. The new tablets and the new commitment to the Common Core curriculum will arrive around the same time, and busy faculty (and those hired to train them) will adopt the Pearson material. The tablets will be obsolete in a few years and the hardware platform may change, but lock-in to Pearson's default curriculum may last for generations."
Who said anything about programming. These are textbook replacements. The only thing they have to do is have all curriculum loaded, accept updated periodically and integrate with the schools provisioning system.
They can still give out the paper workbooks where the kids write stuff. There will still be wide rule notebooks filled with scribbled examples off the whiteboard and doodles galore.
Anything else is a bonus.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Chromebook is a browser in a box, useless when offline, as they may well be when a kid needs to do homework.
And the ChromeBook has only 5 hours battery life. Not long enough. The iPad has 10 hours, which is plenty.
The cheapest option is rarely the one that meets the requirements.
Then wouldn't they be better off with ereaders at 1/4 the price, considering this is being paid for with taxpayer dollars?
It's actually more like 1/10th the price for ereaders.
Or do you believe the students' education will benefit from access to iTunes?
You are welcome on my lawn.
iPads are toys. They will continue to be toys for the forseeable future. While there are some worthwhile apps that allow you to be productive in a very limited scope, if you really want to get work done on a computer, it's at a PC, in front of a keyboard and mouse. It's not a limitation that can be resolved, as it's an inherent limitation of the input mechanism. You can't do anything but pre-programmed tasks on a tablet. Now toys are great. Everyone needs some time for rest and relaxation, but do we really want all these children learning about "computers" using something that is really nothing more than a plaything? Do we really want all these children growing up to write applications that are for little more than play?
I'm not seeing posts here addressing the more serious issue, which is the lock-in to Pearson. I know people who work at Pearson, and they do have an intentional policy of moving into schools, taking over curricula, evaluation, and eventually eliminating teacher jobs. I think that it's good to have plenty of teachers, fewer students per teacher, and I'm skeptical about the value of the new shiny, whether it's a gadget or some theory of fixing everything cheaply, but--by far--the more worrying concern is allowing a single corporation have such a large sway over public education. Especially as, in my opinion, Pearson provides some of the shittier textbooks out there. And that's saying something, given the general shittiness of textbooks.
Forget the iPads - Pearson, and these other parasites are going to do more to cripple education in this country than anything else. Private profits from the public taxpayer's dime, they're going to be unaccountable. We'll certainly blame the teachers when this canned curriculum crashes and burns, but Pearson and their ilk? They'll be laughing all the way to the bank.
You know what's worse than government? Government contractors and suppliers.
The monoculture of the public-school programs set for the entire nation by the federal Department of Education does not bother you, does it? It is only the fact, that one particular city is advancing it using a particular family of devices, that you find troubling...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.