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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."
RTFA. $678 with a case and software. 16GB retina is 499, less with edu discount.
what makes you think they would be getting a discontinued model?
Yeap, also a nice little monoculture for Apple to exploit too, next up government subsidies for Apple directly, have they found oil somewhere. Meet the new MS of old, just twice as nasty.
Yeap, also a nice little monoculture for Apple to exploit too, next up government subsidies for Apple directly, have they found oil somewhere. Meet the new MS of old, just twice as nasty.
No joke. I don't like MS and I never have. But at least MS didn't monopolize the entire software stack. In my opinion Apple is far worse than MS ever was. They not only lock the OS to the hardware, you also have to go through their walled gardens to get most of the useful software. MS didn't lock down the hardware, at one time you could get Windows on other architectures like Xeon and Alpha, and MS doesn't demand that so much third-party software must be purchased through them.
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.
My son is in a year round STEM school in NC and their school uses a system based on android called Amplify http://www.amplify.com/. It isn't just an app it is a modified android tablet that allows students to participate as a collective in the individual classroom. Students can use the table to raise their hand, ask question and participate in classwork. Teachers use it to teach their curriculum and after a lesson can deploy a quick quiz so the teacher knows who understood the lesson and who may need additional help. Teachers can see what each student is doing on their tablet at any time with the master teacher's tablet. Each individual student has their own tablet and the tablets are locked down, always on with att 4G when off campus and students take the tablets home to do their homework on them. Their main responsibility is charging the tablet every night. It has been great over the last school year watching my son enjoy his curriculum in new ways using his tablet and the best part is really how well the tablet fits into the classroom and is replacing the tradition text book. The program was supposed to be only a 1 year test of the product but the school has asked to allow the 6th grade students to continue to use their tablets in 7th grade. Kudos to Amplify I hope all schools in this country will stop wasting money on promises and use something that I personally have already watched prove itself as a fantastic learning product for my 7th grader.
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.
what the fuck are you talking about?
Designed for entertainment?
Have you even used a tablet before? iBooks has educational content, the iPad has a lot of text editors and word processors. I've written many screeds on /. ON an iPad.
The thing about iPads in non-consumer contexts is that large entities like businesses, schools and NGOs can restrict what apps go on these devices and if you get the extra enterprise deployment gear, you actually CAN side load custom software on them.
Stop smoking crack. It's bad for you.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
...and this is why our schools are failing.
A local school was complaining that they'd have to lay off a bunch of teachers recently. Come to find out they'd also recently installed a $3000 digital whiteboard into every classroom. What the fuck is wrong with our schools? You're think teachers could do basic math. I understand that the boards can make the teacher more productive... but those boards are going to fail. Chalkboards and whiteboards don't. For what they spent on those boards they could have kept 4 or 5 teachers on staff. How many teachers could the school district hire for $30 million? I could understand if our school systems were flush with cash but they're not. Once class sizes are bellow 20 students and teachers stop protesting about their raises and benefits, maybe then we can think about giving the kids toys to play with?
Read TFA. Of that $1000, $678 covers the iPad, the educational software, a case, a three year warranty, and free replacements from Apple for lost, stolen or broken units. The rest seems to be for setup, training and support. TCO is always going to be higher than the initial hardware cost, and this seems like a pretty good deal for what they're getting.
Of course, in your infinite wisdom, I'm sure you'd just buy a shipping container full of $100 Chinese tablets, drop it on the school district's doorstep and say "You're all set!"
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.
Of course, in your infinite wisdom, I'm sure you'd just buy a shipping container full of $100 Chinese tablets, drop it on the school district's doorstep and say "You're all set!"
That actually might not be a bad idea. Just give each kid a tablet, and let them do what they want. I bet the kids can figure out the machines faster than the school's tech support people.
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?
Once you understand that the public education system is not concerned with public education, then decisions like this start to make more sense. Public schools have become a day care to relieve bad parents, a welfare program for otherwise unemployable people masquerading as "teachers," an efficient way to grow bureaucracy, and a tool for channeling government money to cronies. In that light, burning another $30,000,000 on a "solution" that will only further worsen the outcomes of public education makes complete sense.
The problem with poor grammar and not communicating clear is absolutely the keyboard's fault. It's not necessarily an issue from software keyboards, but poor input devices in general. When you have a crappy responseless touch screen keyboard, or worse, thumb typing on a number pad, your typing is slow. You make shortcuts to compensate and speed things up. You leave out unimportant words. You abbreviate or make acronyms of others. Sooner or later, no one has any clue what the fuck you're saying. It's all due to the keyboard. Now there are those that will take pride in continuing to use proper language even in the face of such a poor input device, but those are few and far between.
Fuck DRM. The school board is paying for all these books, not the students. It's not like the students are going to share the books with each other and cut the textbook makers out. If they actually want to fight piracy, the school board is a large visible entity and will be easy to take to court. The only reason to want DRM for these things is so the textbook makers can force obsolescence of one edition, and require the school board to spend lots of money on the next, even though the only difference is new homework problems in the workbooks.
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.
Who said anything about programming.
That's the problem right there, no one is saying anything about programming while handing the kids general purpose and powerful computer hardware thats been expressly crippled by software and DRM to kill programming and any other non-sandboxed or unapproved-at-Cupertino program.
This space for rent.
Of course, what is missing and hard to find about the Common Core Standards is they were started by the government (state governors association, I believe) to standardize curriculums and teaching methods accross the states with one of their key reasons being to hold down education costs. That has since been removed from the website, but the CCS was not about improving educational standards but cost containment.
How will they do that? Pay teachers less and pay Pearsons more. You want to improve education in America? Find out how the 1% educate their kids. It won't be cheap, but you do get what you pay for.
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.
This line of thinking is some of the absolute DUMBEST bullshit still floating around on the internet.
Only if you're a big Apple fanboy, as you're known to be, but let me give your arguments a fair shake anyway, despite your foulmouthed rant.
Pull your head out of your ass and recognize that iPads are used in a LOT of industries as incredibly viable tools that increase productivity.
Erm like what? Bonus points if those tasks cannot be performed on a PC, laptop or Android tablet. Further, as I said it's good for grandmas and other folks, just not kids.
Furthermore, do you think, maybe, possibly, some of these kids might get excited about programming and decide, just possibly, to learn more about programming for iOS because of the iPads.
You mean like this? http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2010/05/programming-language-for-kids-banned-from-apple-app-store118
Ok lets see what a kid wanting to program on iOS needs to do.
1) Needs a relatively expensive Mac to even start. What chance is there that parents are going to buy one(if they don't have one) just because little Jimmy may want to dip their feet in programming, which may finally end up in nothing? Pretty close to zero. The cheapest Mac starts at $599 for a weak device on which Xcode lags.
2) Needs an Apple developer ID for which they need to be atleast 13 years ago and $99/yr subscription to test apps on their iOS device. Fat chance that many parents are going to get those for a kid who are known to get bored pretty quick.
You know, sorta like how all the old time geeks learned programming because of their piece of crap computers at their schools.
Seriously, pull your head out of your ass.
Steps taken by old time geeks:
1) Install any one of the hundred IDEs and/or runtimes and start typing.
Who has their "head up their ass" posting "dumbest bullshit" just because they outright worship a company?
Oh, I forgot there is no use arguing with folks like you because:
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-is-a-religion-neuroscientists-find-it-triggers-the-same-reaction-in-your-brain-2011-5
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.
E-readers (the e-ink sort) are terrible ways to read anything even a little bit technical. I used to have a kindle dx (actually I think it's still in a box somewhere). The resolution was nice and the visual quality of the text was top notch. But reading my research papers on it was a nightmare. The rendering and screen refresh is just too slow. And fine print was too hard to read. Zooming in helped but then you couldn't turn pages.
E-readers are great for reading a novel or something one page at a time. But when you have to page back and forth, search and make annotations and markups nothing beats a tablet for me (not even a laptop). Sure you can't read in broad daylight but that's such a small part of when and where I read.
Then there's other kinds of content: video, interactive, connected, etc. can't do any of that well on an e-reader.
As for iPad specifically (the above applies to any full tablet). I've been having fun coding on it in codea. A fully functional IDE:
http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/
Perfect? No. But certainly puts the lie to people's (mistaken) notion that you can't write code on an iPad.
The school can load programming languages on. Cupertino doesn't restrict anything for people under the enterprise management systems. They can load whatever they want.
The iPad is for the wow effect for the kids to want to learn about common core. A propoganda program.
Or they can just share their code for others to download and use
Can they?
From http://twolivesleft.com/news/codea-and-code-sharing/
Here’s what happened.
We were contacted late December last year (20th or so) by an Apple App Reviewer. He informed us that Codea’s project sharing feature violated section 3.3.2 of the Developer Agreement.
3.3.2 An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded. The only exception to the foregoing is scripts and code downloaded and run by Apple’s built-in WebKit framework, provided that such scripts and code do not change the primary purpose of the Application by providing features or functionality that are inconsistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application as submitted to the App Store.
While Codea doesn’t, and has never “downloaded” code. It did “install” Lua source code if directed to do so by the user. That is, a user could open Mobile Safari, point it at a .codea project, and be given the option to “Open in Codea.” This then placed the file into Codea’s sandbox and Codea would extract that file into a new project for the user.
This is essentially the same as the user visiting a website which displays the source code, selecting the text, copying it to clipboard, and pasting it inside the code editor. Except a lot more convenient.
I mentioned this to the App Reviewer over the phone. I think I even asked him, “What happens if the user types code into the app that they see somewhere on the web, is that downloading?”
The answer I got was that it’s a grey area. And most app reviewers are not able to make a decision like this – so they must err on the side of caution. However, the app reviewer was extremely friendly, helpful and completely open to allowing me to initiate further discussion with Apple over this matter. He even started the appeal process for me. This makes me hopeful that when this issue is examined further it will be possible to come to a solution.
It would be great if iOS development tools warranted their own clause in the agreement.
We received a call from Apple about violations regarding downloadable executable code (namely, the .codea packages).
Edit: We have worked with Apple and have resolved the issue. The app will be available to download/purchase in the future, but we have removed the sharing feature in the next update. We will attempt to convince Apple that the feature is benign and that we should be able to keep it using their official channels.
Apple obviously wants only their store to have programs that can be distributed. That means any code written by iPad apps can't even be shared without jumping through needless restrictive hoops that are in place to make it as hard as possible to even do something basic as share code.
Easy peasy, indeed.
This space for rent.
Correction:
My three year old Samsung Chromebook still gets something like 12 hours of battery life (probably more). The Chromebook Pixel, with its higher than retina-resolution and its touchscreen, only gets 5 hours battery life. Just for the price alone, anyone would be crazy to buy a Chromebook Pixel for kids anyway,
The Samsung Chromebook is actually perfect for kids. It doesn't have any games (worth playing). It's not a fun consumption device like the iPad or the Pixel. And nowadays, if you develop a new application for the Chromebook, the framework forces you to write an application that will work off-line by default. You could already use gmail and google docs/drive offline, but offline functionality really used to be an afterthought until very recently.
Schools are one of Apple's traditional strongholds. Personally, this sounds a lot poorer than did the Apple ][, OTOH, it's a lot cheaper...except that it's one/student instead of one/classroom.
I *do* find the approach disgusting, but not surprising. And no worse than weekly standardized tests. (If it replaces them, it might even be an improvement.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yes, two years. My mistake.
You're right. I also overestimated the battery life. It says 6.5 hours from its wikipedia page.
I don't think I can come up with any credible excuse for explaining away almost a two-fold error in my original estimate of "12 hours (probably more)"
Direct brain reader my ASS get the FUCK out.
There's one in every thread.
While you *can* be productive on an iPad, I think the point is that the iPad really doesn't encourage that and its productivity uses are severely limited when compared to a PC. No one's going to be encouraged to tinker, program, or start to learn professional software (Photoshop?)--all of which have very real positive impacts not only on the skillset of the child, but our economy as a whole. But then, we should not be surprised by all of this; Apple is just doing what makes sense to them. The real problem is that our system allows for such stupidity to exist in the first place.