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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."
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.
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.
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.
BTW, the student/teacher ratio is about 2X larger in Utah, and their SAT scores are in the top 10 of the nation, rather than in the bottom 10, as in California. So throwing money or teachers at it doesn't fix what's wrong with education in California.
So what you're saying is... we need more Mormons in our educational system??
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.
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.
Wait. What?
Cite source?
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/states/uschartsat.html ...But even using your source, change it to "Utah is in the top 20, California is in the bottom 20".
http://www.publicagendaarchives.org/charts/state-state-sat-and-act-scores
And I really don't care about cultural bias because college admissions boards don't really care about cultural bias, they care about SAT scores.
And to get a reasonable picture, you should compare spending per capita by state:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/compare_state_spending_2013b20s
California spends more than 7 times what Utah spends, and gets a poorer result.
But if you don't like Utah because you don't like mormons, pick another state higher up in the second table, and compare it to California; California is only going to look worse.
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.