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Every Public School Student In LA Will Get an iPad In 2014
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "After signing a $30 million iPad deal with Apple in June, the Los Angeles School Board of Education has revealed the full extent of the program that will provide tablets to all students in the district. CiteWorld reports that the first phase of the program will see pupils receive 31,000 iPads this school year, rising to 640,000 Apple tablets by the end of 2014. Apple previously announced that the initiative would include 47 campuses and commence in the fall." Certain companies (not just Apple) stand to benefit from this kind of outlay.
That's almost $1,000 each...? No wonder public schools are in trouble.
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Tablets work nicely for casual content consumption; however, they are so limited for context creation. We should be encouraging our student to create and express versus simple digesting information.
This is sad in so many ways. Primarily that there has to be such lock-in with public funds and on such an overpriced device. No need to go into ALL the details, it has already been hashed out on Slashdot before regarding price, toyness, theft, maintenance, battery wear, lack of E-Ink, lockdown, spyware, compatibility, damage, serviceability, insurance, attention span reduction, etc, etc.
Love technology, but sometimes it seems like it is not moving things forward, just sideways.... especially when it gets political.
Oh, and 30 million dollars for 31,000 tablets comes to $968 each. And that is supposed to be some special deal discount??? Meanwhile, the smaller, lighter, faster, higher res, second iteration of the Nexus 7 releases for $229 WITHOUT discount.
This. Stuffing technology in schools in this manner has no impact on education. Facts actually sugest that pencil&paper and and show exact solution with answer lead to better brains than smart expensive pads which react to touch and simplify radiobutton selection options.
Ignoring the fact that you are giving children $1000 devices (Several times the cost of the opposition) that puts them vulnerable to attack. They are unfixable, and heavy, have to work with Apples closed garden. In a dynamic market where Apple is a niche player, its tablet sales dropping. You are rewarding a company that prides itself on not paying tax.
I'm glad its not my tax Dollars. This should have been given to a open platform, willing to provide low margin, easily fixable, assembled in America, Light, ugly tablets..that pays tax.
Its a shame because I think its a great idea.
You're forgetting the infrastructure to support it. Wifi in classrooms, provisioning system. School App Store. Insurance policy. Training for teachers. Licensing for content.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Who pays for the new ones? Have a funny feeling the tax payers are going to have fun with this one...
The large costs will be when students get attacked for carrying around $1000 electronics.
Uh, most kids already DO grade each others tests, well, quizzes at least. I remember passing quizzes to the person next to us all the time after taking a quiz and getting it graded right then and there. Furthermore, evidence suggests the act of teaching stuff to someone else helps you learn it much better, so having kids devise tests and grade each other could be quite beneficial, as long as there was some teacher oversight.
From the article, it looks like that also includes all of the necessary apps and textbook/workbook resources ("Pearson common core system of courses").
Though at almost $1000 per student, that's still $500 allotted to a few apps and digital textbook licensing per student. If mega-mass-produced digital textbooks are costing $500 per *grade school* student no wonder the public school systems have no money...
I was just at liquidations for three schools where they tried this. Somehow they think that throwing high technology at bad students will somehow transform them into good students. The reality is three schools failed to perform, even with millions of dollars in apple miracle products. These children have a poor home structure, poor social structure that frowns on those who are smart as "acting white", a culture they idolizes those who chase quick money and material goods, and no penalties for parents who barely raise their kids. This too will fail, as technology is NOT a substitute for good parenting.
Just think - with a class size of ~31, that's 1000 classes and teachers. If you spread that $30M over 1000 teachers you'd get about a $30k bump per teacher. Imagine recruiting teachers at $70k/year instead of $40k/year. I'm guessing you'd get a much better teacher, and thus a much better education for your kids. These constant stories of dumping technology onto kids never end with any positive results it's just sad. It's especially sad here because iPads are devices meant to consume, not to create. What a waste of taxpayer money.
The Ipad is DRM. The kids cannot study, share or modify the code or freely run the programs as they wish. The kids are beholden to whatver rules Apple imposes. A better route would be an open device that allows for an understanding of how it works along with innovation. Consequently, generations of dependant users are not encouraged to understand and improve things. I prefer generations of innovators, thinkers, who share ideas, challenge and improve. Give the kids access to the source, let them root the thing. The devices should run libre software and made locally. Do you want Islaves or Thinkers? Rewarding oppression does not do much good for the world either. Apple's labour policies leaves a lot to be desired. http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/activate/2011/09/201194144739197637.html The third world has better devices, like the One Laptop Per Child http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child that runs the opensource Sugar OS. Heck, places like China, India, and South America have the right idea. They use devices that run LIbre software. Why is it that the US is taking the worst route possible? On everything?
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
I would think at adding more teachers would be a better option. Class size has one of the largest impacts on quality of education.
books are cheap to repair.
Yeah. But MOSTLY Apple.
Sure, the stupid DRM'ed online-only "book" companies too.
Oh, and all the Apple stores around the area for when the little "darlings" inevitably break something.
I'd rather this money have gone into things that would actually BENEFIT these kids' education. Like building new schools or staggered school hours to reduce class sizes. Setting tighter metrics (or ANY metrics for that matter) on teachers to weed out the incompetent. Hell, increased police presence to help tone down the gang bangers.
But nope! Kidz gotsta haz teh bling bling!
Fucking morons...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Silly goose. What teacher would pay my kickback?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Most likely this will be considered a computer for each child. Since Apple's app policy disallows programming environments on iOS it's likely that this will lead to many children not being introduced to programming.
Americans and Russians put people in space with the above. School education was no different. Why do people think a gadget is necessary.
And the usual defense is, "kids need to be ready for the technological working world." They'll have many, many years to become experts with technology, just through their normal use of it. And if they need to know Excel, they'll take a boring business administration course track like the rest of us.
Watch us continue going down in international match scores.
I've got no horse in the public education race, as my two kids go to a very exclusive private school with a teacher to student ratio of 1:1 and a total student body of two. That being said, I think the single best thing that public schools could do is give teachers the right to expel students from their classroom and schools to expel students from the school. The bar for this should be extremely low.
Teachers would be happier. Students that wanted to learn would be able to, and parents would be forced to take a more active roll in raising their own children.
the $30 million is for the first 31,000 only
Wow, $968 per tablet, what a great deal. Only four times more than retail for the higher specced Nexus 7. This in a city where kids are regularly sent home for "short days" to save salary.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
how important is it to teach 30 children to read, write, and perform mathematics? will that yield $70k worth of economic productivity throughout the child's life? well, possibly $500k-$1m worth of positive impact. that's probably worth $70k/year. it's more valuable than hitting your sports balls.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
It is rare that teachers are grading papers until 9pm. As a parent, I can testify to the fact that my daughter rarely has any written home other than math.
And 64k is a great deal compared to the bullshit 40k citation from the post he was replying to.
64k for working 9 months a year with almost free benefits is a great deal.
Class size has one of the largest impacts on quality of education.
Actually, no. There is a wide spread belief that class size improves education, but there is shockingly little evidence to support that belief. The biggest controlled study was the STAR Study done in Tennessee during the 1980s. It found the benefits to be minimal and uneven. Other studies have generally found even less benefit. Kids in early grades benefit most, with little to no benefit from smaller classes beyond grade 3. Most of the improvement goes to the underperformers. In some cases, the smarter kids actually do worse with small classes. This may be because they are forced to follow along with the class instead of reading ahead or learning on their own.
Much of the benefit from "smaller classes" may actually be from "quieter classes". Many young children have difficulty filtering out distracting noise. Good sound proofing, and reduction in disruptive behavior, can often bring as much benefit as smaller classes. Interesting, improving student/teacher ratios by adding teaching assistants has been found to provide no benefit.
If correctly targeted, smaller classes have their place, but they are far from a panacea.
I don't think simply raising their pay is the answer
Funny, however, that paying CEO's many millions of dollars is justified because it allows companies to better attract 'talent' from other companies, other industries and other countries.
And whenever someone here in Australia bitches about politicians getting $200,000 - $400,000 per annum, the standard response is "but these people would be making many times that in private industry ... we need to encourage them to work in public life". Then those people can fuck off to the private sector if they're not ready for public service.
I do agree that you will get some improvement in quality of teachers if you started paying them more, but I don't think it will be significant.
Let's find out.
What do we do with all the kids that have been expelled? Would they be roaming the streets during school hours? Shoplifting / mugging seniors? (Most of the expelled kids wouldn't be from the maths / chess clubs.)
At worst, they would be doing the same things they do when they are not in school now. Your question implies that schools are being used a prisons that every minor is sentenced to.
Do we conscript them? Lock 'em up in detention?
Maybe that would be best. We already lock them up. The only problem is that the kids who do want an education are locked up with them. If the kids are not going to learn anyway, segregating them out to other facilities that are not bothering to try to teach them isn't going to do any worse.
Tough ... very tough. It'd take a government with an iron will to fix this problem.
No doubt. Unfortunately, sometimes not making a decision IS making a decision, and the decision our governments (education is state level) have taken is clearly broken.