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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.
Every student in LA Public schools gets a good education. Now that would be news.
.... Dec 2014.
Holy crap that is expensive. $968 per iPad. Considering how good a Nexus 7 is I can't understand the thinking here.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
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.
How many will break in the first week?
how is this different than buying all the books that a current student uses?
NYC school system licenses some online content that can be accessed via computer or ipad app for kids to catch up on skills at home. my son does a few units every day so that he doesn't forget what he learned last year. LA is just making sure every kid has access to it
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.
By that math they could have gone to the Apple Store online and saved about 15 million or so dollars.
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.
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.
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.
Paper books can be used over the course of several years with several classes of students. I wonder if the licenses in this case will only apply to a single student.
how is this different than buying all the books that a current student uses?
One thing that came to mind immediately to me: no one really wants to steal a grade school textbook. But they would be happy to take an iPad that happens to have grade school textbook apps.
It was recently announced that over 50% of *all* crime reported in NY, SF, and LA involved a smartphone theft/robbery. If they don't have a 100% effective way of bricking these devices when they go missing there's going to be a crime epidemic in LA.
At first I was thinking "well, just don't let them take them home" - which is still an awful idea when the iPad *replaces* the textbooks (yay, no more homework!) But that probably wouldn't matter, who wants to go steal an iPad from each kid when they can break into any random elementary school and steal hundreds of them at once...
Waste is waste, completely independent of who got taken to a nice meal at three star. Lobbyists are not the problem; politicians and public servants who agree to their agendas when said agendas are against those of their broader constituencies are.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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
Why iPad? Reading textbooks and answering questions doesn't seem like it requires a premium tablet. Why not a much cheaper Android one?
A 30 year bond to pay for technology that is outmoded in less than 5 years?
smh
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!!!
Well then. Now we see the textbook publisher's response to SCOTUS upholding the first-sale doctrine. If a Thai student can import to the U.S. cheaper copies of the same book by the same publisher, that's all well and good. The textbook makers will just stop making paper textbooks.
Question is - is this per student *per year* or per student per career? It sounds like the latter... Personally I think locking the educational system into specific software contract is even worse than locking them into a bad textbook purchase contract, but (as stated by someone else in this discussion) - $650 goes towards the iPad and apps, and the rest to support/maintenance, new administrative payroll, insurance, etc (i.e. overhead).
So that's about $200 per student for the course material. Not as bad as I originally thought on pure price alone given that's comparable to the cost of a year of textbooks for a grade school student and a physical textbook should last ~10 years.
And that first sale case - while being generally applicable - was more relevant for college textbooks where students have to purchase their own - in CA the schools purchase and own the books, so as you said they would expect to re-use the same book many times.
Then again the article was still sketchy on these details... if I cared more about it I'd probably research the rest, but fortunately I don't live in LA. (And maybe ironically I live about 5 miles from Apple's HQ in the Cupertino school district, which is both one of the best in the country and currently not stupid enough to jump so recklessly into this crazy experiment...)
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.
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.
I think the move to pads has more to do with the move to e-books, and not so much to do with paper and pencils. Also an educational app does not have to implement, say math problems, as multiple choice radio buttons. It can use a graphical mode more like a drawing program and have the kids show their work and their solution in a manner very similar to paper and pencil.
“I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.”
-- Steve Jobs, Wired, February 1996
When this fails to produce results, they will come back and say, the reason why it failed is because we didn't have enough money to really do it right. What we actually need is more, and then we can succeed.
So hide the crap teachers behind the face of expensive tablets? This is going to be a great system!