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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.
How many will break in the first week?
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.
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.
Especially that last one, the infrastructure is cheap (3 or 4 servers and a single sysadmin will give you management for 400,000 iPads). When each e-book costs on average $60/student, that's where most of your money goes.
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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.
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!!!
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 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
Apple says that certain features require a complimentary Adobe Creative Cloud membership, but Adobe lists such membership at $49.99 per month.
There are two levels of creative cloud memberships, one includes subscriptions to a bunch of apps ( that's the $49.99 / month ), and the basic level which is sort of like an icloud / dropbox service for storing files ( which is free for 2 GB worth of storage ). The feature that requires creative cloud is that dropbox-like service.
Also the descriptions on appstores are written by the developers, so is what Adobe is saying, not what Apple is saying. I just checked on my Nexus 10 and the description is pretty much the same in the Google Play store.