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No Child Left Untableted
theodp writes "Made possible by a $30 million grant from the Dept. of Education's Race to the Top program, the NY Times reports that every student and teacher in 18 of Guilford County's (NC) middle schools is receiving a tablet created and sold by Amplify, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The tablets — 15,450 in all — are to be used for class work, homework, educational games — just about everything. With a total annual per unit lease cost of $214, Amplify was the low bidder of those responding to Guilford's Race-to-the-Top RFP, including Apple. Touted by Amplify as one of the largest tablet deployments in K-12 education, the deal raised some eyebrows, since Guilford's School Superintendent once reported to an Amplify EVP when the latter was the superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, coincidentally a proving ground of the Gates Foundation. Amplify and the Gates Foundation are partners on a controversial national K-12 student tracking database that counts the Guilford County Schools among its guinea pigs. Getting back to the hardware, after putting their John Hancock on a Student Tablet Agreement and the Acceptable Use Guidelines for Tablet, students are provided with an ASUS-made tablet "similar to ASUS MeMO Pad ME301T" ($279 at Wal-Mart). The News & Record reports on some glitches encountered in the first week of the program, including Internet connectivity issues affecting about 5% of the tablets."
What we really need is well paid and highly motivated teachers with small class sizes. Not yet another way for students to play angry birds.
Of course the ones making decisions know this, but they're happy taking the tech sector money. And a class full of little kids with tablets make good press and website pictures.
per year out of tax payer pockets. Please stop doing it for the children because everything you do sets them back even further. Smaller class sizes? Boon for teachers union, bane for tax payers. Students? Show me the improved test scores. New math? Fail. "Smart" classrooms? Fail.
It remains fact that students pre WWII were better educated in every discipline. The US has sunk hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, over the decades to "fix" education with absolutely no positive results. Perhaps it was not broken in the first place.
I don't see how politicians think a tablet/laptop/computer/ebook reader will make students better.
Manufacturers have lobbyists.
Students do not.
Whose lives do you think politicians are really trying to make better?
Someone once told me "the further you get from the classroom, the more money you make"
"Now, at $214 a pop, that is orders of magnitude less expensive than textbooks."
You don't know what an "order of magnitude" is. Textbooks do not cost $20,000+ per year per student in K12 or anywhere else.
$200 could buy a tablet outright rather than lease for a year. eBook software won't change that equation and other educational software is value-add a book can't offer.
And, of course, the horrors of exposing children to display screens. We couldn't possibly know the effect of that by now!!!
In other word, you visit a page using http, aka hyper text transport protocol, you got served some hypertext, AND YOU COMPLAIN???
Yes. Because too many links make the article hard to read and obscure the most relevant links.
One basic education in reading, writing, arithmetic, speaking and science per child, using paper and pencil and no computers, would be a superior solution. That's all the education I had as child. I've had no difficulties putting computers to work on engineering, financial, and scientific problems since then. What a fallacy, to think children need "computer skills"; they need thinking skills.
Obviously they've got money to burn, the fools.
For their "total annual per unit lease cost of $214" they could buy 5 Raspberry Pis at Adafruit, and OWN THEM OUTRIGHT instead of the devices still being on lease so they have to pay $214 every year till the supplier is fat and happy.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
Said pre-recorded lectures would revolutionize education. Every home should have one. Hwever his competitors discovered that entertainment was more commercially viable.
Every new media invention in the past 140 years has been promoted as an education aid with varying success.
P.S. Edison originally invented the phonograph as a means of cramming more information onto a telegraph. You'd record message on a phonograph, send them at high speed across the wire, record them at the other end, and play back at human readable speeds. Wires were a precious resource in those days.