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How One School District Handled Rolling Out 20,000 iPads
First time accepted submitter Gamoid writes This past school year, the Coachella Valley Unified School District gave out iPads to every single student. The good news is that kids love them, and only 6 of them got stolen or went missing. The bad news is, these iPads are sucking so much bandwidth that it's keeping neighboring school districts from getting online. Here's why the CVUSD is considering becoming its own ISP.
You would have gotten the same results giving them each their own smartphone or computer.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Yes, the kids love them and yes, they probably do have educational value... but look at the mission creep. The district becoming its own ISP next? Can of worms.
Public funding for education going into internet bandwidth for widgets... well, it takes a bridging argument to say that's a good thing.
Do they not get iPads?
iPads may seem expensive to some people but when you consider the price of traditional books, an iPad could be a bargain. When I was in school some twenty years ago, textbooks were $50-100+ a piece. They would get replaced every 2-3 years. A iPad plus some sort of open courseware could be a cheaper solution and it would be easier on the backs of the students.
All this being said, the public school I went to would replace books every couple of years. I actually spend my first six years in private school and they would keep their books for much longer. I remember one book that was around 12 years old with most being 5-6 years old.
I read the article and it's scant on details about anything other than they're sucking bandwidth like crazy, taking the Internet down for the entire district, the IT guys were caught way off guard, and the kids and parents like them. The article doesn't talk about how the iPads (it also mentions some ChromeBooks) have improved or otherwise affected grades, education, or anything. Anyone that has actually done have insight on that? Yes, I've Googled it, but it'd be nice to hear from someone in the field. I'm looking at this for a school I volunteer at too. Bandwidth is definitely an issue.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
figure out why they are doing this in schools... everywhere...
Why do educators and parents think that just *having* these devices will be some sort of educational silver bullet?
It is much more important to figure out where they have the best value educationally and how to then integrate those benefits into the curriculum.
They always seem to have the cart before the horse.
That is my favorite part. How could you not foresee 20,000 devices coming online affecting bandwidth? What is you and your teams job exactly?
These games do make the rote part of learning a LOT more fun and it does capture one's attention
You make it sound like the "rote part of learning" is an inevitability, when it often is not; our education system is simply horrible. 99% of the time, rote memorization is not the right way to go about things, especially when it comes to math.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
20,000 students with 6 text books will go roughly $12,000,000 for the books. And a lot higher percentage of these go missing, broken or damaged. As the kids are forced to lug around a bunch of books.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The school my 9 year old son is at is pushing for parents to donate so they can buy iPads too.
Given iPads are like $400-500 each and a good Android tablet is maybe $150 (and also has access to a lot more useful free software than iPads do), this kind of crap makes it obvious that the education sector is at least very badly managed and more likely very corrupt. I'll bet that someone high up in the education department is getting a very nice fat kickback from Apple.
Just because of this locked-in pro-Apple money wasting mentality I refuse to donate or vote for the very populist local props in my area that want to raise our taxes to give more money to supposedly underfunded schools. Its already very clear that all they are all planning to do with any extra money is blow it on yet more overpriced Apple products.
I'm also having a hard time understanding why a 9 year old kid needs an ipad at school in the first place at all. After talking to the principal and class teachers at my sons school its very clear that they think that ipads in the classroom are somehow a self-evidently good thing, and have no solid justification other than "because tech===future". They are clearly just throwing iPads at kids and hoping something good will come of it, rather than the iPad actually being a necessary tool and part of a larger well-considered strategy with already tested/proven benefits.
I'm sure most kids would say they need an iPad too but if my 9 year old son is anything to go by, at least 99% of them secretly just want it only for gaming or as some kind of trendy fashion accessory.
See I've been there myself. I remember back in the 70's when I was a kid, the excuse/lie that a PC would help with homework was the standard and accepted way by me and all my friends.of getting a new gaming machine.
As such I believe that the onus still lies with the schools to show that iPads in the classroom are not actually just another distraction that comes between the student and the teacher. Assuming they can do that, then they still need to show some real justification why 3x $150 Android pads is worse than 1 $450 iPad with respect to actual benefit in the classroom.
You don't actually think digital text books are free, do you?
I deployed 150 iPads to a group at a business conference at a large Marriott hotel. We crashed the entire hotel network about 5 times. Right before we ran a video conference out of the country, we had to disable the wireless access points to make sure it didn't crash again during the video conference. They do suck bandwidth. I believe many were running Netflix and YouTube and goofing off during the meetings sucking up tremendous bandwidth. They were supposed to be running WebEx which was plenty heavy on the bandwidth. I can imagine the school is sharing bandwidth with other schools and they didn't consider how much bandwidth they needed. We knew we were going to pound the hotels network but they were unwilling for us to have Verizon install a network for our use. We had to use the hotel network which was outsourced to a rink dink vendor.
$35,000 was a decent Salary in 1980.
Lets inflate that 2% per year over 34 years. ( x 1.96)
Merely adjusted for inflation, that should be:
~$59,000 (from $30,000) to ~$69,000 (from $35,000)
$5/hr was also the median minimum wage for student-like jobs in 1980-85 (~10,500/yr). Over three decades later most States don't even have a minimum wage at $10 or above.
Didn't apple just recently agree to pay like $400 million as a settlement for price fixing ebook prices?
So on top of the price of the device, there is also the artificial ebook prices?
Care to cite some examples of people actually creating content on the iPad in the real world? Most of the people i see with them are playing games or watching video's (consumption).
If you expect not to be tied to a calculator for life, then there are some facts that need to be memorized. The three things that come immediately to mind: the addition/subtraction tables, multiplication/division tables, and the order of operations (i.e. PEMDAS). The concepts for each of those topics are simple, but I get daily use out of the tables that I rote-memorized in grade school.
Beyond that, I'd agree; generally, rote memorization is harmful, and when you get into real mathematics, those facts aren't as useful. I don't see math as the real reason that we teach arithmetic, though. It's useful to be at the grocery store and easily know how much you're going to be paying total if you're buying 4 items at $6.49 and 5 at $2.37. If you disagree about the purpose of memorizing those facts (for most people), or the usefulness (in daily life) of having memorized them, then I'm not going to try to convince you. Your replies sound like you're just trying to be contrary, anyhow.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
If teachers' unions ever agree to let teachers be paid based on how good they are - rather than just by seniority - you might actually see more attractive salaries for good teachers. You might also see more bright people interested in taking up the profession if they knew they could make a better living doing so.
The problem is in the measuring of "good" - this is realistically best measured in terms of outcomes - i.e., the better a student does a the end of their scholastic engagement, the teachers involved should be rewarded. Problem: this takes long-term thinking and doesn't profit private interests.
Some teachers had a profound impact on my education. I spend the majority of my educational years in US schools, after immigrating here. The impact could not likely have been measured within the year. You would have to have looked at my performance at the end of several years, or my matriculation out of the school to accurately see what those experiences did for me.
However then you run into the problem that a similar students in similar classes with perhaps abusive home environments, or being unlucky enough to live in more dangerous neighborhoods (gangs, drugs) who might have completely different scores - so you'd need to also cross-correlate with socio-economic factors to get a true view (i.e., factoring out economic standing, and possibly more uncomfortable factors like ethnicity and type of household like single-income vs. dual, vs. single-parent, etc).
All this shit is hard. And doesn't profit those who want to cash in on the education cash cow. So it's never going to happen. But it should.
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