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Chromebooks Are Outselling iPads In Schools
Nate the greatest (2261802) writes Apple thrilled investors earlier this week when they revealed that they had sold 13 million iPads to schools and claimed 85% of the educational tablet market, but that wasn't the whole story. It turns out that Apple has only sold 5 million iPads to schools since February 2013, or an average of less than a million tablets a quarter over 6 quarters. It turns out that instead of buying iPads, schools are buying Chromebooks. Google reported that a million Chromebooks were sold to schools last quarter, well over half of the 1.8 million units sold in the second quarter. With Android tablets getting better, Apple is losing market share in the consumer tablet market, and now it looks Apple is also losing the educational market to Google. Analysts are predicting that 5 million Chromebooks will be sold by the end of the year; how many of those will be sold to schools, do you think?
That's probably a good thing since students shouldn't be static consumers of information and tablets are really subpar for most kinds of content creation. Add in the fact that a Chromebook costs half as much as even an ipad mini and overall the schools are probably making the rational choice.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It's hardly surprising that schools would prefer laptops with keyboards, since students are expected to do a lot of writing. Chromebooks make sense because they are cheap, virus-proof and don't run Windows games.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
When I was at school I wasted vast amounts of time being forced to write stuff out in draft form and then re-write it neatly. Fortunately now we have computers that allow editing. This is progress - I can write a report and edit it without endless copying out by hand.
Kids should have access to computers. Not all families can afford them. By giving all the students the same computers it is easier for the teacher to teach without getting bogged down in technical differences, and allows the school to administer and manage them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The thing these programs [try] to bring isn't so much help with learning as much as EQUAL ACCESS to learning. It attempts to level the playing field between the kids at home with no pc for research and the more well-off kids with greater tech access.
That said, it doesn't provide in home internet access, satellite or 3g coverage, so many times it seems like a wasted effort, but it allows students greater flexibility than previous generations. They aren't tied down to a classroom, or getting shuffled out of the lab so a new class can come in. They can do their work anywhere there's free wifi. Further, it adds a value to your district in less tangible ways: showing kids you trust them with not-inexpensive hardware does interesting things to their psyche.
I hate to break it to you but web apps kickstarted the neo-mainframe movement because everyone having their own PC turned into an admin nightmare. Apple and Google have given the same thing to people who don't want to fight with their computer all the time.
USRobotics kept walking around and saying their modems were the #1 selling modem. This is analogous of what Apple is doing today.
However, while USR was the #1 brand, most modems sold overall had the Rockwell chipset, with most brands simply adding a plastic box and different color LEDs.
More recently, Apple claims that the iPhone is the #1 selling phone. However, phones that use Android sell the most, period.
I shouldn't be, but I'm always surprised how religious people get when their favorite electronics company is shown to be extremely misleading. I know a guy that I'd known for years who threatened to "unfriend" simply because I refuted his claim that the iPhone was the #1 phone.
So this iPad/Chromebook issue is just another chapter of misleading sales tactics. But if you look at what Apple actually says officially, they're very specific in the literature. Unfortunately, people will be blind to anything that might change their worldview... and any company would be nuts not to take advantage of that.
Writing by hand remains an essential skill, and will continue to be an essential skill for the foreseeable future. It is true that it is no longer the domain of people who author reports or books, corresponding with friends and businesses, and many other areas. Yet it is still used extensively for note taking, completing forms, and in many situations where it is easier to use the pen than the keyboard (diagrams, equations, etc.).
In time, that may change. In time, it will probably change. Yet I am getting quite tired of reading the handwriting of adults that wouldn't pass the muster of a grade 3 teacher.
Managers where I work usually get iPads.
All they can do in addition to Facebook and other web browsing is browse the intranet (which nobody really does anyway) and check email. They already get emails on their Blackberry's and use them more often.
Pretty much a corporate toy.
A few months back, I sprained and fractured the thumb on my writing hand. It was almost a week before by thumb was strong enough to even allow me to grip an empty soda can without dropping it, so you can imagine it took awhile before I could write again (nearly two months before I could write more than a few lines, in fact). I also work at a software development shop where a key part of our culture is our use of notebooks. To say the least, I was a bit concerned, since writing seemed like an essential skill.
Because writing by hand was out for me, I turned to taking notes on my iPhone, simply out of necessity. I write by hand at around 30 wpm, I'd guess, which I was able to get on par with almost immediately, without any of the annoying hand cramping that happens after awhile when writing on paper. Plus, the notes are much more legible (even with the occasional auto-correct mishap), have the ability to be searched more easily later, can be synced to other locations, and are "written" using an object I'm keeping with me all of the time anyway. I'm actually seriously considering ditching notebooks altogether at this point, now that my thumb is mostly healed, since I can type just as fast, and if someone throws up a picture on a whiteboard, I can snap a photo more easily than I can copy it to paper anyway.
Which is to say, I'm not convinced that writing by hand remains an essential skill, or else that it will be one for much longer. Useful in numerous situations? Absolutely. Something I'd teach my kids? Without a doubt. But essential? Other than legal and old-world business forms that haven't moved online yet, I can't remember the last time that I had to write by hand, and those are both a dying breed.
Personal note: Just to put it out there, I'm not someone with years of experience as a prolific typist on phones. I'm averse to text messaging and get frustrated when trying to type out e-mails since I'm still, of course, much faster on a full keyboard.
That's interesting as we are actually having the opposite to your experience in the school I work at.
The teachers (mostly) think they are great
Before students had these devices they had pen and paper. Now they have a device that does word processing, spreadsheets, basic multimedia, communication (email, video chat etc), has access to a wealth of information through the internet for research, access to our online learning environment and more. A lot of activities that are great for education across every subject and that they couldn't do prior with pen and paper. And it does all these activities rather well and because it is low powered it easily lasts a whole day without recharging (with the model we have). This last point is really important as it alleviates the problem of a mess of cables for people to trip over etc but it also allows people to move around a lot easier than when they are tethered which is good for collaboration exercises.
Of course it doesn't do cad and multimedia and all that other fancy stuff. That is what our labs are for and in our opinion a desktop with a 20 something inch screen and a mouse and that is plugged into power permanently is much better for doing those tasks than even a high end laptop.
Actually you can do cad and multimedia and a lot of that other stuff on these devices. There are web based options for many of these things. Sure they aren't as powerful but for teaching the theory and concepts you shouldn't need the full blown tools (unless you are a poor teacher who doesn't understand the theory and concepts well enough and can only teach a product which you yourselves were taught on.) For instance we teach students cad with Tinkercad.com and they easily transfer those skills over to AutoCad in later years.
From a management point of view they are awesome. Way fewer breakdowns than with traditional laptops and when they do, a lot of the time a Power Wash and the student is back up and running in a matter of minutes. If it's hardware we loan them another device, they log in and are off and running again in a few minutes, and again when they get their repaired device (or a replacement) back.
I really hate this argument that a device that is easy to manage and offers many things they didn't have before (with just pen and paper) which are of value and which this device does really well, and is actually quite well priced, is useless because it doesn't do some other things which are specialised and for which we already have better devices doing those tasks anyways.
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