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Chicago Mayor Praises Google For Buying Kids Microsoft Surfaces
theodp (442580) writes "Google earned kudos from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel this week for teaming up with Staples to fund the projects of 367 of the city's 22,519 public school teachers on "begfunding" site DonorsChoose.org. "Everything that you asked for...every project that the teachers put on to help their students learn, exceed and excel here in the city of Chicago, you now have fully funded," Mayor Emanuel said. "Chicago's hardworking public school teachers are doing all that they can-and more-to support their students, but they need more help," said Rob Biederman, head of Chicago Public Affairs at Google. "We jumped at the chance to join with DonorsChoose.org and Staples to make Chicago's local classroom wishes come true." So what kind of dreams did Google make possible? Ironically, a look at Google Chicago's Giving Page shows that the biggest project funded by Google was to outfit a classroom with 32 Microsoft Surface RT tablets for $12,531, or about 6.5% of the $190,091 Google award. Other big ticket projects funded by Google included $5,931 for a personal home biodiesel kit and $5,552 for a marimba (in the middle of the spectrum was $748 for "Mindfulness Education"). In addition to similar "flash-funding" projects in Atlanta (paper towels!) and the Bay Area, Google and DonorsChoose have also teamed up this year to reward teachers with $400,000 for recruiting girls to learn to code (part of Google's $50 million Made With Code initiative) and an unknown amount for AP STEM teachers who passed Google muster (part of Google's $5 million AP STEM Access grant)."
Surface sales must have just doubled!
You know Rahm, you could make sure the schools where properly funded and supplied with the equipment they need. But instead you prefer to give handjobs to your teacher union buddies. Go fuck yourself, Rahm.
The summary could use some more hyperlinks.
This $190K expense will buy google an awful lot of free press.
It's nice that Google did this, but let's be clear - the Chicago Public School system has a staggering number of problems, and a marimba and a classroom full of MS Surface laptop/tablets won't really make a difference outside of the handful of children that will be able to actually touch/use these items.
Ken
How can a Marimba (which from a look at Google is similar to a Xylophone) cost so much money?
The marimba is good .... and maybe the home bio-diesel kit.
And then there's
$400,000 for recruiting girls to learn to code
Because doubling the workforce without doubling the jobs has worked out so great for every other sector of the economy since 1970 or so when it took off.
This isn't an ipad? Crap this sucks.
Just wondering ... but why didn't public schools need to engage in constant fundraising and beg-a-thons in the good old days, for basics? Governments weren't spending more on them then, proportionately.
We are spending a river now. Where is it going?
outfit a classroom with 32 Microsoft Surface RT tablets for $12,531 [...] $400,000 for recruiting girls to learn to code
How do these fit together? Since when were programming tools ported to Windows RT?
What schools should be teaching is basic entrepreneur skills so that people can create their own jobs after they graduate.
How likely are kids to carry bad associations formed on a Surface through to, say, Xbox products?
Interestingly, when you look at liberals, many live their lives in a conservative manner. This is because they understand that being liberal in your personal life is a one-way ticket on the high-speed rail line to Failureville.
Do you think Barack Obama would let his two delightful kids fritter their lives away in a miasma of drugs, promiscuity and general sloth? Of course not; those kids are going to work hard and be expected to achieve. But Obama would never expect that of the millions of welfare-sucking losers his party depends on at election time.
No, he needs those Democrat serfs to stay right where they are: poor, trapped and readily exploitable. After all, if they were to live like he does and support themselves, they wouldn't need him. And the priority for any liberal (after being seen as enlightened) is forcing someone else to need him.
Last research I heard, a few years back, was that computers in the classroom actually harmed academic performance except in the sole case that the point was to learn about computers, because they were a distraction and also students didn't tend to take longhand notes, which is an important part of learning.
And if the class is a computer class, tablets seem like the worst possible choice.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/08/09/nixon-vs-obama-yes-nixon-was-bad-but-obama-is-worse/
"Obama has used the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to guarantee any surveillance the government wants without probable cause. Nixon spied on a virtual hand-full. Barack Obama’ s NSA wire-taps the entire nation and monitors the e-mails of thousands.
Nixon talked about using the IRS to harass his opponents but there is no evidence that he successfully did so, yet illegal use of the IRS was among the Articles of Impeachment voted by the House of Representatives. Obama’s IRS has actually used the IRS to harass conservative groups. Can you imagine the liberal outcry if IRS officials under Nixon referred to liberals as “a—holes’ and “crazies”?
The White House tapes show Nixon attempting to use the CIA to impede the FBI investigation into the Watergate break-in. This pales in comparison to the CIA spying on members of the US Senate charged with investigating the Agency's illegal activities.
Where is liberal outrage over Obama’s Justice Department spying on reporters? What would have happened if Nixon's Justice Department had opened the mail and tracked the movements of Walter Cronkite as Obama’s Justice department did with Fox’s News' James Rosen? ....
Nixon was excoriated for the missing 18 and a half minutes in his White House tapes although his long-time Secretary Rose Mary Woods claimed to have erased them by mistake. In the torture scandal, CIA officials admitted to destroying tapes that they knew could be used against them in criminal cases at the same time Obama’s IRS says hundreds of thousands of documents regarding abuse against Tea Party and Conservative groups are “missing,” without repercussion. ...
Because of Obama’s iconic status on the left, liberals are silent as Obama shreds the Constitution in ways Richard Nixon would have marveled at. Democrats scoff at the notion of the impeachment of Obama for crimes far more serious and reaching than of those committed by Richard Nixon."
If I read this right, the amount give is peanuts and will not have any significant impact whatsoever. If you play it right, apparently positive press can be have for cheap trinkets these days.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Why do schools give kids expensive media consumption devices? You can not write code, do 2D/3D graphics design or many other things. Only thing that is left is a gimped office suite.
Shouldn't schools be a place where you learn to create content, not just copy/pasting stuff off wikipedia?
It's going to health insurers, who are taking in upward of $1250 per employee per month from public sector organizations for employee health insurance benefits. I've seen the pay stubs. The health insurer then fights tooth and nail, denying claims, to keep as much of that money as it possibly can as profit.
Uh, the Government Schools are teaching the students how to start a business. The Government Schools are teaching their students to beg.
That's the greatest lesson that can be drawn from all the begging.
Begging for sports
Begging for band
Begging for yearbook
Begging in front of stores
Begging in the streets
Begging on the sidewalk
Begging door-to-door
Begging Parents plaguing their co-workers, co-club members, friends, family
Begging, begging, begging. Between the Government School inmates and the PBS, we are being begged to death.
The USA, through taxes, pays more than any other country for Government education--per students.
What is the ROI? Not much.
The private schools (non-sectarian, sectarian, home, co-op) typically outscore public schools in producing functional and educated graduates.
Why?
Totally true. Human brains haven't evolved (sadly) and what got us to where we are today is a tiny group of scientists and some inventors who did exceptionally well with what we had and did in the past. Realistically, we need to focus on THOSE people and what made them possible instead of attempting to to a 1 size fits all solution with the silly dream of making everybody into an Einstein. (If you want to try doing that, you are going to have to leave Einsteins alone with 1900s education and place the rest into your human experiments.... until you end up with hundreds of education models where then the biggest problem will be inventing the Sorting Hat.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Because private schools are not full of retarded children.
why not just fund the schools well in the first place instead of making them create beggar projects? Oh that's right, we'd have to tax corporations properly in order to afford to do that - instead we have a system that lets corps off on taxes and makes them look like good guys if they step up to help out anywhere at all. FEH!
hahaahahahahahahahaa
What I don't get is what's wrong with _desktops_ in a school lab. They can't be broken or lost as easily. They are more powerful. Each desktop can be shared between several pupils. They're also cheaper, even with larger monitors, have better input devices (real keyboards and mice), and since they're not mobile, they can be set up to boot from the network with zero maintenance.
Why burn perfectly good money on shit kids don't need, especially when research shows it does nothing for their academic achievement?
Ironically we have a "good news" item here which highlights the problems with school funding and companies avoiding taxes. If google, M$ and apple paid their fair share, like most other American corporations, then perhaps the schools could have bought those surfaces without having to go to an official begging site to beg for help from those tax avoiders. And only $200k at that. I wish I could pay no taxes like they do!
Fascinating that Google bought Surface RT units... perhaps they are seeding the ground to encourage people to use Android-based products? I have both a Surface RT and a Nexus 7. Surface RT is superficially nice but the bugs in keyboard, power and application management that I gather were in the first version and still unfixed make it almost unusable due to their erratic nature. Keyboard (or onscreen) stops responding mid-sentence... the fix? Hard reboot, remove and reinstall the keyboard driver, do a factory reset and reinstall all apps and data -- all pretty extreme. And gestures? Well, sometimes they work but mostly no. The Nexus has been far more stable and reliable -- I can take it travelling. The Surface is simply not reliable or trustworthy so too risky to take traveling. Cannot imagine school kids learning anything but cyber-loathing from these things. Be nice if Microsoft cared... they have my money (and Googles). And are clearing out their inventory. Must be why the MS store is now selling other stuff besides their hardware...
Private schools get to be selective about which students they accept, they can get rid of students who do not perform well, parents who are dropping five figures (or more) a year are going to make damn sure that their children are not slacking off, and finally those families that can afford private school tend to recognize the value of education in leading to success. It is not always about big gov vs private industry as you ignorantly assume.
1) It's not Google's job to fix said issues, nor are they going to get into/win that mess. 2) What's your better alternative? Don't fund it?
because the private schools (charter, religious, etc..) can cherry pick the best students. Public schools have to take everyone.
Exactly, I've been saying this for years. The problem is the administrators who don't know squat about tech, they see the shiny things and have to buy them. We have iPad carts in the schools I support and they cost $15,000 or more (30x iPads with a macbook pro to administer them). What a waste of money, usually I see the kids sitting around playing games on them.
There's something I know about a private school student that I don't know about a public school student: the parents actually made a choice about the child's education, and were prepared to back it up with money (either theirs or by seeking out a grant or scholarship). These kids then have parents who have demonstrated interest in their child's education, and that's a big factor in K-12 success.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The myth is that a technology like Surface will help in education. It doesn't. From palm pilots, educational software, computers, they don't work with kids. I know, I threw away tens of thousands of bucks on technology. I should have spent it on a hell of a good night in Vegas for as much good as it did. Good old fasioned learning works. Looking at subjects, actually doing them to the point that you can teach them does work. Problems, problems, problems to get the brain to work on it. This is the very thing that they - DON'T - teach in school. How to learn. At least not intentionally. Sometimes you come across a real teacher instead of an educator who will actually teach you.