Microsoft Debuts New Low-Cost Laptops and 'Classroom Pen' For Schools (geekwire.com)

Microsoft is doubling down on the education market, a competitive arena for the world's largest tech giants, with a series of new low-cost laptops and tools to help students and teachers work together. From a report: At the BETT education conference in London Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled seven new laptops and two-in-one tablets made by partners like Lenovo, Dell and Acer and a new Microsoft Classroom Pen designed for the smaller hands of kids. Starting at $189, the low-cost devices are designed to stand up to tough treatment of being dragged around in a backpack everyday. The seven new devices showcased today are: Lenovo 100e -- priced from $189, Lenovo 300e (2-in-1) -- priced from $289, Lenovo 14w -- priced from $299, Acer TravelMate B1(B118-M) -- priced from $215, Acer TravelMate Spin B1 (B118-R/RN) -- priced from $299, Acer TravelMate B1-114 -- priced from $319, and Dell Latitude 3300 for Education -- priced from $299. The pen is priced at $40.

Comments

But can it run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

The hardware looks nice, but I would like to opt-out from Microsoft indoctrination...

Can I run Linux on these (or any of the BSDs for that matter, even MacOS-X would be better)? Otherwise, they're just baggage my kid doesn't need.

Re:But can it run Linux?

[cayenne8]

Hell, I'm wondering why shareholders are NOT kicking Tim Cook to the curb??

Apple used to have a lock on the educational crowd years back.

Apple used to have a lock on the artistic and creative types years back.

Now?

they seem to have their futures tied up believing everyone needs a brand new smart phone annually and will continue to buy new ones each time.

They keep sinking money into Apple TV...something that really hasn't taken off, compared to others.

They're forgetting one of the important things in the IT industry, GET THEM WHILE THEY"RE YOUNG!!

Seems Apple is just riding the fading energy engine that was left in motion by Jobs upon his passing.

They have a BIG pile of money they are sitting on, sure....but at some point, without new ideas, and keeping folks in your ecosystem (a great way is to raise kids using your OS and products)....at some point, that big pile of money won't matter and it will start vanishing too trying to keep above water at some point.

Re:But can it run Linux?

[TomBauserman]

Our school district is 1 to 1 chromebooks for about 1200 students. We pay about $200 ea. Over a year we have about a 10% failure rate. But we're also an authorized warranty repair center. So we make money on repairs. Yes they run linux. You can either install ubuntu/fedora or run linux apps directly on them now.

Re:But can it run Linux?

[pgmrdlm]

They also use to have a lock on graphic work didn't they? I thought that was due to the hardware being better for graphics. But then, I thought that changed when they went with generic PC chip sets. This is not a statement, this is a question.

Re:But can it run Linux?

[bensafrickingenius]

Wrong. I buy Chromebooks for $176 each. I have a cart that's 5 years old and still going strong. We have hundreds and hundreds of them. Best to know what you're talking about before, you know, *talking* about it.

Re:But can it run Linux?

[chuckugly]

Way way back when the dinosaurs roamed the Mac had a reasonably decent looking bitmapped display, and this allowed WYSIWYG workflow for desktop publishing, when combined with a little laser printer magic and a lot of software. They held onto this head start for a surprisingly long time after those initial conditions were common on other platforms as well. But the display that got them the lead wasn't anything that generic chipsets of today are envious of. I forget exactly but it was pretty small and grayscale initially ....

Re:But can it run Linux?

[sensei moreh]

The first univrsity I worked for bought me a $10K Apple ][ system. 64K, 3 floppy drives, color and monochrome monitors, Z80 card, CP/M, Wordstar, dot matrix printer, daisy wheel printer, and a FORTRAN compiler for CP/M

Wasting people's time while making money!

[bogaboga]

While there's been a number of articles touting the benefits of technology in the classroom, the disadvantages are immense and not worth the investment That's why, pupils from the so called 3rd world thrive when they come over to "technologically advanced" classroom environments. They demonstrate an understanding of the academics better.

This leads me to one conclusion: Nothing beats the old fashioned [pen and paper] way of learning.

Microsoft cannot agree with me on this. Heck, they want to sell more and more gadgets. They want to make money, and lots of it. I will point those who support technology to debunk this piece

Re:Wasting people's time while making money!

[Voyager529]

Actually it is well documented. Technology in he classroom has proven to disrupt learning not enable it. The higher cognitive functioning technology was suppose to allow has not materialized. In fact the use of technology has shown students regress in simple tasks.

Technology in schools was always about sales and never about education.

100% sincere request: I haven't read any studies that proved this either way, so if you have citations, I would be very interested in reading them.

That being said, I don't think it was a matter of tech can alter brain chemistry, so much as the fact that there are things that can be demonstrated in an interactive environment. For example, allowing students to use drag-and-drop interfaces for math, or make things disappear to improve simplicity in visualization, or using colors to separate nouns and verbs in a sentence, or showing the Coriolis effect by showing the youtube video of two guys on the opposite side of the world draining swimming pools.

The problem isn't that tech is useless, it's that people who buy stuff for schools seem to think it's possible to budget for a palette of laptops and a few access points and then kids are going to 'just learn it'. Teachers, who are already overworked, underpaid, and who have a wide gamut of experience ranging from "Office 2010 in high school" to "the old guard who used WordPerfect 5.1 in college" to "zomg I have an iPhone but I don't know how to work it, teehee", to "Yes, I actually know how to use this stuff, but I am disallowed to have admin credentials"...and the decision makers didn't budget for training or had the following plan for implementation:
1. Acquire Chromebooks.
2. Tell teachers to teach students to use Chromebooks.
3. ???
4. Tell parents that they are teaching technology in the classroom.
5. Profit?

This ends up with royally inconsistent results that lean toward the lowest common denominator of "kids can log in and use the obvious parts of Google Docs". Sometimes it's a bit better, and sometimes it's a bit worse. I remember reading a Slashdot comment a few years back of a school that did a 1:1 iPad rollout, and the kids had to take spelling tests on it, but the app they used didn't disable autocorrect.

Because of this wild inconsistency and so many people involved, it's not that classroom tech can't be done well, but it's very rare to have the desire to do so in every step from the superintendent on down to ensure that proper training and support structures are available in order to make it the case.

tl;dr: When tech in the classroom is done properly, it can indeed be an asset. However, that ideal has so many points of failure that it is incredibly rare to not have those initiatives backfire in some way, some more spectacularly than others.