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Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

• oculusthrift 10y ago
  I don't know how you can teach kids anything without a keyboard and only having access to "apps".
• secabeen 10y ago
  Finally. It was always so hard to see schools spend millions on expensive Apple tech when there was equivalent equipment available for half the price that met their needs equivalently well. We really don't need to be spending $400-500 per tablet to outfit a classroom with 1 device for every 3 kids, when each kid really needs their own.
  • GuiA 10y ago
    I question the underlying premise that " each kid needs their own". Every time there's a pilot program that gives every kid a laptop or tablet, it seems to be a complete failure after a few months. My aunt is a teacher in a public school district, and has seen a number of such programs come and fail over the decades.
    • derefr 10y ago
      They don't need to give the kids laptops or tablets to take home, but having each child be able to do individual computer-supported exercises at their own desk—in effect, turning every classroom into a computer lab—has important benefits for lesson planning.
      • dpark 10y ago
        Such as? I think having computers at home is the one compelling reason for all the "let's give everyone laptops/ipads" initiatives. It means that everyone has a device they can do typed reports or homework research on. I'm much less convinced that computers in the classroom are a clear value-add in many cases.
        • BearGoesChirp 10y ago
          >It means that everyone has a device they can do ... homework research on. I've known a couple of families where the children received take home devices they were expected to use to do further research or school work on, but who were unable to due to the lack of internet. A few had dial-up which can be unusable with some of the education sites (all the js resources take too long to load, time out, and leave the page useless), but some had no internet at all. Some of these families had no heat/ac, to give an idea of the level of poverty. There were no libraries within walking distance either (nor public transit options). I think the devices are a good thing, because it gives some of these kids exposure to computers they wouldn't have otherwise and if the school handles it correctly they can be used to do work from home (have all needed resources already loaded on the device), but I've seen multiple teachers not be able to account for the most impoverished students lacking internet action (I somewhat suspect the teachers don't always have a choice in the matter either).
          • dpark 10y ago
            Internet access is an good point. That would seriously diminish the "equalizing" factor of giving every child a device.
        • sperglord 10y ago
          The idea is that you're no longer constrained by planning around the use of a shared computer lab space. Instead, any activities that benefit from computer use can be used immediately. You don't have a "pencil and paper" lab that is used the entire school day and scheduled around, and now computers have reached the commodity price point where they don't need to either.
          • dpark 10y ago
            I don't think the vast majority of education gets much value from a computer lab, either.
            • sperglord 10y ago
      • skookumchuck 10y ago
        > has important benefits for lesson planning If computers help learning, why have school results essentially been flat since 1970 or so?
        • ensignavenger 10y ago
          Perhaps the curriculum has changed. Almost certainly the tests have?
    • dpark 10y ago
      The premise is that when you to inject tech into teaching it is unarguably better and always an improvement. Why it's better is rarely explained sensibly and so far as I know never really supported with data. I think there are good uses of tech in classrooms, but much of the time it's forced and pointless and expensive.
    • MiddleEndian 10y ago
      I'd just be happy if students had digital only textbooks. Would save a lot of back pain and locker trips.
    • ensignavenger 10y ago
      I can think of several areas that having a computer for every child would help- but it requires training and adaptation by the teachers. 1) A large pool of free, open e-textbooks that teachers can customize and contribute to for the needs of their class. Textbook publishers are the scum of the earth and most of their textbooks used in education suck terribly. 2) Access to video explanations/lectures, etc. 3) Adaptive assignments and exams like Kahn Academy that allows students to work on solving problems that are at their level and progress at a different pace than the class as a whole. 4) Easier for students, parents, and teachers to track progress towards educational goals over time. 5) Learning about computers. (Keyboarding to programming...) Might be some other ways to use computers in education that would pay real benefits, please comment :)
    • madenine 10y ago
      Its really situational. Every student at my school was given a laptop (2005, but that practice started years earlier) - but we were in a special situation being a boarding school. Every student having a laptop meant that teachers could reasonably expect every student to write/research papers, install/run software, use email, etc - on their own time (nights/weekends/study times, etc). My laptop lived in my dorm room, and if I needed it for a class or to go study somewhere I could take it - but that was a 2-3 times a week thing, not every day and certainly not every class. Day (non-boarding) students had it a bit rougher, as they were bringing their laptops back and forth from home every day, lugging them around from class to class. Even in 2005, I don't think campus could have operated with the efficiency it did without every student having a laptop. Important information was sent out via email constantly (Lotus notes...), BlackBoard for class documents, lecture notes, etc. But that was our situation. At a day school, I imagine technology is probably a nightmare. If 1 class each day needs kids to have a laptop, that means every student is walking around with their laptop all the time for no good reason. Sounds like a recipe for failure. Not to mention the effect of "students have this technology so let's go out of our way to use it whenever we can"
  • Tsagadai 10y ago
    It's telling that MIT still lectures with blackboards while other universities spend oodles of dollars on expensive electric whiteboards, projectors and whatnot.
    • siranachronist 10y ago
      But MIT records most lectures and has great online companion resources, which is where the tech in teaching thing is really helpful
      • pawadu 10y ago
        Yeah, but in my book thats "technology done right". No hype, no expensive toys, just the right tech to solve the right problems without getting in your face.
    • exodust 10y ago
      Depends what is being taught. Electric whiteboards, displays and projectors can provide obvious benefits and time-saving for things like updating values, neatness, illustration, demonstration. Ever noticed when a lecturer writes a sentence on the chalk board, the only sound in the room is the sound of chalk? That isn't efficient use of time.
      • foldr 10y ago
        It often is in practice, because students need time to think and digest the material.
        • thearn4 10y ago
          This is very true in practice. I lecture as a part-time professor every so often, and this is one of many good reasons why you should never lecture via powerpoint. The act of writing down a thought as it's spoken is an important thing for many people. I do use an electronic Wacom tablet when possible, so that I can at least give out pdfs of the lectures.
      • 10y ago
• yawz 10y ago
  > “At the end of the day, I can get three Chromebooks for each of the Mac devices I would have purchased,” No brainer, really. A device's cost and what value you're getting from it are very important, especially in a classroom environment.
• jboggan 10y ago
  Alright Google, that sweet holiday gift charity is paying off!
  • alokedesai 10y ago
    "Charity" being the keyword there
• sna1l 10y ago
  I'm curious how much of a boon Chromebooks/low cost laptops were for schools in low-income areas. I can imagine they made quite a significant impact!
  • protomyth 10y ago
    I'm in a very low income area and they really haven't changed anything for us since the lack of any local management software for chromebooks has not allowed us to buy them. Netbooks were interesting but they had quite the maintenance problems. I think buying tough books or their equivalent would have been a more cost effective solution.
    • sna1l 10y ago
      Ah interesting, thanks for the perspective. I'm surprised nobody has build any local management software for chromebooks, but maybe Google makes it difficult.
      • 2arrs2ells 10y ago
        Not sure what grandparent means by local management software, but Google's built a cloud device management console (https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/business/devices/features-management-console.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/business/devices/featu...) and there are 3rd party tools (ex. GoGuardian - who works with my company - https://www.goguardian.com/ https://www.goguardian.com/) that help manage devices.
        • protomyth 10y ago
          I mean something that would allow management and storage locally instead of on Google's cloud. We have some requirements by law. I haven't heard of GoGuardian, thanks for the info.
• masterleep 10y ago
  It's sad, but Apple has completely lost it at the low end. The value proposition just isn't there any more. This goes for iOS as well as Macs.
  • DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
    But they've lost it at the high-end too: the MacPro's internals are now over 3 years old with still no update in site, AV pros are switching to HP Z-series and the MBP is high-end only in price and design: perf-wise it's quite lacking. The MacBook Air (with its low price to clear their stock) and Mac Mini are priced right for education, but spec-wise they're poor investments, especially as even web-pages now require beefy specs to display at a decent framerate (blame ads).
    • csydas 10y ago
      In regards to the air/mini, I'm not convinced they have no place as you're describing it. My 2012 MacBook Air handles stuff just fine with modern browsers and modern applications. The numbers and specs are fine for a computer that "just works". A webpage has never been the culprit to make the thing sweat (excepting bugs with flash/Java plugins). They probably could afford to bump the specs easily if they wanted to run a new line, but to suggest the user experience is bad on these machines just based on numbers is incongruent with the reality of said devices.
    • zzzeek 10y ago
      yet apple's stock price keeps soaring well into the 130s (!) now, despite months and months of nothing but bad news in my own distorted, self-selected information. what are we missing?
      • intoverflow2 10y ago
        > what are we missing? A CEO that finds fulfilment in something more than numbers on a chart?
    • lotsofpulp 10y ago
• DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
  I remember the huge push when the iPad came out and all the talk about how it would replace textbooks and exercise books. It could only be because school administrators were won-over by the engaging user-experience - completely overlooking practicalities - back in 2010 even into 2014 iOS lacked decent enterprise-management tools that would enable staff to lock devices down as they're obvious distraction devices - things are made worse by Apple's decision to not have multiple user-profiles on the iPad and confusion with how Apple IDs work. I understand they've gone some way to address those issues - but other concerns still apply, such as the vision of a wide range of high-quality (and interactive, no-less!) iBooks to replace textbooks - simply hasn't happened due to massive cost of authoring even a single iBook. But the main blocker I feel is that staff (both teachers and school district IT folks) just don't want to have to manage them. I know an IT contractor who resigned his job at a private school after having to deal with setting up hundreds of iPad Mini devices for every student - he just simply hated the work involved. As Apple is neglecting the desktop market, they're just as well neglecting the education market: remember when Apple had massive education market penetration in the late-1980s? Now there's not even an equivalent of the old eMac unless you count the now 3-years-old Mac Mini models.
  • paulddraper 10y ago
    As a middle-school student in the early 2000s, I helped part-time with IT at a Mac-only school. Macintoshes, iMacs, eMacs. People were less familiar with Macs than PCs, but from an IT perspective, it was heaven. There were only a few models, they were reliable, and everything "just worked" together. The most common snag was attempting to get floppies to work with people's PCs from home. Sad to see the Apple desktops gone.
    • simonh 10y ago
      >Sad to see the Apple desktops gone. Nobody goes to the Apple Stores anymore, they're too crowded.
      • christoph 10y ago
        Apple need to take a long hard look at the nose dive their customer service has taken in the last few years. I love Apple kit, I really do, but Apple the company are starting to become increasingly difficult to like and do any sort of business with. I have many personal data points on this, but below is the worst i've encountered in any retail store in my life: I went into an Apple Store to purchase 3 (yes, 3) Macbook Pro's (old style, they were in stock at the time) in early December (for some new staff that were starting), knowing exactly the model I needed. I was told I would need to make an appointment and come back in 90mins. Really? A customer comes into your shop, looking at spending over £7k without hesitation and you say go away?!? I said to the store member that I thought this was unacceptable, it would take someone literally 2 minutes to go into the storeroom, pull them off the shelf and swipe my card. The response was that it was now the lead up to Christmas and they were very busy and there was nothing they could do about it. My response was that they need to tell their boss(es) to hire more staff for busy periods. I walked out without purchasing and didn't return.
• ux-app 10y ago
  I'm a HS teacher. I was so happy when my school finally phased out iPads as the designated device for our year 7 students. It's such a rubbish device for content creation. The touchscreen is a POS for anything other than web browsing and casual games. Teaching coding, image manipulation, file manipulation was utterly painful or impossible. Typing on them is beyond painful and of the hundreds of students I taught, fewer than a dozen actually bought a physical keyboard. This meant that every task took 3x longer than necessary. On top of this they are expensive. To anyone even remotely IT savvy it was clear from the get-go that this was going to be a failed experiment. Unfortunately education, like most other things follows the fashion of the time and everyone had to learn the hard way that a traditional computer is superior in every conceivable way. Chromebooks are rubbish too, so I don't really see the move to them as a positive either.
  • bubblethink 10y ago
    Have you tried EndlessOS ? I haven't, but I would be curious to know what people involved with education think. It is probably better suited for places which don't have good internet, but that aside, I still think it looks promising. I saw their promo video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgUzdb3S2uA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgUzdb3S2uA), and it has that vibe that Ubuntu originally had when they were new (with the whole linux for human beings thing and free CDs). It also has some new ideas regarding package management with ostree + flatpak.
  • dpark 10y ago
    > Chromebooks are rubbish too, so I don't really see the move to them as a positive either. What to your mind would not be rubbish? I'm a Microsoft employee, so I have a vested interest in Windows devices being the dominant choice for schools, but I don't see anything realistic students at the high school or below level couldn't do on Chromebooks. Also, where do you live/teach? "Year 7" is not high school in the US. That is distinctly junior/middle school.
    • eon1 10y ago
      Can't speak for OP, but in Australia we only have Primary (K-6) and High (7-12) school. Edit: Yup, their website lists them as being in Adelaide.
• decasteve 10y ago
  I replaced my kids' iPads because of the awful hunched posture it precipitates (as shown in the 2nd picture in the article). Also, after an initial enthusiasm for iMovie and Swift Playgrounds wore off, they gravitated towards the more distracting apps and games, youtube and netflix, etc. Having them sit upright, with good posture, at a desktop computer puts them in a different frame of mind when it comes to what they do on the device. I also have more input on directing their attention to being interested in computing, playing different types of games, and programming (dabbling in python mostly). My hope is they get a broader picture of computing, which won't be inhibited by the handicaps of iOS.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • Insanity 10y ago
    I agree with this pretty much, though a good posture is often not really present with using a computer either. Still better than the hunched posture, but you should pay attention to the ergonomics then of how your children are sitting (not slouching) in front of the computer. It does kind of fascinate me how children today are so used to technology. My youngest relative is almost two years old, but he can find "youtube" on the iPad and can click on the peppa pig videos that he likes to watch. Or when he is in the mood for another app that tells stories, he can click on that. Maybe I just hugely underestimate children, but it did surprise me that he can find the apps he wants. I hope that when raising my own children, I can give them a broader picture of computing in the way that you are doing.
  • simonh 10y ago
    Interesting, personally I think mobile devices and laptop/desktops have differing roles and both have their place. Funny you should mention switching to a desktop to teach them Python, I'm teaching it to mine using Pythonista on iPads because I do a fair bit of coding for fun with it on the train. No one device can be the be-all and end-all. Yes my daughters watch a lot of dreck on Youtube, but my youngest recently got really excited and showed me her 'favourite video'[0] and told me about this great channel she'd found called numberphile. My eldest watches tons of Anime, but recently got into AMV (Anime Music Videos) and is working on one for herself using Garageband and iMovie on our desktop. It's not the tool that matters, it's cultivating the mind and attitudes that count. On devices in formal education, I don't think any good can come from kids carrying around any device to use in classrooms all the time until at least high school age. I'm a big fan of using computers educationally, they have specific places and roles to play in that process and one solution simply doesn't fit all cases. iPads, Chromebooks and 'proper' desktops and laptops all have strengths and weaknesses. I'd no more outfit a school entirely with one or the other than I'd replace everything on the road - lorrys, cars, buses - with one kind of vehicle. Tying kids permanently to one specific device just makes no sense to me. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdyociU35u8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdyociU35u8
• ploggingdev 10y ago
  > “At the end of the day, I can get three Chromebooks for each of the Mac devices I would have purchased,” said Steve Splichal, the superintendent of Eudora Public Schools. Not choosing a Mac for school students should have always been a no brainer because, as mentioned a) cost, b)what benefit do Macs provide over say Windows laptops or chromebooks for high school students? Apple did a real good job marketing their products to schools all over the country though. I imagine high school students require a device to do basic coding, assignments, office applications (presentation, word), browsing and maybe basic image editing. Sure, in professional settings I can understand people choosing Macs, but but for high school students it just seems overkill for their use case. Anyway I'm glad to see schools coming to their senses and move away from apple devices...into another (cheaper) walled garden.
  • askvictor 10y ago
    Macs definitely have less downtime, shorter startup time and better battery life than windows machines. Windows has certainly gotten better over the last few years, but 5 years ago it would be taking a minute or two for windows to wake up and log in between each class. Mac is pretty much instant (Chromebooks are fast too). Before you say that a minute isn't much, consider that you have 25 teenagers in the classroom, with a minute of boredom. Also, build quality, effective lack of malware and other system problems mean students (and teachers) don't have to deal with broken computers nearly as often. It's only the last couple of years that windows has come close, and for hardware the compares in terms of durability, you'll be paying as much as Apple anyway (which schools are hesitant to do as they are underfunded) I speak from years of experience as a teacher and IT manager, and as an apple hater.
    • hisyam 10y ago
      > 5 years ago it would be taking a minute or two for windows to wake up and log in OS boot time depends mostly on storage speed, not just the OS itself. My 2012 MBP takes 90s to boot before I upgraded it to SSD.
      • askvictor 10y ago
• shmerl 10y ago
  Schools should start using Linux more.
  • 2arrs2ells 10y ago
    Well, ChromeOS is based on the Linux kernel...
    • shmerl 10y ago
      Yes, but one has to go out of the way to enable normal Linux environment there (developer mode, chroot and so on). It should really be easier, and it could provide advanced mode with normal Wayland based DE, without requiring one to jump through hoops for it.
  • vacri 10y ago
    I agree emotionally, but practically it's hard to get education-level support it it.
    • shmerl 10y ago
      Why so? Linux is great for education especially.
      • vacri 10y ago
        There's not a lot of education suppliers for linux. Most teachers aren't techies, so you need a good support network. On a philosophical level, I abundantly agree that a FOSS system should be in education - which other areas of general education do we train our kids in using Company X's stuff?
  • _callcc 10y ago
    Emacs K-12
  • bischofs 10y ago
    I agree, we complain about the lack of STEM grads and CS education then we give them a web browser and some "Apps" to learn computing. Heading in the wrong direction.
• snowwrestler 10y ago
  I'll be the guy who points out that this story is about what school districts are purchasing in bulk, not necessarily which computers students are buying with their own (i.e. their parents') money.
• Brendinooo 10y ago
  My wife's school used the iPad 2 in classrooms, and my wife generally disliked them. They don't do a whole lot for content creation as others have noted, and they went obsolete fast. It's a nice box to check (particularly for a private school) - "We have iPads" sounds nice. But the reality wasn't so great. This point might be a little more moot now that iPads have matured a lot and Apple has started to push for better content creation, but that stuff is still on the higher-priced end of the platform. I'd have to think that the lack of repairability is a problem for some schools as well. My school district was one of the first to distribute laptops to junior high students (this was around 1999...and pre-WiFi I guess, since we all pointed the tops of our laptops to the infrared caps in the ceiling! [0]), and I remember seeing the IT guy with a stack of computers in the tech room, replacing screen after screen. [0]: https://www.cnet.com/i/ne/pre/Pcnews/12_97/kidntbk.jpg https://www.cnet.com/i/ne/pre/Pcnews/12_97/kidntbk.jpg
• skookumchuck 10y ago
  Tablets are great for media consumption. I don't understand how anyone can use them for creation, though. On my desk is the biggest screen I can afford, and a full size keyboard, and I use it all when doing work. As for helping kids learn, I just cannot see how a tablet will help in the classroom.
  • chjohasbrouck 10y ago
    Completely agree. I take this one step further and say tablets are probably handicapping your kids in the home. Having no tablets or smartphones available during the PC revolution forced most of us here to default to exactly the correct set of tools for maximum learning and efficiency: a keyboard, a mouse, a full-size monitor, sitting at a desk, with a full computer with some kind of (more-or-less) exposed desktop operating system. This isn't a choice any of us made, it was just the climate and the time. That lucky coincidence has given most of us a lifetime of experience using these tools, extending back all the way into our childhood. Over the last 10 years though, a lot of people/families have started replacing their desktops/laptops in favor of tablets/smartphones. I can't even imagine how I would've become a programmer if I had grown up in a house that just used tablets and smartphones for everything. They say that one of Bill Gates' greatest advantages in life was early access to the PDP-10. I think this trend toward "convenience computing" is especially bad for lower-income families (which are more likely to rely entirely on smartphones/tablets), and could even be a significant contributor to income inequality.
    • skookumchuck 10y ago
      I see a lot of kids who grew up with tablets and stuff, and they've learned nothing at all about computers - they learn how to run various apps. And that's it.
    • antfarm 10y ago
      When you teach e.g. basic astronomy or anatomy, you want students to explore the solar system or human body interactively, not their computers. Computer use in schools is not only about learning to use the computer. One of the great features of the iPad is that once you start an app, it becomes a single-purpose device that just works. I totally agree with your last point.
• thr0waway1239 10y ago
  I don't quite understand why people thought iPads were good for content creation in the first place. Also, I think Apple really missed a trick by not going after the education market with a more suitable device. With Windows, you never know what havoc the next update around the corner is going to wreak. And Chromebooks are still quite limited in many different things. By merely having a serious presence in this market, Apple would by now have had a best in class device because this is turning out to be the classic case of the one eyed man being the king of the land of the blind.
  • joezydeco 10y ago
    In my local school district, gDocs is the key for our switch away from iOS devices. We don't even need the chromebooks, Docs will run on older PCs as well. I don't believe any newer/cheaper hardware from Apple will help here.
    • antfarm 10y ago
      Shouldn't computers in schools be used for more than just teaching students how to use office tools? Teaching only boring stuff has great potential to suck the fun out of computer use for them and does not encourage them to explore what it is they might want to do with a computer.
      • joezydeco 10y ago
        From my personal experience watching my own children use gDocs, they're extremely comfortable working with computers in general and the operation of the tool itself is nearly transparent. They open a document and start typing. They open a slide presentation and start moving pictures and words around. Collaborative work is automatic and they kids don't even think about it. I can remember a time when simultaneous editing of a document was something only CS PhD students dreamed about in their theses. Now my 7 year-old is doing it. And she finds it kind of fun, actually. It doesn't need to be an indoctrination into corporate life and I haven't seen one iota of that in the classroom. They're just tools like everything else in their school. Is writing on a whiteboard training for the business world, or just an easier/cleaner way to write so the whole room can see it? How about using a video projector overlaid on the whiteboard? Sitting on an exercise ball to minimize fidgeting? Standing desks? RFID cards in the lunchroom? Maybe they're all just applications of technology that have positive uses with the kids.
• kregasaurusrex 10y ago
  I worked in Education IT as my college job, and Apple provided zero value added with regard towards educational software. For every piece of software that instructors requested such as stat analyses, whiteboards with note-saving capability, standardized test-prep materials, and math visualization it was often non-existent, cost-prohibitive, or a available as a free web app. Campus labs virtualized Windows 7 on iMacs to run side-by-side in order to allow compatibility with 90% of the tools educators need. While I think that we're doing an excellent job at preparing tomorrow's teachers on how to educate kids; technology largely remains a point of friction in keeping kids focused because of the lack of good tools in the ecosystem. My high school district always received the short end of state funding and we never had any good tools available for physics simulations, art & design, CAD, or personal finance to name a few. Anything we did end up using was available as a web app with no OS dependence; and I see school districts pay extra for mac systems without any competitive advantages to the platform. It's largely a market mismatch that Apple's failed to address, and were largely being phased out because of this.
• LeicaLatte 10y ago
  The passing of Steve has affected the iPad product line the most. iPads have pretty much stagnated since his demise and Apple has alienated the education market with their laptops too. I mean look at the Pro features of the iPad - split screen multi-tasking and 100$ pencils. Its a joke.
  • remir 10y ago
    The 12.9-inch iPad Pro (32GB, Wifi only) is selling for $1,049 CAD. Who are they kidding?
    • LeicaLatte 10y ago
      32 GB storage on a 1000+$ device is mind boggling. The cloud storage situation is even worse. Every Pro device (MBP or iPadP) should come with atleast 100GB cloud storage IMO.
      • remir 10y ago
        To be honest, the only Pro thing about the MBP and iPad Pro is their name.
• foxfired 10y ago
  When I used to see all schools turning to iPads I was one of the naysayers. I saw my nephew working(playing) on his school iPad and I thought this was the worst decision the school system ever took. But now looking back, I am glad they went through it, call it a phase if you must. The American school system (or government) is always last to adopt any tech. You can still find outdated technology barely holding together in some schools. But this time they did something different. They took a risk. They adopted something that hadn't been tested yet. Well now they tested it. We thought iPads were inferior to laptops or desktop, but now we know that they are, at least in the classroom. Money was wasted, time was wasted, but at least now we know through experience. I'm glad that they took the risk of trying something untested. And I hope that in the future they will do so again with whatever tech that looks promising in improving education.
  • eksemplar 10y ago
    I work in the public sector, albeit in digitization an architecture in the central administration in a Danish municipality, but I can assure you the lesson won't stay learned for long. We've gone through the same shift, but it wasn't because IPads were unfit for classrooms, it was because chromebooks were cheaper and are easier to administrate for the IT department (also a major financial saving). Our school system is at a whole a lot better than the American, yet even here it's typically cost and business needs which define what IT makes it into classrooms, rather than educational needs. Apple is unfortunately for Apple technically and financially unfit for most enterprise, and in the modern world schools are becoming enterprise.
  • Kalium 10y ago
    > When I used to see all schools turning to iPads I was one of the naysayers. I saw my nephew working(playing) on his school iPad and I thought this was the worst decision the school system ever took. Personally, I think the attempts that school IT make to prevent playing are great! They're the best way I can think of to create a generation of flexible problem-solvers who penetrate security for fun.
• sxcurry 10y ago
  Glad I never had a teacher with such an unfortunate attitude. Rubbish/failed experiment - maybe you should ask yourself why you were unable to integrate modern technology into your teaching.
  • dang 10y ago
    That's unduly personal. Please don't post such comments here. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13780702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13780702 and marked it off-topic.
• danso 10y ago
  I've been teaching at Stanford for the past few years and 95% of the students I've had are all on Macbook laptops. Still have to adjust/manage the 1 or 2 students on PCs. That said, I'm glad to hear that iPads are being phased out in the primary/HS grades. Other than games, I haven't seen many made-for-iPad software that show parity with desktop counterparts when it comes to word processing, spreadsheets, photo/video editing/management, etc. I'm going to assume that the state of the art in interactive books is much further behind.
• pasta 10y ago
  This might be a little unrelated, but here in The Netherlands a research showed that 60% of the children have some form of pain caused by device usage. As you can see in the statistics of this article, more and more devices are used at school. And looking at the pictures my first reaction was: let's also teach those children to have a good posture.
• lowpro 10y ago
  My HS rolled out iPads to all students my Sophmore year of HS 4 years ago. It was well known the average GPA dropped by a sizable amount (mine personally by nearly .5). There wasn't a good way for the school to lock down games, and it was really hard to self regulate. The technology side of Canvas worked pretty well once teachers knew how to use it, but the fact that so many games could be played just distracted the hell out of everyone, and the teachers knew this. Without a way to lock down device gaming, I don't think they're a good idea in a school environment unless you antipate and actively try to curb gaming, but this can be hard and will make the teacher seem like the bad guy, which is never a good thing.
  • sperglord 10y ago
    There are many iPad MDM solutions to that problem. Apple s App Store can be disabled and replaced with a custom one, for example.
    • nommm-nommm 10y ago
      Doesn't matter if its technically possible if teachers and administrators are clueless on how to do it.
      • sperglord 10y ago
        The teachers and admins should not be the people administering equipment...
  • pawadu 10y ago
    > It was well known the average GPA dropped by a sizable amount Are there and studies on this? The subject must be a gold mine for edu researchers...
  • nommm-nommm 10y ago
    Snood. When I was in high school Snood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snood_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snood_(video_game)) was all the rage. Kids installed Snood on all the (Windows 98) lab computers and played through class. When the teacher came around kids would just minimize it. Then Yahoo! Games was added as classroom activity among students. Between days people would download songs on Kazaa in the background. Teachers were totally clueless as to how to prevent this. Teachers just winged it teaching as they went along, admitting openly to the students they didn't really know anything about what they were teaching. Our "lessons" were mostly randomly playing around with various applications without any goal or direction. Including "making a website." "Making a website" consisted of opening up Microsoft FrontPage to drag and drop a bunch of stuff onto the canvas. That's it. Never hosting it anywhere, just a FrontPage file. We were required to add certain items, such as at least one textbox and one button but they never did anything at all. Everyone in the school district, teachers, administrators, was entirely unable to deal with computers in any sort of manner other than "pay someone to set them up and place a random teacher to sit in the lab with the kids." But they got to check off "has computer lab." What a waste. Teachers and administrators need to have some sort of plan before introducing new tech.
• tasty_freeze 10y ago
  When it is the school buying the equipment, I can very well believe that they could decide to make the switch to PCs or Chromebooks. But Macs still have mindshare of the actual kids. My daughter wasn't allowed to use a computer for homework and such until she got to 8th grade (it is a private school and it is their policy -- they should be playing outside with friends and not spending hours shooting monsters and watching TV). When they get to 8th grade, the policy then says the kids needed to have a computer. They get classes on keyboarding, creating web pages, binary math, programming with Scratch, and they start doing homework on their computers. They were told they could use either Macs or PCs, no preference. We got our daughter a decent Lenovo PC; it is better than my own computer. After a year, she would have none of it, as nearly all of her classmates have Macs. It simply has caché that PCs don't. My daughter was willing to go through a second learning curve and convert her 16th birthday present in order to get a Mac, just to be like her friends at school.
  • Moru 10y ago
    Sometimes you can be surprised to learn what "Everyone else..." means. If the cool kids have mac it means you will be left outside the cool kids group as a pc owner.
• metafunctor 10y ago
  The sad thing is that in practice, iPads are mostly used as substitutes for books. That's completely backwards. It reminds me how "multimedia CDs" were supposed to revolutionize teaching in the 90s. They ended up being picture books on a computer, with silly animations and sound effects on mouse hover added on top. Computers and tablets could be a great pedagogic tool for many things, like exploring maths concepts interactively, spaced-repetition for rote learning foreign language words, and other things where the computer as an interactive, programmable medium shines. Sadly, I don't see these opportunities being exploited at all in the classroom. On the bright side, at least kids have equal access to modern tools, and learn the same basics of searching for stuff online.
  • TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    The opportunities aren't being exploited because the cost of professional content creation is so high. Paper textbooks are a comfortable earner for publishers, especially with nominal annual or regular updates. Print development, including author payment, is much less expensive than app development, and requires skills that are far more common. Publishers are reasonably likely to make some money on a book project. (The author probably won't beyond an initial advance, but that's a different problem.) They're much less likely to make money on educational app or ebook development. It doesn't help that the industry never standardised a format for animation and interactivity. There's a big gap between the features you can include in an epub and in a native app. Apple poked at this problem with their book creation software, but never really solved it. The other platforms barely considered it an issue. There's definitely an entrepreneurial opportunity in developing smart learning tools for schools. But between conventional publisher apathy, school board politics, device incompatibilities, marketing access, and a dearth of authors/designers who can produce the content that's needed, it's a very bumpy minefield. Platform selection is not the hardest problem. IMO Apple should have created a "school certified" app creation program, added multi-user and app selection locks to iOS, brought in experienced educators and consultants with evidence-based credentials who could explain effective learning strategies, and acted as a bridge between developers and school management. Instead we got an app store free-for-all with education tacked on as a buying category. That strategy was never going to give schools the tools they needed to go beyond buying iPads to making education the well-managed and effective market it could be.
• rsj75 10y ago
  Apple is focused on consumer apps and barely provides any support to edtech developers. There is no focus on education strategy or business model. We built an iOS educational platform but because of all these issues, transitioned to cloud with our classk12.com platform with Google and Microsoft integrations.
• rsj75 10y ago
  Apple is focused on consumer apps and barely provides any support to edtech developers. There is no focus on education strategy or business model. We built an iOS educational platform but because of all these issues, transitioned to cloud with our classk12.com platform with Google and Microsoft integrations.
• tkubacki 10y ago
  Can't stop giggle. Android is Linux on mobile and ChromeOS is linux on desktop
  • gcp 10y ago
    Linux + Walled Garden, unfortunately.
    • pawadu 10y ago
      With a pretty huge door you can open from the inside: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton
  • pjmlp 10y ago
    That is wishful thinking. Android is 90% Java frameworks. C and C++ applications are only allowed to use these libraries from the underlying OS. https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis.html https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis.html Trying to link to anything else will terminate the application, starting with Android 7. https://developer.android.com/about/versions/nougat/android-7.0-changes.html#ndk https://developer.android.com/about/versions/nougat/android-... ChromeOS is a browser based OS, that happens to have Linux underneath. On Android Things, the NDK is even more constrained to the point that the device drivers API is mostly exposed via Java. https://developer.android.com/things/sdk/index.html https://developer.android.com/things/sdk/index.html In all cases, their fork of Linux has some POSIX API removed. http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~vatlidak/resources/POSIXmagazine.pdf http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~vatlidak/resources/POSIXmagazine... So, Google could tomorrow replace Linux by anything else and only OEMs writing drivers would notice. Which is actually what they are doing with their Fuchsia project. https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror
• rebootthesystem 10y ago
  I read through this entire thread. Interesting range of comments. I had the experience of being consulted by the principal of our local elementary school on this a few years back. They had received a donation and could make their own localized purchasing decision with that money. Based on what we learned at home with our kids and various iOS devices my advice was to avoid them and opt for inexpensive PC laptops running Windows. We, in fact bought 100 HP laptops, 17 inch screens, brand new, in original packaging, for $200 each. The machines have been absolutely fantastic. They have allowed the kids to explore things that would be absolutely impossible to approach with an iPad. For example, using a USB port to save their work and bring it home. Or read and write CD's and DVD's. Yeah, that's how bad iPads are. Oh, yes, and they are all multi-user, of course. They run applications like GIMP, Lego Mindstorms and a myriad of really excellent programs out there. And, of course, access the web under supervision to do even more. This year, if I can find the time, I'd like to get the school started teaching a very basic Python programming class. One of the big problems we recognized early on with iPads was that the lack of multi-user capabilities made them impossible to use. For example, in the Special Ed class (For non-use readers: developmentally disabled kids) the spectrum of disabilities was such that you would have to have a highly customized iPad for each kid in order to configure it to fit their needs. PC's dealt this this very easily. In some cases we had to cover the keyboard give them a small Wacom tablet. Tablets are great for such things as reading books and what I am going to call limited web browsing. Even today, with the push for mobile-first, the browsing experience on tablets can range from OK to frustrating and down-right impossible. Tablets will, of course, survive. It'll be interesting to see what use-cases they end-up satisfying in the end. EDIT: Forgot to add that in our own case we took away our kid's iPads and iPods. Both my wife and I concluded they were not doing anything useful with them. The devices became an addiction and achieving balance between beneficial play (educational apps) and mindless addictive crap was a constant battle. The last straw was when one of them started to lie about usage and would play Clash of Clans hidden under his blanket in bed instead of sleeping. They exhibited the behavior of alcoholics or drug addicts who deny their reality. That's when the iOS devices evaporated. They have nice PC's in our family room. They can have fun and they can also learn but the addictive element is completely gone. And rules are easier to enforce. For example, on Saturday's they can play as much as they want. In practice they play about a couple of hours and then go play with real toys, the dogs, lego's etc. Better balance and better outcomes.
• sytelus 10y ago
  TLDR; 12M devices shipped to schools in 2016, Chromebooks accounted for 58%, up from 50% in 1 year. The iPads and Mac laptops fell to 19%, from 25% while Windows remained relatively stable at about 22%.
• ChicagoBoy11 10y ago
  I was the Director of Technology at a school overseas when the hype first began -- and over there the pull was even stronger because in addition to all of the reasons American schools were swooning over the iPad, the fact that this was an "American" thing was yet another factor over there. I was lucky to be at a place where my principals listened when I suggested that we pass -- for many of the reasons stated here. What I think most people don't appreciate, though, is how much of a marketing tool these iPads became in this space. There wasn't a parent who would come in for a visit who didn't want to see that the school was "innovative," and the surest way to (pretend) show that was to point to your iPad initiative. We held our with laser focus on our educational mission, but I saw many of our peers spend a ton of time, money, and effort, to try to use iPads in one way or another. Marketing was -- and often still is -- the real driving force behind the adoption of these devices.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• iammyIP 10y ago
  All public schools should be forced by law to use free systems on free hardware, anything else seems insane.
• basseq 10y ago
  My county in Virginia was one of the first national pilots for computers in high schools. Every student was given an iBook. I also worked on the help desk, so I saw the administration side as well. The school system experienced all the challenges you'd expect from giving several thousand 14-18 year-olds expensive tech kit. Broken screens, porn, integrating technology into the curriculum, etc. (But, oh, those heady days when we knew more than the admins and played multiplayer Quake 3 or CroMag Rally—the latter came pre-loaded on the first images!—in the back of classrooms over school wi-fi.) They switched from Apple to PCs in 2007 or thereabouts, but it was generally regarded as "worse" (more issues, more hardware problems, etc.). I suspect Apple's strategy changed. They used to own primary school, but I think in the mid 2000's they started to back off that. Macs were becoming popular, including the rise of the iPhone, and the kiddie image wasn't in line with Apple's brand. Not to mention the hardware expense as schools a) bought more volume and b) went with lowest-cost options (like Chromebooks).
• sperglord 10y ago
  In this thread a bunch of weirdos from San Francisco decide that your children don't really need computers. Only the elite priesthood that consists of them is eligible. Maybe you can pick up some docker tips.