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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 conten

by 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.
- droithomme 10y ago
  His user profile shows he is in Australia.
- ux-app 10y ago
  > Also, where do you live/teach? "Year 7" I'm in Australia. Nationally we are transitioning to a R-6 = Primary School, 7-12 = High School model. My school is a little unorthodox. We're a private school with a 6-12 shared campus which is why I had experience teaching younger students even though I am HS trained. > What to your mind would not be rubbish? Either Mac or PC is fine in my books. Anything that allows them to install native software is fine. I recently did a small unit on binary data. It was really handy for students to install a hex editor, inspect a flat text file in binary mode and map out the ascii table for themselves. I don't think that's possible on a Chromebook. I also teach Web dev. We use MAMP which is cross platform. We install VSCode, interact with the FS, create a local DB, file uploads, programmatic image resizing etc. My understanding is that this is not possible without jailbreaking (is that the right term?) a Chromebook. I'm also opposed to any device that hides away the file system from the user. It relegates a computer to the dumb appliance category which I think is unhelpful.
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  - dpark 10y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. I agree that Chromebooks are not the ideal learning device for coding. I was thinking general schooling and glossed over your earlier comment about teaching coding. I think they can probably work there, but you're right that a "real" computer is a better choice for that.
    - ecspike 10y ago
      There are a couple of Chrome apps that can run offline and do coding. I've used Caret and Advanced REST client on occasion for things. It gets a bit tricky if you need something that can't work without a real webserver but there's a lot of beginner stuff you can do with it. crouton unlocked a bit more functionality giving you the possibility of a Linux base layer, albeit likely not a great idea to have kids put the machines into dev mode. But that might be workable if staff did it. I've dogfooded a bunch of the Web Development content we make at Udacity using either a pure Chromebook or Chromebook + Crouton.
- arthurfm 10y ago
  "Year 7" is not high school in the US. That is distinctly junior/middle school. Year 7 is also the first year of secondary school (high school) in the UK.
  - gaius 10y ago
    High school in the US == 6th Form in the UK.
    - foldr 10y ago
      No, 6th form is from 16 to 18 years.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        Which is almost exactly what high school is in some parts of the US (that is, in places where it is 10-12 grade.) The thing is, while the US tends to have the Elementary/Middle or Junior High/(Senior) High split in most places, the grade levels aren't the same. I've seen (and this may not be exhaustive) the splits with the following grade levels: 1-5/6-8/9-12 1-6/7-8/9-12 1-6/7-9/10-12
        ekiru 10y ago
        Two more splits: In my hometown (in Tennessee), the split was originally K-3/4-8/9-12, but around 2000 they completed the construction of a new high school, so the old high school became the new junior high and grades 4-8 got redistributed so that it was now K-2/3-5/6-8/9-12.
    - deleted 10y ago
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- deleted 10y ago
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- shams93 10y ago
  While you could always run python on windows have the WSL is a big deal for education. You can get away with running a pretty modest system and still be able to run ruby on rails and mysql or postgresql on even a modest atom based laptop.
- unfamiliar 10y ago
  > "Year 7" is not high school in the US. Maybe we could all agree to just use pupil age in these discussions, to avoid the international confusion between "year 7", "4th grade", "primary 6", "middle school", "6th form", and all of the other country-specific nomenclature.
  - Veratyr 10y ago
    I don't think that's entirely reasonable in a discussion about schooling as curricula in different countries differ considerably. A 17 year old Chemistry student in Victoria, Australia might be learning about how to read NMR spectrograms and some common industrial chemical processes [0], a 17 year old Chemistry student in Texas, USA might be learning about the chemical processes involved in genetics [1]. 0: http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Documents/vce/chemistry/ChemistrySD-2016.pdf http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Documents/vce/chemistry/Chemistry... 1: https://www.kleinisd.net/users/0138/Chemistry_Scope_and_Sequence_2016_2017.pdf https://www.kleinisd.net/users/0138/Chemistry_Scope_and_Sequ... Different places teach different things at different times, so I don't think equating ages works very well.
ReverseCold 10y ago
Chromebooks are the best, my school has them, and they're 100% usable in all non-tech classes. Battery lasts forever, great for typing, and everything is a web app anyway. We had iPads at one point, but luckily the school realised those were bad and I haven't seen them this year at all.
- ReverseCold 10y ago
  I also see comments about programming on them, that'd be painful. For everything else (that matters at school) though it's 10/10.
  - bitmapbrother 10y ago
    Not really. It's quite easy with Crouton installed.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Crouton is not ChromeOS.
      - bitmapbrother 10y ago
        I didn't say it was. It's an option you can explore if you need to extend the functionality of the Chromebook.
  - technofiend 10y ago
    Isn't programming on a chromebook just a guacamole session away? I could see giving kids access to a unix system via guacamole or a similar shell-in-browser solution and letting them run riot. https://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/ https://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > I also see comments about programming on them, that'd be painful. There are plenty of programming-in-a-browser tools available that are far from painful, plus now that they support Android apps, there's plenty of Android-based programming tools that are non-painful.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
>Chromebooks are rubbish too, so I don't really see the move to them as a positive either. http://lifehacker.com/how-to-install-linux-on-a-chromebook-and-unlock-its-ful-509039343 http://lifehacker.com/how-to-install-linux-on-a-chromebook-a...
- bubblethink 10y ago
  But what's the point of that ? Why not buy any laptop if you want to run linux ? If all you are worried about is cost, a thinkpad from a couple gens ago will cost about as much, and will do a lot more than a chromebook with a shitty processor and possibly soldered ram + hard drive.
  - bitmapbrother 10y ago
    To have the benefits of ChromeOS full time and the option to use Linux part time.
    - bubblethink 10y ago
      What are the benefits of ChromeOS compared to standard GNU/Linux ? The main benefits are 1) Better security model and updates 2) Easier to use. 1) Goes out of the window once you flip that developers switch. Not to mention crouton/vm/dual-boot etc. are fine for mucking around. You can't use that in any sane way if you have to deploy and maintain hundreds of machines for a school. Regarding 2), I can't comment on usability since I haven't used ChromeOS, but I don't think there's going to be a world of difference compared to a modern distro.
      - bitmapbrother 10y ago
        Yes, a mass deployment of Crouton may not be feasible, but in edge cases where a teacher wants to use the additional capability of Linux for their curriculum then it's certainly a manageable and viable solution. And the ability to instantly flip back and forth between the two OS's is icing on the cake.
- 10y ago
cm2187 10y ago
What I find the most frustrating on ipad is content selection. Particularly in the browser, where I do that a lot when I want to google what I read about. The text selection in safari is absolutely useless.
- abricot 10y ago
  ...and non-existing in many apps. I really hate how it is up to the app maker to allow/dissalow text selection.
blitmap 10y ago
The biggest problem I saw was the inability to mass-create Apple ID's for all the iPads. Leading the classroom through doing so was very frustrating.
- metafunctor 10y ago
  Our kids just brought home a sheet of paper together with the iPad, detailing the instructions for creating the Apple IDs, which was left as a home exercise with parents. I don't remember it being especially difficult; but no idea how many families ended up contacting the teacher to get over a problem.
rayalez 10y ago
You're probably right about the schools, but I want to disagree with you about content creation in general. I'm using my iPad for painting, writing, video creation every day. It is extremely useful and convenient for my purposes. It has a specific niche, and might not be for everyone, but I very often prefer it for specific tasks. At this point, writing(in Editorial) for me is pretty much as convenient as writing on my laptop. I wouldn't code on ipad, but for notes(which I take a huge amount of) and fiction it's perfect. And since they've introduced the stylus, it's insanely great for painting(in Procreate). I have a wacom tablet, but I still use my ipad all the time. And I can record the video tutorials, or stream my painting process on twitch, it's really cool. And if I need to, I can use Pinnacle Pro to edit my videos, narrate voiceover over them, and publish them on youtube. So the whole creative process - script writing, video recording, editing - can be done entirely on my tablet. I find it extremely cool. ---- For example: - Here's a video I've made entirely on the ipad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dvx6nBDfpE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dvx6nBDfpE (sorry for the annoying voiceover, I'm working on getting better at it) - And here's the collection of my favorite art made by other people: https://www.artstation.com/artist/rayalez/collections/117859 https://www.artstation.com/artist/rayalez/collections/117859
- tmd83 10y ago
  Fiction writing on touch screen keyboard is as good as your laptop's keyboard? I can sort of understand the painting/video creation even though I don't do either. But I would guess you would be a special minority in the writing department.
  - nkkollaw 10y ago
    He probably has a keyboard, but students don't.
    - Filligree 10y ago
      Even then, he's wrong. There are power tools such as Scrivener which have no equivalent outside the PC ecosystem.
douche 10y ago
My mother's school toyed with iPads for a few years. According to her, the biggest problem is that trying to print from them was a nightmare. I dunno whether that is a lack of driver support, the school IT being too ignorant to set things up properly, a combination of the two, or something else, but it didn't Just Work.
nihonde 10y ago
If you see iPads as a hindrance to education, you are a terrible teacher. If I had been given access to an iPad at age 10, I would have been completely, endlessly obsessed with the possibilities of it. As it was, I had access to a TRS80 at that age, and I had to fight the fussy old math teacher to get access to it, let alone any meaningful instruction or encouragement to match my curiosity. Meanwhile, the same teachers kept an Apple II in their office strictly off limits from students except their favorites. Even if it isn't your favorite tool in 2017, an iPad is literally the kind of thing I dreamt of when I was a kid. If you can't make that work in the classroom, you're failing.
- forgotpwtomain 10y ago
  > If you see iPads as a hindrance to education, you are a terrible teacher. Personal attacks are frowned upon here.
  - nihonde 10y ago
    People who live in glass houses...
    - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
      > If I had been given access to an iPad at age 10, I would have been completely, endlessly obsessed with the possibilities of it... You could have very well made the rest of your point without the personal attack, which was quite unnecessary and unfounded.
- lou1306 10y ago
  Can you code (and teach how to code) on an iPad in an efficient and effortless way? The "terrible teacher" didn't just bash on the device, they listed some use cases for which it is clearly not the best tool around.
liveoneggs 10y ago
If chromebooks had the option of plugging in a usb drive that could open "portable apps"-style programs + save files it would be a really great option for classrooms (or, really, anything) Those crazy web-only restrictions hit fast
devwastaken 10y ago
Surface RT's were an amazing step for our school. Had full office suite, a stand with a magnetic detachable keyboard, usb port, and was the same stuff we'd be using on the desktops. So, we could write up essays right on our desk, or do research, right there. Could then transfer that data to another computer at home if we wanted, or plug in a mouse to do some quick research. But, Microsoft refused to fix the problems with them. Sometimes you'd push the power button to put them to sleep/turn off the screen, and it wouldn't come back up without turning it off, losing your work. They refused to allow domain policy, so the school had to manually configure each one of them. For our small school, it was doable, but a larger school I could not imagine that. They were cheap, productive, compatible, and problematic. Microsoft had their chance at education, and they shot it down, hard.
- fuzzybeard 10y ago
  That's a big one. How do you sell a computer in an enterprise or institutional environment and not allow that.
euroclydon 10y ago
In my children's schools, I get the impression the iPad is meant to replace textbooks, and not to be used as a general computing device. Now, it doesn't replace a textbook with an eBook or iBook, but rather with a plethora of crappy web pages.
bnolsen 10y ago
My kids use chromebooks and for writing papers, managing accounts, etc I can't think of any better option.
- deleted 10y ago
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thearn4 10y ago
I've been skeptical of mobile devices in the classroom for awhile now. They just seem like distraction machines. Which I admit sounds weirdly luddite for someone who makes a career working with technology.
- jartelt 10y ago
  I think you are right to be skeptical. In my experience (sitting near/behind students with laptops in class), the laptops are used more for web browsing than for note taking. This distracts multiple people because your eyes can't help but look at the laptop every time the screen changes. My experience is from college and graduate school. But, I can only imagine that high school students are more prone to distraction and will always be able to find the next chat/messaging client before administration blocks it.
bisby 10y ago
For the topics of stuff like coding, image manipulation, file manipulation, etc... would a raspberry pi cover your teaching needs (That IS what they were made for). The pros I see would be: size, price, similarity to desktop environment vs iOS The potential flaws I see would be: Linux isn't windows, speed (maybe for image manipulation an issue?), not mobile (this would have to be an a computer lab), would require someone to set up.
johanneskanybal 10y ago
There's two strong separate issues here: 1. pricing, no-brainer. 2. The two sometimes noticable conflicting goals of making no/low-effort admin computers and teaching kids to handle computers/do general things with them nr2 there's no all-around answer to but my bias is towards something like the chromebook atleast even if execution might be flawed.
jobu 10y ago
My kids used iPads at a previous school and I was initially thrilled, but that faded immediately when I saw one of them trying to type an essay on it. I think iPads can be useful tools for some things (reading, studying, learning), but even with an external keyboard they suck for writing/creating anything. > Chromebooks are rubbish too, so I don't really see the move to them as a positive either. You get what you pay for with Chromebooks. The school my kids are at now started giving Chromebooks to older kids and the initial ones were seriously underpowered with terrible low-res screens. We ended up buying my oldest an Acer Chromebook for $300 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MHX6TIA/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MHX6TIA/). It has a full HD screen and can actually handle multiple tabs and apps running in the background. For anything other than a serious programming class I would highly recommend Chromebooks for schools, but you need to push for a usable one.
- s3r3nity 10y ago
  Anecdote on keyboards & iPads: My brother was attending a high school that was experimenting with iPads for students, and humanities classes especially felt this. I bought him a decent external keyboard case and he told me his friends all followed suit, as it was like the "missing link" to making the iPad accomplish like 90% of what he needs. Separately, I think that the better market opportunity would be for a cheap-ass Surface model -- essentially sitting below the Surface Pro line -- that could be marketed at the education market. I know MSFT has been pushing OneNote for classrooms, agnostic to the medium for how it's accessed, but the Surface pen + keyboard + tablet combination is something I WISH i had in high school
  - bskap 10y ago
    So the Surface 3, then. Too bad Intel canceled development on that processor line so they can't make a new one.
draw_down 10y ago
Yeah, typing on glass screens is probably the worst thing about tech today. Autocomplete is pretty good, I'd say, but it doesn't matter.
Balgair 10y ago
Wife is a HS teacher that has access to Chromebooks (CBs): Yes, they are useless. Even if you could get the 35+ kids per class to stop sending each other pics of their sex-organs during class the CBs are still futile. The district has mandated that you cannot use a CB without logging into the main district server. That is fine and dandy, but the wireless routers only have so much bandwidth, so you can only have ~15 kids per router logged on until they are auto kicked off. That then starts a ring-around-the-rosy of kids trying to log back in and kicking others off the wireless. Bonus points because there is only 1 router per ~5 classrooms. The CBs are also on a cart to be used and so my wife has to push that to each class she is in, so trying to get all the CBs out, set up with the lab, logged into, made actually useful, then logged out of and put back, charging, and ready to be pushed to the next room is difficult to do in the allotted class time. There are not enough classrooms in the school for the kids, so they have many 'lunch' periods that kids alternate in so some can be in class while others sit in the hall. Again, this clogs up the wireless routers too. Also, the Mirai botnet clones are still attacking the central district server and causing havoc with trying to log into it to make the CBs useful. As such, its a total gamble if the CBs will function at all on any given day and between classes or within a class period. Maybe the CBs are not the culprit, but the whole system has made then useless to everyone but the company that sold them to the district. iPads are just finessed off to pawn shops for cash by the kids, so they never really took hold to begin with.

by ux-app 10y ago

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.
droithomme 10y ago
His user profile shows he is in Australia.
ux-app 10y ago
> Also, where do you live/teach? "Year 7" I'm in Australia. Nationally we are transitioning to a R-6 = Primary School, 7-12 = High School model. My school is a little unorthodox. We're a private school with a 6-12 shared campus which is why I had experience teaching younger students even though I am HS trained. > What to your mind would not be rubbish? Either Mac or PC is fine in my books. Anything that allows them to install native software is fine. I recently did a small unit on binary data. It was really handy for students to install a hex editor, inspect a flat text file in binary mode and map out the ascii table for themselves. I don't think that's possible on a Chromebook. I also teach Web dev. We use MAMP which is cross platform. We install VSCode, interact with the FS, create a local DB, file uploads, programmatic image resizing etc. My understanding is that this is not possible without jailbreaking (is that the right term?) a Chromebook. I'm also opposed to any device that hides away the file system from the user. It relegates a computer to the dumb appliance category which I think is unhelpful.
- deleted 10y ago
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- dpark 10y ago
  Thanks for clarifying. I agree that Chromebooks are not the ideal learning device for coding. I was thinking general schooling and glossed over your earlier comment about teaching coding. I think they can probably work there, but you're right that a "real" computer is a better choice for that.
  - ecspike 10y ago
    There are a couple of Chrome apps that can run offline and do coding. I've used Caret and Advanced REST client on occasion for things. It gets a bit tricky if you need something that can't work without a real webserver but there's a lot of beginner stuff you can do with it. crouton unlocked a bit more functionality giving you the possibility of a Linux base layer, albeit likely not a great idea to have kids put the machines into dev mode. But that might be workable if staff did it. I've dogfooded a bunch of the Web Development content we make at Udacity using either a pure Chromebook or Chromebook + Crouton.
arthurfm 10y ago
"Year 7" is not high school in the US. That is distinctly junior/middle school. Year 7 is also the first year of secondary school (high school) in the UK.
- gaius 10y ago
  High school in the US == 6th Form in the UK.
  - foldr 10y ago
    No, 6th form is from 16 to 18 years.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      Which is almost exactly what high school is in some parts of the US (that is, in places where it is 10-12 grade.) The thing is, while the US tends to have the Elementary/Middle or Junior High/(Senior) High split in most places, the grade levels aren't the same. I've seen (and this may not be exhaustive) the splits with the following grade levels: 1-5/6-8/9-12 1-6/7-8/9-12 1-6/7-9/10-12
      - ekiru 10y ago
        Two more splits: In my hometown (in Tennessee), the split was originally K-3/4-8/9-12, but around 2000 they completed the construction of a new high school, so the old high school became the new junior high and grades 4-8 got redistributed so that it was now K-2/3-5/6-8/9-12.
  - deleted 10y ago
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deleted 10y ago
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shams93 10y ago
While you could always run python on windows have the WSL is a big deal for education. You can get away with running a pretty modest system and still be able to run ruby on rails and mysql or postgresql on even a modest atom based laptop.
unfamiliar 10y ago
> "Year 7" is not high school in the US. Maybe we could all agree to just use pupil age in these discussions, to avoid the international confusion between "year 7", "4th grade", "primary 6", "middle school", "6th form", and all of the other country-specific nomenclature.
- Veratyr 10y ago
  I don't think that's entirely reasonable in a discussion about schooling as curricula in different countries differ considerably. A 17 year old Chemistry student in Victoria, Australia might be learning about how to read NMR spectrograms and some common industrial chemical processes [0], a 17 year old Chemistry student in Texas, USA might be learning about the chemical processes involved in genetics [1]. 0: http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Documents/vce/chemistry/ChemistrySD-2016.pdf http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Documents/vce/chemistry/Chemistry... 1: https://www.kleinisd.net/users/0138/Chemistry_Scope_and_Sequence_2016_2017.pdf https://www.kleinisd.net/users/0138/Chemistry_Scope_and_Sequ... Different places teach different things at different times, so I don't think equating ages works very well.

ReverseCold 10y ago

Chromebooks are the best, my school has them, and they're 100% usable in all non-tech classes. Battery lasts forever, great for typing, and everything is a web app anyway. We had iPads at one point, but luckily the school realised those were bad and I haven't seen them this year at all.

ReverseCold 10y ago
I also see comments about programming on them, that'd be painful. For everything else (that matters at school) though it's 10/10.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  Not really. It's quite easy with Crouton installed.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Crouton is not ChromeOS.
    - bitmapbrother 10y ago
      I didn't say it was. It's an option you can explore if you need to extend the functionality of the Chromebook.
- technofiend 10y ago
  Isn't programming on a chromebook just a guacamole session away? I could see giving kids access to a unix system via guacamole or a similar shell-in-browser solution and letting them run riot. https://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/ https://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > I also see comments about programming on them, that'd be painful. There are plenty of programming-in-a-browser tools available that are far from painful, plus now that they support Android apps, there's plenty of Android-based programming tools that are non-painful.

bitmapbrother 10y ago

>Chromebooks are rubbish too, so I don't really see the move to them as a positive either. http://lifehacker.com/how-to-install-linux-on-a-chromebook-and-unlock-its-ful-509039343 http://lifehacker.com/how-to-install-linux-on-a-chromebook-a...

bubblethink 10y ago
But what's the point of that ? Why not buy any laptop if you want to run linux ? If all you are worried about is cost, a thinkpad from a couple gens ago will cost about as much, and will do a lot more than a chromebook with a shitty processor and possibly soldered ram + hard drive.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  To have the benefits of ChromeOS full time and the option to use Linux part time.
  - bubblethink 10y ago
    What are the benefits of ChromeOS compared to standard GNU/Linux ? The main benefits are 1) Better security model and updates 2) Easier to use. 1) Goes out of the window once you flip that developers switch. Not to mention crouton/vm/dual-boot etc. are fine for mucking around. You can't use that in any sane way if you have to deploy and maintain hundreds of machines for a school. Regarding 2), I can't comment on usability since I haven't used ChromeOS, but I don't think there's going to be a world of difference compared to a modern distro.
    - bitmapbrother 10y ago
      Yes, a mass deployment of Crouton may not be feasible, but in edge cases where a teacher wants to use the additional capability of Linux for their curriculum then it's certainly a manageable and viable solution. And the ability to instantly flip back and forth between the two OS's is icing on the cake.
10y ago

cm2187 10y ago

What I find the most frustrating on ipad is content selection. Particularly in the browser, where I do that a lot when I want to google what I read about. The text selection in safari is absolutely useless.

abricot 10y ago
...and non-existing in many apps. I really hate how it is up to the app maker to allow/dissalow text selection.

blitmap 10y ago

The biggest problem I saw was the inability to mass-create Apple ID's for all the iPads. Leading the classroom through doing so was very frustrating.

metafunctor 10y ago
Our kids just brought home a sheet of paper together with the iPad, detailing the instructions for creating the Apple IDs, which was left as a home exercise with parents. I don't remember it being especially difficult; but no idea how many families ended up contacting the teacher to get over a problem.

rayalez 10y ago

You're probably right about the schools, but I want to disagree with you about content creation in general. I'm using my iPad for painting, writing, video creation every day. It is extremely useful and convenient for my purposes. It has a specific niche, and might not be for everyone, but I very often prefer it for specific tasks. At this point, writing(in Editorial) for me is pretty much as convenient as writing on my laptop. I wouldn't code on ipad, but for notes(which I take a huge amount of) and fiction it's perfect. And since they've introduced the stylus, it's insanely great for painting(in Procreate). I have a wacom tablet, but I still use my ipad all the time. And I can record the video tutorials, or stream my painting process on twitch, it's really cool. And if I need to, I can use Pinnacle Pro to edit my videos, narrate voiceover over them, and publish them on youtube. So the whole creative process - script writing, video recording, editing - can be done entirely on my tablet. I find it extremely cool. ---- For example: - Here's a video I've made entirely on the ipad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dvx6nBDfpE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dvx6nBDfpE (sorry for the annoying voiceover, I'm working on getting better at it) - And here's the collection of my favorite art made by other people: https://www.artstation.com/artist/rayalez/collections/117859 https://www.artstation.com/artist/rayalez/collections/117859

tmd83 10y ago
Fiction writing on touch screen keyboard is as good as your laptop's keyboard? I can sort of understand the painting/video creation even though I don't do either. But I would guess you would be a special minority in the writing department.
- nkkollaw 10y ago
  He probably has a keyboard, but students don't.
  - Filligree 10y ago
    Even then, he's wrong. There are power tools such as Scrivener which have no equivalent outside the PC ecosystem.

douche 10y ago

My mother's school toyed with iPads for a few years. According to her, the biggest problem is that trying to print from them was a nightmare. I dunno whether that is a lack of driver support, the school IT being too ignorant to set things up properly, a combination of the two, or something else, but it didn't Just Work.

nihonde 10y ago

If you see iPads as a hindrance to education, you are a terrible teacher. If I had been given access to an iPad at age 10, I would have been completely, endlessly obsessed with the possibilities of it. As it was, I had access to a TRS80 at that age, and I had to fight the fussy old math teacher to get access to it, let alone any meaningful instruction or encouragement to match my curiosity. Meanwhile, the same teachers kept an Apple II in their office strictly off limits from students except their favorites. Even if it isn't your favorite tool in 2017, an iPad is literally the kind of thing I dreamt of when I was a kid. If you can't make that work in the classroom, you're failing.

forgotpwtomain 10y ago
> If you see iPads as a hindrance to education, you are a terrible teacher. Personal attacks are frowned upon here.
- nihonde 10y ago
  People who live in glass houses...
  - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
    > If I had been given access to an iPad at age 10, I would have been completely, endlessly obsessed with the possibilities of it... You could have very well made the rest of your point without the personal attack, which was quite unnecessary and unfounded.
lou1306 10y ago
Can you code (and teach how to code) on an iPad in an efficient and effortless way? The "terrible teacher" didn't just bash on the device, they listed some use cases for which it is clearly not the best tool around.

liveoneggs 10y ago

If chromebooks had the option of plugging in a usb drive that could open "portable apps"-style programs + save files it would be a really great option for classrooms (or, really, anything) Those crazy web-only restrictions hit fast

devwastaken 10y ago

Surface RT's were an amazing step for our school. Had full office suite, a stand with a magnetic detachable keyboard, usb port, and was the same stuff we'd be using on the desktops. So, we could write up essays right on our desk, or do research, right there. Could then transfer that data to another computer at home if we wanted, or plug in a mouse to do some quick research. But, Microsoft refused to fix the problems with them. Sometimes you'd push the power button to put them to sleep/turn off the screen, and it wouldn't come back up without turning it off, losing your work. They refused to allow domain policy, so the school had to manually configure each one of them. For our small school, it was doable, but a larger school I could not imagine that. They were cheap, productive, compatible, and problematic. Microsoft had their chance at education, and they shot it down, hard.

fuzzybeard 10y ago
That's a big one. How do you sell a computer in an enterprise or institutional environment and not allow that.

euroclydon 10y ago

In my children's schools, I get the impression the iPad is meant to replace textbooks, and not to be used as a general computing device. Now, it doesn't replace a textbook with an eBook or iBook, but rather with a plethora of crappy web pages.

bnolsen 10y ago

My kids use chromebooks and for writing papers, managing accounts, etc I can't think of any better option.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

thearn4 10y ago

I've been skeptical of mobile devices in the classroom for awhile now. They just seem like distraction machines. Which I admit sounds weirdly luddite for someone who makes a career working with technology.

jartelt 10y ago
I think you are right to be skeptical. In my experience (sitting near/behind students with laptops in class), the laptops are used more for web browsing than for note taking. This distracts multiple people because your eyes can't help but look at the laptop every time the screen changes. My experience is from college and graduate school. But, I can only imagine that high school students are more prone to distraction and will always be able to find the next chat/messaging client before administration blocks it.

bisby 10y ago

For the topics of stuff like coding, image manipulation, file manipulation, etc... would a raspberry pi cover your teaching needs (That IS what they were made for). The pros I see would be: size, price, similarity to desktop environment vs iOS The potential flaws I see would be: Linux isn't windows, speed (maybe for image manipulation an issue?), not mobile (this would have to be an a computer lab), would require someone to set up.

johanneskanybal 10y ago

There's two strong separate issues here: 1. pricing, no-brainer. 2. The two sometimes noticable conflicting goals of making no/low-effort admin computers and teaching kids to handle computers/do general things with them nr2 there's no all-around answer to but my bias is towards something like the chromebook atleast even if execution might be flawed.

jobu 10y ago

My kids used iPads at a previous school and I was initially thrilled, but that faded immediately when I saw one of them trying to type an essay on it. I think iPads can be useful tools for some things (reading, studying, learning), but even with an external keyboard they suck for writing/creating anything. > Chromebooks are rubbish too, so I don't really see the move to them as a positive either. You get what you pay for with Chromebooks. The school my kids are at now started giving Chromebooks to older kids and the initial ones were seriously underpowered with terrible low-res screens. We ended up buying my oldest an Acer Chromebook for $300 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MHX6TIA/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MHX6TIA/). It has a full HD screen and can actually handle multiple tabs and apps running in the background. For anything other than a serious programming class I would highly recommend Chromebooks for schools, but you need to push for a usable one.

s3r3nity 10y ago
Anecdote on keyboards & iPads: My brother was attending a high school that was experimenting with iPads for students, and humanities classes especially felt this. I bought him a decent external keyboard case and he told me his friends all followed suit, as it was like the "missing link" to making the iPad accomplish like 90% of what he needs. Separately, I think that the better market opportunity would be for a cheap-ass Surface model -- essentially sitting below the Surface Pro line -- that could be marketed at the education market. I know MSFT has been pushing OneNote for classrooms, agnostic to the medium for how it's accessed, but the Surface pen + keyboard + tablet combination is something I WISH i had in high school
- bskap 10y ago
  So the Surface 3, then. Too bad Intel canceled development on that processor line so they can't make a new one.

draw_down 10y ago

Yeah, typing on glass screens is probably the worst thing about tech today. Autocomplete is pretty good, I'd say, but it doesn't matter.

Balgair 10y ago

Wife is a HS teacher that has access to Chromebooks (CBs): Yes, they are useless. Even if you could get the 35+ kids per class to stop sending each other pics of their sex-organs during class the CBs are still futile. The district has mandated that you cannot use a CB without logging into the main district server. That is fine and dandy, but the wireless routers only have so much bandwidth, so you can only have ~15 kids per router logged on until they are auto kicked off. That then starts a ring-around-the-rosy of kids trying to log back in and kicking others off the wireless. Bonus points because there is only 1 router per ~5 classrooms. The CBs are also on a cart to be used and so my wife has to push that to each class she is in, so trying to get all the CBs out, set up with the lab, logged into, made actually useful, then logged out of and put back, charging, and ready to be pushed to the next room is difficult to do in the allotted class time. There are not enough classrooms in the school for the kids, so they have many 'lunch' periods that kids alternate in so some can be in class while others sit in the hall. Again, this clogs up the wireless routers too. Also, the Mirai botnet clones are still attacking the central district server and causing havoc with trying to log into it to make the CBs useful. As such, its a total gamble if the CBs will function at all on any given day and between classes or within a class period. Maybe the CBs are not the culprit, but the whole system has made then useless to everyone but the company that sold them to the district. iPads are just finessed off to pawn shops for cash by the kids, so they never really took hold to begin with.