L.A. School District's 30,000 iPads May Come With Free Lock-In 232
lpress writes "The Los Angeles Unified School District will spend $30 million over the next two years on iPads for 30,000 students. Coverage of the announcement has focused on Apple winning over other tablets, but that is not the key point. The top three proposals each included an app to deliver Pearson's K-12 Common Core System of Courses along with other third-party educational apps. The Common Core curriculum is not yet established, but many states are committed to it, starting next year. The new tablets and the new commitment to the Common Core curriculum will arrive around the same time, and busy faculty (and those hired to train them) will adopt the Pearson material. The tablets will be obsolete in a few years and the hardware platform may change, but lock-in to Pearson's default curriculum may last for generations."
Re:Crippled crap... (Score:2, Informative)
Yeap, also a nice little monoculture for Apple to exploit too, next up government subsidies for Apple directly, have they found oil somewhere. Meet the new MS of old, just twice as nasty.
No joke. I don't like MS and I never have. But at least MS didn't monopolize the entire software stack. In my opinion Apple is far worse than MS ever was. They not only lock the OS to the hardware, you also have to go through their walled gardens to get most of the useful software. MS didn't lock down the hardware, at one time you could get Windows on other architectures like Xeon and Alpha, and MS doesn't demand that so much third-party software must be purchased through them.
Android based teaching system Amplify (Score:4, Informative)
My son is in a year round STEM school in NC and their school uses a system based on android called Amplify http://www.amplify.com/ [amplify.com]. It isn't just an app it is a modified android tablet that allows students to participate as a collective in the individual classroom. Students can use the table to raise their hand, ask question and participate in classwork. Teachers use it to teach their curriculum and after a lesson can deploy a quick quiz so the teacher knows who understood the lesson and who may need additional help. Teachers can see what each student is doing on their tablet at any time with the master teacher's tablet. Each individual student has their own tablet and the tablets are locked down, always on with att 4G when off campus and students take the tablets home to do their homework on them. Their main responsibility is charging the tablet every night. It has been great over the last school year watching my son enjoy his curriculum in new ways using his tablet and the best part is really how well the tablet fits into the classroom and is replacing the tradition text book. The program was supposed to be only a 1 year test of the product but the school has asked to allow the 6th grade students to continue to use their tablets in 7th grade. Kudos to Amplify I hope all schools in this country will stop wasting money on promises and use something that I personally have already watched prove itself as a fantastic learning product for my 7th grader.
Re: sad (Score:4, Informative)
Wait. What?
Cite source?
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/states/uschartsat.html [umkc.edu] ...But even using your source, change it to "Utah is in the top 20, California is in the bottom 20".
http://www.publicagendaarchives.org/charts/state-state-sat-and-act-scores [publicagendaarchives.org]
And I really don't care about cultural bias because college admissions boards don't really care about cultural bias, they care about SAT scores.
And to get a reasonable picture, you should compare spending per capita by state:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/compare_state_spending_2013b20s [usgovernmentspending.com]
California spends more than 7 times what Utah spends, and gets a poorer result.
But if you don't like Utah because you don't like mormons, pick another state higher up in the second table, and compare it to California; California is only going to look worse.
Re:Crippled crap... (Score:4, Informative)
Correction:
My three year old Samsung Chromebook still gets something like 12 hours of battery life (probably more). The Chromebook Pixel, with its higher than retina-resolution and its touchscreen, only gets 5 hours battery life. Just for the price alone, anyone would be crazy to buy a Chromebook Pixel for kids anyway,
The Samsung Chromebook is actually perfect for kids. It doesn't have any games (worth playing). It's not a fun consumption device like the iPad or the Pixel. And nowadays, if you develop a new application for the Chromebook, the framework forces you to write an application that will work off-line by default. You could already use gmail and google docs/drive offline, but offline functionality really used to be an afterthought until very recently.