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."
Crippled crap... (Score:1, Insightful)
iPads are okay for grandmas, but giving them to kids is just mind numbing. With a real PC or even a netbook or a hybrid, atleast the kid can do more as get tired of Angry Birds. Not all will, but some will definitely venture out to programming and alternate OSes, even if only in a VM. Give them an iPad and it's nothing more than a glorified iPod Touch. Not to mention that the lack of a physical keyboard discourages thoughtful writing of even a few sentences and instead encourages texts-like writing. The Chromebook isn't much better either.
#1 reason this is stupid (Score:1, Insightful)
The people and the stories all focus on the device. The device is not inherently educational. People think of these devices as fun things... entertaining things. They are, in fact, designed mostly for entertainment. Why is this good for schools?
Now, if some educational software system out there which makes especially good use of iPad as a student interface, then great! Let's hear about this great software system. To put out "students get consumer device" followed by "students are easily distracted by social media and entertainment" makes me wonder what they have in mind for the educational system.
Re:Crippled crap... (Score:5, Insightful)
Who said anything about programming. These are textbook replacements. The only thing they have to do is have all curriculum loaded, accept updated periodically and integrate with the schools provisioning system.
They can still give out the paper workbooks where the kids write stuff. There will still be wide rule notebooks filled with scribbled examples off the whiteboard and doodles galore.
Anything else is a bonus.
Re:Crippled crap... (Score:5, Insightful)
Chromebook is a browser in a box, useless when offline, as they may well be when a kid needs to do homework.
And the ChromeBook has only 5 hours battery life. Not long enough. The iPad has 10 hours, which is plenty.
The cheapest option is rarely the one that meets the requirements.
Re:sad (Score:2, Insightful)
...and this is why our schools are failing.
A local school was complaining that they'd have to lay off a bunch of teachers recently.
They always complain about that. Then they send out pink slips. Then they don't lay anyone off. It's a scam by the teachers union, where your career path exits teaching and moves into administration so that you can make 2-3x the money while parents are forced to buy paper and pencils for their students.
BTW, the student/teacher ratio is about 2X larger in Utah, and their SAT scores are in the top 10 of the nation, rather than in the bottom 10, as in California. So throwing money or teachers at it doesn't fix what's wrong with education in California.
Re:Crippled crap... (Score:4, Insightful)
Then wouldn't they be better off with ereaders at 1/4 the price, considering this is being paid for with taxpayer dollars?
It's actually more like 1/10th the price for ereaders.
Or do you believe the students' education will benefit from access to iTunes?
Re: Crippled crap... (Score:3, Insightful)
PEARSON (Score:4, Insightful)
Pearson, and companies like them, are a nightmare (Score:4, Insightful)
Forget the iPads - Pearson, and these other parasites are going to do more to cripple education in this country than anything else. Private profits from the public taxpayer's dime, they're going to be unaccountable. We'll certainly blame the teachers when this canned curriculum crashes and burns, but Pearson and their ilk? They'll be laughing all the way to the bank.
You know what's worse than government? Government contractors and suppliers.
Re:wait what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Free Macs for the staff for buying Apple probably.
Re: Crippled crap... (Score:1, Insightful)
iPads are toys. They will continue to be toys for the forseeable future. While there are some worthwhile apps that allow you to be productive in a very limited scope, if you really want to get work done on a computer, it's at a PC, in front of a keyboard and mouse. It's not a limitation that can be resolved, as it's an inherent limitation of the input mechanism. You can't do anything but pre-programmed tasks on a tablet. Now toys are great. Everyone needs some time for rest and relaxation, but do we really want all these children learning about "computers" using something that is really nothing more than a plaything? Do we really want all these children growing up to write applications that are for little more than play?
You see it as a toy only because your frame of reference is a PC. Your viewpoint is no different than the one espoused when the PC came along and people proclaimed "you need a real computer with a terminal to do real work..." or when the mouse first came out and people said "you need a keyboard and shortcut keys to do real work..." Sure, a PC is better at some things, but an iPad is quite capable of doing real work as well; you just need to think different. For example, it's far better than a PC for reading documentation, you can actual take notes on it, it makes a great white board or overlay for writing on presentations, and it's a lot easier to do a quick web search on one as well. Rather than view it as a PC replacement, view it as a different tool that complements it.
As for limitations of the input method, the touch screen and a bluetooth keyboard mimic a PC quite well; even the virtual keyboard is pretty good. Since the school is not using it to teach computers but to replace textbooks it is more than up to the task.
Re:Crippled crap... (Score:4, Insightful)
The monoculture of the public-school programs set for the entire nation by the federal Department of Education does not bother you, does it? It is only the fact, that one particular city is advancing it using a particular family of devices, that you find troubling...