[mac_miser]

Read below. What's gives? My experience with Macs has been good...apparently that's not the case in many schools. Is this cause for concern?

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http://www.mdjonline.com/articles/20...0/10192918.prt

Cobb board ignored Henrico's laptop lessons

As a supporter of properly implemented technology in education, I've vicariously watched this slow moving train wreck known as the Cobb Laptop program. With each new revelation in the MDJ, it becomes more apparent that "somebody was getting something from someone." With the information available from both the Cobb County School Board evaluation process and from other school districts that have implemented this type of initiative, you have to ask yourself what was the CCSB thinking - or not thinking?

Since Henrico County, Va., was constantly mentioned in this process, I decided to do a little web research on the Henrico Public Schools Laptop Initiative.

They've had four years of experience with a program that looks like a carbon copy of the Power to Learn project. Well, well - bet they've got a wealth of information that would have been helpful to our fearless leaders at the CCSB in their quest for the best solution. A couple of clicks later and voila! I was correct. Henrico County Public Schools - the educational model for technology in the classroom, the favorite reference site of Apple Computer, that amazing come-from-behind winner in our laptop derby (and apparently the best place to look for supportive consultants to put on the CCSB payroll), does in fact have experiences that could've been of benefit to the CCSB. In fact, Henrico schools went out and hired a consultant to evaluate the process - after four years - to see just what administrators, teachers and students thought of the program. They also included the people actually footing the bills - the tax paying parents - in this survey.

I'll skip to the juicy stuff in the report, the stuff that should have set off a few Red Flags if you had to make a purchase decision for a large school district:

n Page 16 - "The majority of iBooks (Apple laptops) require repair during the school year - 57 percent turned their iBooks in for repair since the start of the 2004-2005 school year."

n Page 18 - "61 percent indicated that it took more than three days to receive their iBooks back from the help desk. - 18 percent of middle school students with iBooks have sent them to the Texas repair center since the start of the 2004-2005 school year."

Who knows how long that took?

n Page 27 - "The majority of teachers indicated that they prefer to have a Windows-based system, while most administrators preferred the Apple Macintosh system."

n Page 30 - "The majority of parents prefer their children use Windows-based personal computers. - 54 percent preferred that their children used Windows-based, 11 percent selected Apple Macintosh, and 32 percent did not have a preference. - Support for Windows was higher among those parents with a computer at home."

Let's see if I have this right:

n 57 percent (!) of the students have to get their Apple laptops repaired in one year;

n The majority of the people who work with the students and the computers -the teachers - prefer a Windows based alternative;

n The majority of the people who actually pay the bills, actually had to make an informed purchase choice with their money to buy a computer for home - the parents - prefer a Windows-based alternative; and

n The majority of people who neither work with the students and the computers, nor have to foot the tax bill to fund the programs - the administrators - prefer the Apple laptops.

Gee, it sure would have been nice for the CCSB to see this information before a decision was made. Too bad this report came out too late. Oh, wait a minute - it was submitted to HCPS on Feb. 10.

So I challenge anyone to find out what the CCSB knew and when they knew it regarding the Henrico County Public School Technology Evaluation Survey.

My guess is it wouldn't have mattered - the fix was already in at that point.

Pete Gonzalez of Marietta has worked in the technology industry for over 17 years. He is the father of three young children.


Copyright © 2005 Marietta Daily Journal. All rights reserved.
All other trademarks and Registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

[_Ω_]

Any reason for the new thread? You started an apple and education thread just a week ago.

[mac_miser]

Originally Posted by Omega Any reason for the new thread? You started an apple and education thread just a week ago.

Am a newbie. Not sure what to do. Plz advise.

[_Ω_]

Not trying to bust your chops, just making an observation.

Instead of starting a new thread and fragmenting/repeating the discussion, having it all merged/contained in one thread (should!) allow the discussion to be better focused.

As I said, just making an observation.



EDIT: Also having in one thread would actually help support the "validity" of the claim. Whether or not the "validity" is true or not, well that is another thing.

[Luca]

This poll is clearly not a single-choice only.

EDIT: But I can't seem to change it... Hrm. Oh well, I'll just leave it. I wasn't going to vote in it anyway. What I will contribute is that regardless of students' and teachers' Mac experiences, schools are run by school boards consisting of a bunch of idiot pushovers. They are spineless and will do anything to avoid being blamed for anything. So all it takes is a little Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt against Macs and they're jumping ship.

[Franz Josef]

I smell a troll. The second of mac_miser's 4 posts to date was simply to imply some wrong-doing in Apple's approach on Cobb, unsubstantiated by the then attached article. This simply quotes a further unsubstantiated article by someone who quite eveidently doesn't like Apple. Discussion is good but this is crap. As is the poll.

[jsk173]

Whether the story is legit or not, I'm not necessarily surprised by the poll results quoted therein. I'm sure kids beat the hell out of those iBooks, and I'm equally sure it is not so much that the parents prefer Windows, but that they are much more familiar with Windows and don't like looking like idiots when kiddie is at home, asking for help. (A good portion are also probably hoping for fresher copies of Windows and Windows apps, to, ahem, borrow from the kiddies' laptops.)

[Kitsune]

Being a Henrico resident (no, I wasn't at the stampede, I knew better), I've seen the kids and the computers involved first-hand. Here's the things to consider:

1. The kids treated the iBooks like trash. I saw students in my apartment block leaving their laptops sitting on the concrete steps while other kids ran over the laptops on their way up and down the steps, while yet more kids were drinking right next to it. No disasters while I watched, but plenty of room for a foot to kick the iBook down the stairs or someone to spill their drink on it.

2. The iBook Dual-USB model had a defective video board, and for a lot of them it was just a matter of time before it would blow and the screen would go blank. This isn't good for first impressions, Apple frankly blew it on that count. Putting computers in the hands of impressionable young buyers doesn't help if the computers have a fatal flaw in them.

3. The kids don't want broad horizons and good educational software, they want to play Doom 3, download free music, and surf for porn.

4. The parents don't want their kids to have broad horizons and good educational software, they want their kids to have a dirt-cheap computer to keep them quiet. Parents here were actually complaining that their kids' school laptops weren't running Windows games. Wonderful parents, huh?

5. The kids hacked all the iBooks. A couple of the neighborhood kids told me stories about other kids caught surfing porn in the middle of class, all the games they'd installed, music they'd downloaded, etc. The county had billed their iBooks as being proof against shenanigans, but apparently the only security measure was to wipe the drive in the laptop of a student caught being naughty and ghost a clean drive image onto it. Teachers had to actually catch a student in the act of doing something they shouldn't before any security would come into play.

Henrico has ditched the iBooks, as everyone knows, and is switching to Dells. This will open the very gates of hell itself. If people thought the kids broke the iBooks a lot, they will be astounded at just how much they're going to break the Dells. It was a testament to the durability of the iBooks that they managed to survive four years of being in the hands of high school students, I very much doubt that there will be any Dell laptops left for sale in four years.

A teacher told me that the student laptops had been given special, super-secure software and that there wouldn't be any problems with the kids installing extra junk on them. She told me this with a straight face, and I laughed. It's impossible to secure a computer when someone has physical access to it; there's just too many ways to fiddle with the hardware to circumvent software security. It'd stop the stupid kids, sure, but there's bound to be one or two future computer science majors in the school, and that's all it takes to have every one of those laptops hacked before the month is out. I give it five weeks, tops, before every one of those laptops is filled to the brim with spyware, games, porn, and illegally-downloaded movies and music.

[Amadeus]

It is important for Apple to be involved in education. It encourages future purchases.

[_Ω_]

Originally Posted by Franz Josef I smell a troll.

I will admit that this is why I knew about the other thread as I like to do my homework before assigning labels to people. I am not 100% sure this is the case. My % is quite high at the moment, but because I am in a transitional period of forgiveness and happiness I am will to give the benefit of the doubt. For now.

[RowdyScot]

Kitsune is absolutely right regarding how laptops are treated by students. I just graduated from Anthony Wayne in Northwest Ohio, and we have an iBook for every kid in the middle school, and for most of the elementary school and junior high kids. The high school is quite a bit more restrictive at this point, mainly because of just what we see happen to teacher machines. Working on the student help desk in my junior and senior years, in addition to Tech Maintenance this summer, I can say the same situations are commonplace here. Honestly, if a teacher tries getting the battery out of an iBook by prying it out with a key, what do you think a student might do?

[rasmits]

I've seen few Apples in schools beyond the video production room for a long time.

[SledgeHammer]

I'll second Kitsune's thoughts. Without a control, or anything else to compare to, the number of computers needing repairs is meaningless. Saying that x number of iBooks needed repairs does not lead me to the conclusion that the iBooks were shitty, it leads me to the conclusion that the students' treatment of them was.

[HezMah19]

At my previous school (on the Gold Coast, changed 3 months ago) we had 3 iBooks for video editing...as you can imagine they didn't exactly fly through it (800mhz, 40Gig HD's, 256MB RAM). However the treatment they got from the other kids, my god, I'm surprised they aren't in very, very small pieces...they were in for repair often, but IMO only because of the disturbing use by students.

[AsLan^]

It seems that giving expensive things to children and expecting them to act responsibly is asking too much. The children have no concept of the value of their computer because they did not work or pay for it.

Perhaps a new program can be developed... where students would have to work for their computer. This might give them concept of the relative value. For example, a student must earn 100 credits to have a laptop, an hour of community approved work equals one credit. Allow this work to be done before the school year starts and make a laptop compulsory for attendance. If the children dont want to work then the parents will have to provide a laptop.

The students who do work and receive a laptop from the school should have favourable support included such as a replacement computer if theirs requires service and a "trade up" option at the end of their time in school so they can enter college with a new laptop, provided that the laptop is still in *good* condition, exact specifications for what qualified as good condition would have to be written in stone... i.e. scratches on case - okay, cracks and cola - bad.

The software to be used in the classroom should be cross platform and open source to allow people to use whatever platform they choose.

This system allows parents to choose their childs computing platform if they wish and allows poorer students the opportunity to have a computer to use in class and the knowledge that when they go to college they will have the latest and greatest. Some of these students might even take better care of their laptops knowing deep down inside that they worked for it and its good working condition is required for that trade up. The children that had their laptop supplied by their parents are free to treat them as they wish as per their parents guidance.

I like this idea... I might write it down somewhere.

[*Joe*]

Personally, having left school just over a year ago, I think the whole conecpt of laptops is a terrible one. My school was just buying in sets of laptops and implementing wireless networking when I left. The amount of extra work it generated for the IT Services staff was unacceptable.
Kids had no respect for the equipment, and much of it was irrepairably damaged in the first 6 months.

I think the fundamental problem with laptops in schools is that administrators are implementing a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. But the mention of new IT provision is merely there to impress and meet IT expenditure targets.
Many schools could do with more staff and new textbooks rather than wasting money on un-planned IT projects.

[hyperb0le]

I'm a Senior in a Cobb school, and I thought some might be interested to know that the Cobb County Superintendant of Schools, Gen. Joseph Redden, resigned effective today in order to shift attention back to education and away from this whole ordeal.

Read More...

The whole situation sucks (especially since I had an internship lined up with the county to help with deployment and support of the iBooks... :/)

[Ryan]

I don't think that the laptops are a good idea. What problems are they actually solving? What's wrong with a physical textbook? I personally can't stand reading ebooks, because I can only read text on a computer screen for a few minutes before I have to up the text size, because my eyes quickly lose focus.

It sure doesn't sound like it made it any easier on anyone in the school system. I find that when we use computers at my school, most students don't focus on the work (though that may be because we aren't often in the computer labs). I sure wouldn't want my school to hand out laptops, because they have no clue how to secure a system. I never store files on my allocated space on the school servers, because those servers are often hacked by students who erase all the files. I just use my USB thumb drive.

USB thumb drives might be a better idea than laptops. They're small, cheap, and some of them are pretty sturdy and should take the abuse the students dish out. A hacker can't get into them, though theft becomes a bigger problem. If the schools really want to get sophisticated, they could use the drives as computer ID cards. Want to use a computer? Plug in your drive, and it logs you in automatically based on the information on the drive.

If the school was using OSX, they might even be able to use the drives as portable home folders, so when you plug in the drive and log in, you have all your own settings. Browser history, email, bookmarks, files, etc. I think a system like this could work really well.

[SledgeHammer]

In high school, as long as students have access to computers in the library and/or at home, I don't see what they could possibly need one for in all of their classes, etc. Hell, even in college, when I brought my TiBook to classes under the guise of taking notes, I usually just ended up playing games. I learned plenty in high school with real books and pencils and paper.

[Kitsune]

People are trying to hustle up to a utopian Star Trek world where everyone just walks around with a little flat panel under one arm that does everything for them. The reality of the situation is that things aren't nearly to that level yet. There's a lot of hype about the sophistication of the digital lifestyle and all, but frankly it tends to involve more effort than the paper lifestyle did.

People make a lot of having contact lists and being able to dash off emails over wireless connections from Starbucks while watching stocks and downloading from iTunes. My experience, however, is that going into your case, pulling out your laptop/Palm/cellphone/etc., powering it up, going to your contact list, typing in the new contact, all of which is typically done while precariously balancing your expensive electronic toy in a crowded area, it just winds up taking much longer than pulling a notepad out of your pocket and scribbling the info on it.

Same deal with schools. People imagine students being all productive like they are in commercials, effortlessly pulling down information to write reports, dashing off calculus equations to be instantly rendered, all that sort of stuff. Simply untrue.

[intlplby]

i think the thing with laptops in schools is to get kids used to using computers for managing their lives.....

yes it's not as quick as a notepad... yet.... but it's easy to backup, easy to organize, easy to share and compact..... imagine replacing a whole backpack of 2-5 textbooks with one laptop....

i also think that everyone needs exposure to certain tools and needs to be taught how to use them effectively

i think Keynote, OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle are absolutely top tools that everyone should know how to use effectively....

having just graduated from college it's a shame to see how many students are hopeless with using a computer to perform basic skills that they would need for work....

i don't think laptops should replace textbooks entirely yet.... but it think they can.... i don't think the educational media content exists yet to replace textbooks......it would be good to be able to leave the textbooks at home.....

i think students should also take a basic graphic design principles class so they can make presentations, papers and other assignments more presentable, easy to read and easier to understand..... i think a course based loosely on Robin William's The Non-Designers Design Handbook complemented with instruction on presentation software and page layout software would complement projects and presentations in other courses.

[SledgeHammer]

I agree with you, especially about people who can't manage a computer for anything more complex than solitaire and email, but the downside is I can drop my backpack with 5 text books off the top of a three story building, go to the bottom, pick it up, then promptly use the text books, do that with a laptop in a bag, and there is no more laptop. Not that students will actually be dropping their bags off of buildings, but it has been known to happen, and the treatment that backpacks get put through in a day is probably comparable, anyway.

[HezMah19]

Not that students will actually be dropping their bags off of buildings

If I recall correctly, we were having competitions to see whose bag hit the ground first when being dropped from the 2nd floor classrooms last month...Naturally having the PowerBook in mine I wasn't participating.

Using a laptop has been the best thing to ever happen to my education. However it eliminates the "The dog ate my homework" excuse...

[Ryan]

The most computers have done to my education is allow to me listen to music during algebra class. I can type an essay just as well as I can scribble one in a notebook, and things like illustrations and graphics are easier with pen and paper than ink and printer.

For most students, I think computers are too much of a crutch and hindrance than something that really enhances education.

The only time I couldn't imaging living without a computer while learning is research. Instant information makes researching a paper much easier (though it also makes plagiarism much easier).

[The Return of the 'nut]

Originally Posted by intlplby i think the thing with laptops in schools is to get kids used to using computers for managing their lives..... yes it's not as quick as a notepad... yet.... but it's easy to backup, easy to organize, easy to share and compact..... imagine replacing a whole backpack of 2-5 textbooks with one laptop.... i also think that everyone needs exposure to certain tools and needs to be taught how to use them effectively i think Keynote, OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle are absolutely top tools that everyone should know how to use effectively.... having just graduated from college it's a shame to see how many students are hopeless with using a computer to perform basic skills that they would need for work.... i don't think laptops should replace textbooks entirely yet.... but it think they can.... i don't think the educational media content exists yet to replace textbooks......it would be good to be able to leave the textbooks at home..... i think students should also take a basic graphic design principles class so they can make presentations, papers and other assignments more presentable, easy to read and easier to understand..... i think a course based loosely on Robin William's The Non-Designers Design Handbook complemented with instruction on presentation software and page layout software would complement projects and presentations in other courses.

computers are a waste of school's budgets in K-12 and have ruined our education system.

Nothing you describe as a benefit makes someone intelligent.

[jimdad]

On a purely practical note we've had to move over to laptops just because of the space taken up by desktops in our classes. Can't keep building new rooms to house computers. Whether or not we should be giving them to kids to take home is another matter although we do need a computer literate workforce which means time spent on computers on a one to one basis.

[intlplby]

the biggest problem with giving kids laptops is that there really aren't many teachers computer literate enough use them to their potential in a learning environment

every teacher i had using computers for teaching in a non-technical area knew just enough to teach a course.... they were quite inept...... you need to hire recent college grads with good knowledge to assist in making the most of an expensive piece of equipment

[The Return of the 'nut]

Originally Posted by intlplby you need to hire recent college grads with good knowledge to assist in making the most of an expensive piece of equipment

easier said then done.

a new smarter teacher is not neccessarily a better teacher either

[intlplby]

i was suggesting hiring assistants who can work with each teacher one on one to provide the best advice on how to use the software to teach better.

i know in my courses which used photoshop, illustrator and flash, my teacher knew just enough to teach the course and i ended up being the one everyone came to learn anything more advanced......that shouldn't happen...... even on the specialized textile and apparel design software i ended up knowing more than the teachers within the course of a semester.

plus having a IT capable person on hand is essential..... the number of times we had problems with the systems that needed immediate assistance was appalling... but that may have been more the product of using windows systems which were badly managed.

all in all though many teachers usually don't know enough about the capabilities to make use of the equipment. they need assistants who really know what can be done to work together with them on the curriculum.... you can't just hand a computer system to a teacher and say "use this to teach" next semester and expect them to know how to best use it.

heck you could probably create an entire new college major based on the utilization of technology in education. something like a cross between an education and IT person

[Ryan]

Originally Posted by intlplby i was suggesting hiring assistants who can work with each teacher one on one to provide the best advice on how to use the software to teach better. i know in my courses which used photoshop, illustrator and flash, my teacher knew just enough to teach the course and i ended up being the one everyone came to learn anything more advanced......that shouldn't happen...... even on the specialized textile and apparel design software i ended up knowing more than the teachers within the course of a semester. plus having a IT capable person on hand is essential..... the number of times we had problems with the systems that needed immediate assistance was appalling... but that may have been more the product of using windows systems which were badly managed. all in all though many teachers usually don't know enough about the capabilities to make use of the equipment. they need assistants who really know what can be done to work together with them on the curriculum.... you can't just hand a computer system to a teacher and say "use this to teach" next semester and expect them to know how to best use it. heck you could probably create an entire new college major based on the utilization of technology in education. something like a cross between an education and IT person

That's why computers shouldn't play that large a role in education. Students just end up playing games or looking at porn instead of using them for their intended purpose.

It sounds like in your case, teachers were teaching classes in which they didn't understand the material (were these computer courses?). They don't need assistants. They need teachers who understand the material.

Seriously, what's wrong with a textbook and notepad?