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Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Education / Tech San Diego School District Buys 26,000 iPads

Posted by Goldy on Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 11:02 AM

I used a $1,000 gift from my grandmother to purchase my first computer in September 1984, just before starting my senior year in college. It was a used Franklin ACE 1000, an Apple II clone with a Z80 card that allowed me to run CP/M-based WordStar.

It was amazing.

Looking back I can't believe that I got through high school and my first three years of college without a computer. I was a history major, which meant I wrote a ton of papers, all of them produced in a laborious three-pass process that consisted of a first draft written out by hand, second draft revisions scribbled in the margins, and final revisions made at the typewriter. I was also a playwright and sketch comedy writer who would often spend hours after rehearsals retyping that day's script revisions, only to repeat the same routine the following day.

It was awful.

I get this same sort of I-can't-believe-we-did-it-this-way olden times feeling when I watch my daughter lugging her high school textbooks between school and her two homes, or completing assignments on photocopied worksheets. These books are huge, heavy, expensive and just aching for interactive features—exactly the kind of content that is ideally suited to tablet computing. So when I read the news that the San Diego Unified School District has purchased 26,000 iPads for its students, my immediate reaction was, of course!

Textbooks are an anachronism, a throwback to era when we wrote 20-page papers by hand, an era when the process of learning too often got in the way of learning itself. The digital textbook isn't entirely there yet; it hasn't fully evolved to take advantage of the platform and it's still too expensive for many districts when you consider the combined cost of the hardware and the textbook licensing. But I've no doubt that my daughter will look at her own children's high school experience and marvel at the fact that she ever lugged around all those godawful textbooks.

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VALIS.

Posted by treacle on June 26, 2012 at 11:06 AM

"San Diego School District reports record number of property thefts on school campuses"

Posted by Zebes

on June 26, 2012 at 11:16 AM

What happens if I lose or break my iPad? Sorry, WHEN I lose or break my iPad?

Posted by jzimbert on June 26, 2012 at 11:18 AM

GET OFF MY LAWN

Posted by 34x42 on June 26, 2012 at 11:23 AM

Textbooks are an awful lot better at being tossed around in a backpack and jostled for 6 hours a day though.

Considering how these iPads do not belong to the students, they will be treated horribly, and if I know young people, primarily used to cheat and view pornography/social media.

I am thinking that at least 10% will have the be replaced in a year or two. A novel idea, but still mostly an expensive trifle of an "experiment."

Besides, lugging those books is just about the only exercise American kids still get, you know.

Posted by Theodore Gorath on June 26, 2012 at 11:24 AM

While a fan of educational technology in the classroom, I abhor technology for technologies sake. For example, my school has about 400 computers and kids use them to cut and paste wikipedia entries into their research assignments. School libraries have become glorified computer labs and research skills are non existent. The district pays thousand of dollar a year on subscription databases that nobody knows how to use.

If you spend the money on technology it is only worth it if districts spend the time to create a comprehensive information literacy curriculum that begins in 1st grade. With out that they are just flushing money down the toilet.

Also, my dog ate my Ipad.

Posted by Rotten666 on June 26, 2012 at 11:26 AM

Will they come with keyboards? If not, 26,000 people will have to learn how to type on the iPad virtual keyboard. While some will master this, a lot of people won't. As such, the iPad might be a great consumption tool, but maybe not a great production tool. Not sure the iPad would have helped Goldy produce those history papers in high school.

And does this lock the San Diego ISD into Apple's textbook system instead of an open system (more formats, more flexibility, etc.)?

Posted by Sterno on June 26, 2012 at 11:29 AM

A move to electronic formats is laudable but @2 has a point. For kids in chaotic living situations or who are at lower socio-economic spectra, there will be a high loss rate. I-pads are even more desirable than lunch money. Photo-copied sheets are cheap and easily replaceable. Must be nice having a well-to-do school district.

E-text books will probably be very popular with revisionist school districts and entities such as the Texas Text Book Commission because they can easily remove content they don't like such as science and replace it with superstion.

Posted by thatsnotright on June 26, 2012 at 11:31 AM

@ 8, nah, those kinds of school boards will do what they already do - make publishers produce texts they approve in the first place.

Posted by Matt from Denver on June 26, 2012 at 11:36 AM

A move to electronic textbooks - and when possible to open-source, public-domain, or otherwise cheap electronic textbooks - seems desirable. But they would have been better off getting a bunch of old-version large-format Kindles not because I love Amazon but because (1) the theft and breakage risks on the iPads is just too huge and (2) the Kindles can't play Angry Birds, etcetera. And can't usefully do Facebook, either. Or maybe a bunch of undesirable $250 netbooks.

I have no problem with kids having iPads, but I foresee utter disaster with the district giving kids iPads.

Posted by Warren Terra on June 26, 2012 at 11:37 AM

You don't need to look that far. Out here in the wilds of Shoreline Apple products have been the norm for years, next year all high school students will recieve an iPad. The parents have to buy insurance. Yes they are misused, yes they are stolen and yes, the kids can't live without them.

Posted by Headlikeahole on June 26, 2012 at 11:38 AM

Buying technology this way is a deal with the devil. Its extremely expensive and will need to be regularly updated until they're so out of date that the school district will need to buy brand new ones all over again.

Technology has its place in the classroom but for the most part it's a fad that enriches private corporations. The money could have been spent hiring more teachers to create smaller class sizes, something that has a proven correlation with student achievement and helps the economy to boot.

I recently moved from a high technology/ high class size school to teach at a school with half as many students and little to no technology. I wouldn't trade my small class size for an iPad any day. We prefer our pencils, our books and our imaginations, thank you. Our classroom is the one place where kids aren't visually assaulted by glowing screens everywhere they turn.

Posted by MK1 on June 26, 2012 at 11:39 AM

Textbook publishers are very happy right now. As anachronistic as paper books supposedly are, they can be reused for many years, a necessity in cash-strapped school districts. With digitization of textbooks, publishers can now force schools to buy the latest edition of every book every few years, despite the fact that the latest editions aren't any more useful at the primary- or secondary-school level.

Posted by keshmeshi on June 26, 2012 at 12:03 PM

Some schools in the north end have issued ipads to their students. Their textbooks are just apps. When the ipads break, or encounter technical difficulties, it's up to the students to pay for repairs, and in the meantime, the students do not have access to any of their textbooks. The textbook apps are cheaply designed, poorly formatted and surprisingly slow. From activating the ipad to getting to the right page can sometimes take upwards of a minute.
In theory, they should be a version of a A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. In practice, they are instead a collection of bad Power Point Presentations. In many case the students would literally be better off with just a link to Wikipedia. The only positive thing I can say about them is that they don't contain advertising (yet).

Electronic textbooks are future, and the current iteration of that future is bleak.

Posted by dirge on June 26, 2012 at 12:05 PM

It isn't just San Diego. The Shoreline school district also bought iPads for high school students. The student's parents pay a small fee for insurance to cover the ones that get broken, so that problem is manageable, at least.

Posted by Reverse Polarity on June 26, 2012 at 12:06 PM

What if one of the high school asshole bullies decides to break the iPad...does the school replace it free of charge or is the victim student stuck with the bill?

Sorry Goldy...this is nothing but a ploy by Apple to sell more of it's electronic crap. And given the history Apple has in censoring what can be used on their products I'm amazed you are down with this.

Posted by Cato the Younger Younger on June 26, 2012 at 1:23 PM