Michigan To Purchase Record 130,000 Laptops 641
goombah99 writes "The Detroit FreePress reports that Michigan state is planning the largest single laptop purchase/lease ever, over 130,000 wireless laptops--enough for every 6th grader. And of course future purchases for each new class. The main competion is between Dell and Apple, with Apple having the edge in classroom integration experience. But price points will matter since the school districts may have to pay $25 per pupil. And the Gates foundation has a foot in the door. No word on what OS the Dell laptops would run. What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?"
My choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Ibooks for all (Score:4, Insightful)
Dell with Linux. (Score:4, Insightful)
No decision at all: should go with Apple laptops (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd buy Macs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this really make sense? (Score:5, Insightful)
But Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't Michigan having a budget crunch like every other state?
My choice... (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno... maybe a blackboard, some chalk and a couple of erasers. Paper, pens and pencils would be apropos. Textbooks I hear have a pretty low TCO.
Misguided Spending (Score:5, Insightful)
over 130,000 wireless laptops--enough for every 6th grader
Great. Now every 6th grader may not be able to write a coherent sentence or multiply two fractions, but they'll be able to point-and-click their way to the job of their dreams.
Computers aren't the solution, but tools to help aciheve one.
definetly... (Score:1, Insightful)
Laptops for 6th graders? (Score:2, Insightful)
Apparently the state has too much money to spend, either that, or someone in state government has a 6th grader or two.
6th Graders with Laptops. (Score:5, Insightful)
In some of my old CS classes, I remember COLLEGE students playing games or watching movies during the lectures. I can forsee a similar problem with the younguns.
What OS? It should probably be "Schoolnix"
Re:Ibooks for all (Score:0, Insightful)
Thats a falsity if my experience has anything to go by. While we're mostly a windows shop, one of the staff managed to wangle a G4 into our network. It's not a bad machine, and OSX is nice, but where most of the XP boxes will be up for weeks or even months at a time with no problems, crashes are a few a week on the G4. It might not sound bad, but when you lose hours of work 3 times a week repeatedly, you really have to question the usefulness of the system that's causing those problems.
130,000 iBooks, that makes near half a million crashes every week. That's a lot of lost work. Compare that with a few thousand crashes if they were XP machines. I'd be wary.
What a waste of tax dollars (Score:2, Insightful)
I wouldn't buy the laptops. (Score:2, Insightful)
These kids have the rest of their lives to spend in front of a keyboard and screen. Give them a few more years of relief before they get chained up.
What a stupid trend (Score:5, Insightful)
My choice for school kids is pen and paper and good teachers.
Why spend so much money on technological gadgetry with 2/3 years of life when that money could be better spent on smaller classes, more personalized education and fighting illiteracy?
What's more, one thing I strongly believe is that computers destroy what makes kids kids : the ability to imagine and dream. Computers and televisions presents them with pre-chewed images that prevents them from developing their imagination, and pretty much turns a lot of them into passive technology consumers. The last thing we need is that crap to pervade into schools. There's time enough for kids to get into technology later, even touch it a little now and then as introductory classes when they're younger, but really schools should be sanctuaries of things simple, to let kids' brains be free and allow them to learn the basics properly.
Re:My choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Laptops to 6th graders
what the heck for, its going to get broken, stolen, and not used to its full potential.
all they need is a browser, and a word processor.
they could prolly get away with a palm before they need a laptop.
choice? (Score:4, Insightful)
MacOSX, of course.
It's Unix-based and is widely acknowledged to have the best user-interface.
The UI means less problems of the "how do I do...?" kind.
The Unix-based means you can actually lock it down so that the user can't terminally fuck it up. At worst he loses his home directory.
Linux would be 2nd choice, as it has the Unix advantage, but not quite the slick interface.
Windows would be 3rd choice. It has neither, but is widely used, so the kids will find it again later in life.
*BSD and other less well-known OSs come later, mostly due to their obscurity and the lack of a wide selection of software. Also because even with the "minimal admin" goal you will need some admin work done, and that means you need to find people who can handle the machines. Easy to find for windos, Linux, MacOS (in that order). No so easy for NetBSD, Plan9 or LispOS.
Re:Let's prep these kids for the real world (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple has already rolled this out in Maine (Score:2, Insightful)
Does Dell have a sub 5 lb laptop?
Re:Ibooks for all (Score:3, Insightful)
That's opinion, not fact. My school runs Windows 2000, and I have *never* seen a *single* computer crash. Nor have Word, Excel, or PowerPoint ever crashed on me. Perhaps it's because they have a fixed environment and don't mess with it - but, nonetheless, Windows XP (or 2000) can be made rock solid with proper administration.
"and doesnt have to have a legion of anti-virus software packages installed on it to keep the machine safe"
They run Norton corpoate version. It's simple and stays out of your way. Virii aren't really an issue as students store everything on a Samba share (which automatically deletes executables and MP3s) and anything we can write to locally (e.g. the desktop) get's wiped out everytime you log out.
Mod parent up! (Score:3, Insightful)
What's next, getting graded on your choice of on-slide animation effects and transition effects?
I'm glad I'll be dead before we've had more than two generations of these clowns, the spiral into ignorance and incompetance won't be pretty.
as a michigan taxpayer... (Score:5, Insightful)
as far as an OS choice, i'm going to burn any chance i might have of being moderated up here by suggesting windows xp. apple still doesn't really have a robust and easy to adminsiter means of locking down large numbers of systems and handling application delivery that would be required by this environment, nor does linux without a significant amount of research and development. while the software may be free, most of your local middle school admins (and i've worked with a number here in west michigan) don't have the first clue about managing linux (and barely the second clue on managing windows). this means that there'd be a large investment in outside contractors. of course this might mean some juicy support contracts for anybody that _does_ have these skills locally... hrmm.. maybe linux is a good idea after all
i'd also image that m$ is going to give a signifcant licensing break to the state to indoctrinate the students into the m$ shining path - i wouldn't be at all surprised if they gave away the windows licenses for free. before you act shocked, keep in mind that apple has been giving steep discounts to schools for decades for just the same reason.
How about Teachers? (Score:1, Insightful)
More well-paid and competent teachers would go a lot further in helping the students.
Oh well, it's the American way -- thinking that a quick technological fix will solve every problem.
*sigh*
Won't someone PLEASE think of the teachers?! (Score:5, Insightful)
How about some books? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps they can start with some easy-to-digest classics of the Western canon, like Aeschylus, Swift, Twain, Shakespeare, etc., and then move on to the more difficult philosophical works of Donne, Rosseau, Locke, Jefferson, Hamilton, etc.
Most of this stuff I didn't get to read in high school because the standards were too low even in AP classes, and that's just too bad. Perhaps with fewer computers and less bullshit, and more books, better teachers, and school choice, students would actually come out of 12th grade knowing something and not requiring remedial education for their first year in college.
Re:I'd buy Macs... (Score:3, Insightful)
- It runs on all of their hardware, so they don't have to get rid of their Pentium 166 boxes to standardize on a single OS. Try running Mac OS X on a PowerMac 200mhz with no USB.
- It has very good centralized management tools
- It doesn't lock them into a single hardware vendor. My discrict standardized on HP, but only because a signifigant portion of my town works for HP, so they get huge discounts on hardware
- It doesn't require retraining or relearning. Most teachers are familiar with Windows 2000 and Mac OS 9. Mac OS X looks and behaves differently.
- Microsoft Office. Mac OS may have Office, but it looks out of place on the desktop (the district has standardized on Office 2000).
- Backwards app compatibility. They still have DOS and Windows 95 based applications. They don't want to have to use some "classic" mode to run their old applications.
- Forwards app compatibility. There's no garuntee that future apps will run on OS 10.2; many apps are now incompatible with 10.1. With Windows, you can be relatively sure that most apps created in the near future will be compatible with Windows 2000.
- Support. Microsoft's written policy is to provide hotfixes for Windows 2000 until at least March 31, 2007. Will Jaguar still be supported in 2007? Will RedHat Workstation still be supported in 2007?
My school has 2200 people and 800+ computers. They have 1.5 support personell (1 full time, 1 half time). So far, everything runs smoothly. I have never had a computer managed by the school crash. That's because they standardized on a software platform and are sticking with it. Even the new 2.4Ghz Evos they purchased three months ago run the same software as the 166mhz Pentium boxes they have. They have Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III, and Pentium IV boxes all under one roof, and they all run the same software, work with the same network, with the same documents, and, most importantly, the same administration.
Re:Ibooks for all (Score:3, Insightful)
Loaded statement. This can be said of almost any commercial OS.
Re:Won't someone PLEASE think of the teachers?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Saxophones? (Score:3, Insightful)
And this is all passed onto the parents, and not paid for by the school!
As for depreciation, you haven't tried re-selling an instrument after 4 years that was thoroughly beat up by a middle schooler/high schooler, have you?
Re:Ibooks for all (Score:3, Insightful)
In addition, it's a Mac. It just works, Apple gives phenomenal educational discounts, and with OS X, the kids can *opt* to learn a UNIX-like (well, BSD, really,) environment without having to muck about with installing something new and potentially wiping out their hard drives.
Give every kid an iBook and a USB keychain drive, and they're set for a few years.
This is, of course, coming as the owner of a 12" Powerbook, so I'm probably a little biased.
Re:the ONLY Choice (Score:5, Insightful)
High quality versions of the applications necessary for a young student to thrive are available on every modern OS...spreadsheets, word processors, presentations, web browsers, and other internet utilities. It's even arguable that Macs have better tools for creating multimedia content for projects, which may excite the students even more.
The purpose of the laptops isn't to teach them how to maintain a computer, it's to use the computer as a tool. That being the case, why wouldn't the state choose the platform that is more easily maintained, more secure, has a lower cost of ownership, and has fewer headaches in general?
Re:Ibooks for all (Score:3, Insightful)
How about without proper administration? Mac OS X has the advantage there - it's secure out out of the box and it doesn't have viruses attacking it. There's already been a massive deployment in Maine and that hasn't attracted the virus writers - or if it has, they haven't been successful.
These kids' laptops won't get locked down. They'll be connecting to the Internet, several times a day, probably, way more often than virus definitions are updated. One of the latest worms spreads just by visiting a page with IE (from there it dials a 900 number in Muldova or something). What's more, change control is going to be a bitch - you don't set Windows Update to 'automatic' on 140,000 machines if these are an integral part of the cirriculum since you can't affort patch breakage. Which means there will be threats against unpatched machines in the wild while testing is happening. You can attempt perimeter security but it's more of a pipe dream than anything else. If these laptops are to replace textbooks, they'll be going home sooner or later.
With about 25 Windows boxes where I work, all with NAV, and only a handful portable, our sysadmin spends probably an hour a week dealing with viruses that sneak in before definitions are downloaded. Scaling that to 130000 computers, that's 5200 hours a week, or 130 FTE's just to deal with viruses. That's almost 15% of the project's budget and you haven't even left the starting gate yet.
Re:What a stupid trend (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry; that's horseshit.
While you may decry the state of television programming, or the rampant amount of porn on the net, these arguments do not change the fact that television and the Internet are just containers for content. Any content. That includes all the imagination and dreaming you want.
I mean, what is a book but a petty distraction from the myriad sensory delights available to you in the world, right? Sheesh.
No people in favor? (Score:4, Insightful)
But I have to ask - how many of the people responding even HAVE kids?
Everyone slams 6th graders like they couldn't handle a computer if it killed them. When I was in 6th grade I already had two computers. Now that was the 80's so I was unusual then, but NOW? They already know more about the computers than most adults.
If you treat them like they are too young and immature to have a laptop - then they will be. If you teach them and allow them to learn - they will grow and expand. Children expand to fit their environment. Too many people treat children like they are stupid because they are young. Lack of experience is NOT THE SAME as lack of knowlege. Kids are AMAZINGLY smart. And they will never GET the experience you all want them to have, if you never ALLOW THEM TO.
6th graders are perfectly capable of keeping laptops.
And why not start using technology in the classroom? As long as it is just a TOOL - and not the focus of the course, it is fine... What if people had said the same thing about pen and paper? "We already have chalk and slate. We don't need any new gadgets. Kids won't be able to learn." Technology moves forward, we should use the technology as a TOOL to move forward as well.
Give kids some credit - they need to learn and grow sometime!
Oh yeah, and in my opinion the iBook is more durable than most Dell offerings.
Recently on NPR... (Score:2, Insightful)
How many Slashdotters? (Score:3, Insightful)
I happen to think my high level of comfort and adaptability with computers greatly benefitted from my early exposure to the computer.
I also know that I WORSHIPPED that piece of crap with its cassette drive (30 minutes to load Pac Man???) like it was the most prized object in the universe.
Now the Michigan Laptop program may be a flaming-pile-of-shit, but before everyone starts talking about idiot sixth graders, maybe they should think back to when they had their first computer, what it meant to them, and whether or not they were and idiot 6th (or 7th, or 8th) graders at the time.
Re:Sys admin requirement (Score:3, Insightful)
===============
6th Grade is where it all happens (Score:3, Insightful)
While there, I was involved in a project designed to bring technology into the classrooms. The key sides of every arguement was:
1. Kids don't need it.
2. We only need one per class room.
3. Every kid needs a laptop to be successful.
Of course, each one had its own woes of "Where does the money come from," and "How do we prevent them from goofing off?"
Well, the reality is this - any system, when administered properly, can be locked down. That means they have a large choice - Mac, Windows, Linux, Novell for Windows. It's all in the planning. If they make the correct roadmap, they will require less TCO to maintain it.
Someone here asked why we would buy soemthing that losses it's value overnight, but you are looking at it for the wrong reasons. Will it be able to play HalfLife 2? Probably not, can the encylopedia be updated with the latest content from the web, showing how California elected another actor for Governor? Why yes, it can...
Technology is the future - I'm not saying that they don't need to learn to read and write, but that is what elementary school is for. I don't know about you, but I learned to read and write in cursive well before the end of third grade (hell, maybe sooner).
Vocabulary can still be taught, literary works of art can be read (this content won't change), and RIAA can get involved to provide instruments to children after they sue the parents.
And - if you made it this far - no one ever said these kids were taking them home and running around with them. That's what home directories and mapped drives are for. You should be able to sit down at any machine, log in, and do your work with the standard set of tools (office, adobe or macromedia suite, internet explorer).
You see, laptops are simply an effective use of space in an already overcrowded school environment. I can easily stash 30 laptops in a cabinent faster than I can move 30 desktops and monitors out of the way. That is why they have choosen laptops.
Better watch out - your kids will have this luxury too!
--
Sound In Motion DJs - Official Music Provider of the San Jose Sharks! [simdjs.com]
Re:My choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Cost to setup/aquire softtware/etc from least expensive to most:
Linux/Windows/Mac
Least Expensive to maintain from least to most:
Mac/Windows/Linux
(Remember Windows admins are significantly easier to find/hire/fire than Linux admins, plus explaining to 130,000 kids how to rpm -Uvh rpmname.rpm isn't optimal)
Thin Clients/ Huge Business Opportunity (Score:2, Insightful)
It doesn't make any sense to give a kid either a mac or a windows pc for educational purposes.
Each route is flawed, because either option wastes hardware. You don't need external monitor support, firewire, floppies or big hard drives. You need a thin client with a school-based distro of Linux that is downloaded and run remote off of a mainframe.
Not only does this improve the price-performance ratio, but it also improves accountability by allowing for detailed logging of the kid's activities, and can allow for detailed administrative control on a classroom basis.
Say a teacher has a classroom of students. The students show up, boot up Schoonix (loading remotely via high-speed wireless). The teacher's first subject is geography. The teacher unlocks the Geography Suite of programs for her students. The students are allowed access to pre-determined geography based websites.
A problem occurs, a student can't find the right web page. The teacher clicks on the student's icon on screen and immediately switches to that students desktop. The teacher remotely shows the student how to find the right web page, and everyone moves on.
Sound far-fetched? Not really. Throw together some PAM auth, hack some remote x11 displays, write a couple custom admin programs, and strip down a linux kernel and you already have something that would work much better than Windows or Mac OS X by customizing it for the classroom.
Re:Durable enough? (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a large university in San Antonio that issues laptops to its students with a $50 deductable. If the laptop is lost or stolen the student pays the $50 deductable and gets another one. Street price on them was around $250.
Doesn't take a genius of a student to subtract the two numbers and end up $200 richer after a police report and a couple of days.
Same thing goes for any kind of insured property though I suppose. Its just that when you have lots of kids with expensive laptops and even less good judgment than they have cash, it seems that the incidence of theft may be quite high.
With the numbers of these things they are talking about buying, I wonder if it would be cost effective for them to have a ruggedized design customized for them. Something that addresses the kinds of problems found in an middle-school academic environment (built in GPS and celluar devices for locating lost or stolen machines for instance).
Re:Ibooks for all (Score:3, Insightful)
What, that it's secure out of the box or that it doesn't have viruses attacking it?
What about the student who decides to delete a bunch of files or download a program that messes up their system.
Why would they let them [apple.com] do that?
"These kids' laptops won't get locked down."
Why not?
Because they're laptops, they're meant to move with the kids among classrooms. And probably go home.
Believe it or not, it is very unlikely that a student would run into a virus that wouldn't be caught by definitions a day (or even a week) old.
Eh? MSBlast? SoBig? Slammer? Nimda? Klez? ILUVYOU?
Really. Did you make that up or do you have actual documentation?
Just what I read in the news [yahoo.com].
Duh. You don't use Windows Update. You use the other tools that Microsoft provides you with that let you test a patch before you deploy it over the network. Usually, exploits have appeared 4-8 weeks after the patch. That's plenty of time for IS.
Let me get this straight - you're counting on hackers not discovering any vulnerabilities themselves?
Viruses don't have enough access to infect the important files (those added by the school) even if they get through Norton.
If they're getting in through a network buffer overflow, they bypass the user's permissions. Microsoft runs network services as 'Administrator'.
With about 800 Windows boxes where I go to school, all with NAV, and about 10% portable (mostly staff), we only have *one* sysadmin. And she isn't dealing with viruses for 32 hours a week.
That's great for a very tightly controlled system. When everybody has a WOL NIC and gets SMS updates every night this can work. But we're talking about 140000 wireless laptops, diversely spread across a largely rural state which will mostly be asleep when they're not in use. The 'tight control' model depends on every single one of these being updated properly on a regular schedule - it can work, in theory. Sure there are tools to help laptops sync when they're available, but 140000 of anything don't work right all the time.
Let me put this another way:
What's the best way to stay sober?
a) Don't drink
b) use the KGB chemical that keeps acetealdehyde out of your blood
What's the best way to stay out of jail?
a) Don't commit a crime
b) Have a good lawyer
What's the best way to avoid a car wreck?
a) Don't drive
b) Drive defensively
What's the best way to avoid the cost of viruses?
a) Don't run Windows
b) Rigorously administer the Windows machines
Dear god no! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:the ONLY Choice-Win-studies. (Score:3, Insightful)
If Michigan had a set of specific applications in mind, then there wouldn't be much question of what platform they would pick. Instead it seems like they are following other states' lead by giving students access to laptops for general schoolwork, NOT to run specific applications. Besides, there are definitely plenty of educational software titles available for OSX. Maybe not as <b>many</b> as Windows, but quantity certainly does not equal quality.
Re:Won't someone PLEASE think of the teachers?! (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Teachers HOURLY wage should be considered. Not yearly. If you look at the hourly wage things aren't nearly as bad as some would make it out to be. I'm sure the teachers would love to be paid to take the summer off but lets be real.
Perhaps you don't realize that a high school (can't speak from experience for others) teacher's day generally starts around 8am and lasts until late in the evening. I'm sure most teachers would jump at the chance to go hourly. Imagine being paid OT to grade papers, talk to parents, plan lessons, be an assistant coach, attend meetings... woohoo!
iBooks + OSX + WiFi + AppleCare (Score:3, Insightful)
Overpurchase by 5% on the units. You won't have a care in the world for three years, repair wise compared to anything else.
Viruses? Feh.
TCO? Much lower.
Networking is self-configuring if you just RTFM.
Airport base stations judiciously placed. Secure the hell out of them, though - each school building will have a big 2.5GHz target painted on it from day 1.
An Xserve for each building, or use your existing servers (in the other articles, the wintel IT people are freaking about the added something or other.
As for the guns or butter arguments - they already have chalkboards, chalk, books, pencils, paper.
The average per pupil expenditure in the US is around $10,000 per year. If a $1200 iBook (that's their target price - easily done for an 800+airport+applecare in volume) lasts 3 years. I know. I bought a 500 the week they came out 2.5 years ago and it's still running circles around anything else from that long ago.
So the cost is $400 per year per student. That's 4%. try and reduce class size with that sort of increase. No can do.
Arg! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What a stupid trend (Score:3, Insightful)
The only thing that turns people into "consumers" is a lack of creativity or drive, in which case they didn't need a computer to "poison" them; if it weren't for the computer, they'd find something else to latch onto for their passive time-wasting. The problem comes both from lack of spirit in the individual, coupled with a lack of proper encouragement by parents, teachers, and peers.
seriously, folks (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, there's this. Laptops for 6th graders. What braindead politician came up with this one? For one, a 6th grade kid is usually not responsible enough to take care of his bicycle, let alone a commercial electronics device with sensitive equipment that costs 5 times as much. They'll be broken within days as they put them in their laptops and lug them about.
That is, if they last for more than day to begin with. As someone else has mentioned, kids like money. Unless these kids are hardcore geeks, careful, and can run like a bat out of hell, chances are these laptops will a) be stollen or b) be sold within the first couple days. A laptop that is seen as primarily for writing reports and papers, is big (for their age) and heavy, and has to be lugged around is not something that a kid would want, when they could sell it and buy, say, two or three years of the most trendy clothing and toys. These are middle schoolers we're talking about, here.
What's more, they're 6th graders. I don't know if you guys remember 6th grade or not, but the majority of 6th graders in my school were affraid of the upper classmen (7th and 8th), because there were always a few that would pick fights, and there was always the chacne that your stuff would be stollen. I'm sure some 7th or 8th grader that didn't get a laptop will want one, and know just where to get one.
How about Training for Teachers (Score:2, Insightful)
This is the 1st year that my son's high school teachers will be expected to use the email addresses they have had for several years. Not all classrooms and offices have working computers with network access.
And this is in Maine, where the laptop experiment was tried. It was a huge PR sucess for the then-governor. As an education initiative, the money could have been used much more successfully elsewhere.
To all those who think WindowsXP should be used (Score:2, Insightful)
I dont see them getting 130000 NEW dell laptops for every 6th grader, its way to expensive compared to used/refurbished equipment.
Also, with just highschool juniors and seniors the IT department is constantly busy repairing or reimaging laptops because either hardware fails or acidents happen. I'd hate to work at a large school where every 6th grader has a laptop.
And even though our laptops cant handle winxp, weve had debian, knoppix, and gentoo running great on them =)