Every Public School Student In LA Will Get an iPad In 2014 393
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "After signing a $30 million iPad deal with Apple in June, the Los Angeles School Board of Education has revealed the full extent of the program that will provide tablets to all students in the district. CiteWorld reports that the first phase of the program will see pupils receive 31,000 iPads this school year, rising to 640,000 Apple tablets by the end of 2014. Apple previously announced that the initiative would include 47 campuses and commence in the fall." Certain companies (not just Apple) stand to benefit from this kind of outlay.
Re:$30 MILLION WILL ONLY COVER THE FIRST 31,000 (Score:5, Informative)
Especially that last one, the infrastructure is cheap (3 or 4 servers and a single sysadmin will give you management for 400,000 iPads). When each e-book costs on average $60/student, that's where most of your money goes.
A 30 year bond to pay for technology? (Score:5, Informative)
A 30 year bond to pay for technology that is outmoded in less than 5 years?
smh
Steve Jobs' opinion (Score:5, Informative)
“I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.”
-- Steve Jobs, Wired, February 1996
Re:That's not news (Score:4, Informative)
The average teacher salary in the Los Angeles Unified School District is $63,000, plus excellent benefits and job security that makes it near impossible to get fired. And they don't work the entire year.
Re:context consumption vs creation (Score:4, Informative)
Apple says that certain features require a complimentary Adobe Creative Cloud membership, but Adobe lists such membership at $49.99 per month.
There are two levels of creative cloud memberships, one includes subscriptions to a bunch of apps ( that's the $49.99 / month ), and the basic level which is sort of like an icloud / dropbox service for storing files ( which is free for 2 GB worth of storage ). The feature that requires creative cloud is that dropbox-like service.
Also the descriptions on appstores are written by the developers, so is what Adobe is saying, not what Apple is saying. I just checked on my Nexus 10 and the description is pretty much the same in the Google Play [google.com] store.
Re:That's not news (Score:4, Informative)
If a student gets kicked out of one school, why would another school take him?
(Actually we had a situation something like that before federal laws prohibited it. It was a disaster. Kids never got educated. Girls got pregnant and went on welfare. Boys joined gangs, got into crime and went to jail.)