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.
That's not news (Score:5, Funny)
Every student in LA Public schools gets a good education. Now that would be news.
Re:That's not news (Score:5, Insightful)
This. Stuffing technology in schools in this manner has no impact on education. Facts actually sugest that pencil&paper and and show exact solution with answer lead to better brains than smart expensive pads which react to touch and simplify radiobutton selection options.
Re:That's not news (Score:5, Insightful)
Just think - with a class size of ~31, that's 1000 classes and teachers. If you spread that $30M over 1000 teachers you'd get about a $30k bump per teacher. Imagine recruiting teachers at $70k/year instead of $40k/year. I'm guessing you'd get a much better teacher, and thus a much better education for your kids. These constant stories of dumping technology onto kids never end with any positive results it's just sad. It's especially sad here because iPads are devices meant to consume, not to create. What a waste of taxpayer money.
Re:That's not news (Score:4, Insightful)
Silly goose. What teacher would pay my kickback?
Re:That's not news (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't make it any better, just explains why it happens.
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Its true there are a lot of regulations governing the pots of money, but the real reason is that if they spend an extra 5 million this year on raises, they are pretty much forced to spend 5 million every year forever more, and they are also setting the bar higher in for any other raises. So the iPads are way cheaper in the long run (though I agree, not a good investment)
Re:That's not news (Score:5, Interesting)
I get the point, really I do, but I don't think simply raising their pay is the answer, not to mention the economics of your suggestion are way off target.
LA Unified had over 27,000 teachers in 2012, quite a bit higher than the 1000 you suggest. Also, the average teacher pay in the district for 2012 was $66,000/year.
I do agree that you will get some improvement in quality of teachers if you started paying them more, but I don't think it will be significant. Education majors already have some of the worst SAT scores. Simply offering to pay them more isn't going to improve that much as you still have the very real issue of people simply not wanting to be teachers because it is a terrible job. You do have people who actually love teaching, but those folks are incredibly rare, and rarer still are those who love teaching and are good at their job.
You'd do more to improve the quality of public school education by making the job itself more attractive, not the pay. There are too many teachers burning out early in their careers which says a lot more about the job's environment than it does the compensation. I know that the main reason I quit working in education wasn't because the pay was shit, the main reason was because administrators often are too out of touch with the modern classroom that the students have no desire to learn, and the teacher ends up being nothing more than a baby sitter for 8 hours.
Class rooms are broken. Fix them and you will find more student engagement, which will improve the teachers' morale, which will result in a better education. Now, a snazzy piece of tech in each kids' hands might be a move in the right direction, but it just screams of a band-aid fix when instead it should be introduced as part of a comprehensive overhaul of the entire system.
Re:That's not news (Score:4, Insightful)
Teachers would be happier. Students that wanted to learn would be able to, and parents would be forced to take a more active roll in raising their own children.
Re:That's not news (Score:4, Insightful)
What do we do with all the kids that have been expelled? Would they be roaming the streets during school hours? Shoplifting / mugging seniors? (Most of the expelled kids wouldn't be from the maths / chess clubs.)
At worst, they would be doing the same things they do when they are not in school now. Your question implies that schools are being used a prisons that every minor is sentenced to.
Do we conscript them? Lock 'em up in detention?
Maybe that would be best. We already lock them up. The only problem is that the kids who do want an education are locked up with them. If the kids are not going to learn anyway, segregating them out to other facilities that are not bothering to try to teach them isn't going to do any worse.
Tough ... very tough. It'd take a government with an iron will to fix this problem.
No doubt. Unfortunately, sometimes not making a decision IS making a decision, and the decision our governments (education is state level) have taken is clearly broken.
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.)
Re:That's not news (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think simply raising their pay is the answer
Funny, however, that paying CEO's many millions of dollars is justified because it allows companies to better attract 'talent' from other companies, other industries and other countries.
And whenever someone here in Australia bitches about politicians getting $200,000 - $400,000 per annum, the standard response is "but these people would be making many times that in private industry ... we need to encourage them to work in public life". Then those people can fuck off to the private sector if they're not ready for public service.
I do agree that you will get some improvement in quality of teachers if you started paying them more, but I don't think it will be significant.
Let's find out.
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:That's not news (Score:5, Insightful)
the $30 million is for the first 31,000 only
Wow, $968 per tablet, what a great deal. Only four times more than retail for the higher specced Nexus 7. This in a city where kids are regularly sent home for "short days" to save salary.
Re:That's not news (Score:5, Interesting)
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And if Pearson wants to be competitive, maybe they need to port it to Android.
I heard a lecture about that by an ebook developer. Publishers like Pearson make all their textbooks in a standard ebook format, which can be easily converted into the other formats (except Kindle).
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the $30 million is for the first 31,000 only
Wow, $968 per tablet, what a great deal. Only four times more than retail for the higher specced Nexus 7. This in a city where kids are regularly sent home for "short days" to save salary.
It's more than twice the price of an iPad 2. That's some deal the school district is getting.
Re:That's not news (Score:4, Insightful)
how important is it to teach 30 children to read, write, and perform mathematics? will that yield $70k worth of economic productivity throughout the child's life? well, possibly $500k-$1m worth of positive impact. that's probably worth $70k/year. it's more valuable than hitting your sports balls.
Re:That's not news (Score:5, Insightful)
Class size has one of the largest impacts on quality of education.
Actually, no. There is a wide spread belief that class size improves education, but there is shockingly little evidence to support that belief. The biggest controlled study was the STAR Study done in Tennessee during the 1980s. It found the benefits to be minimal and uneven. Other studies have generally found even less benefit. Kids in early grades benefit most, with little to no benefit from smaller classes beyond grade 3. Most of the improvement goes to the underperformers. In some cases, the smarter kids actually do worse with small classes. This may be because they are forced to follow along with the class instead of reading ahead or learning on their own.
Much of the benefit from "smaller classes" may actually be from "quieter classes". Many young children have difficulty filtering out distracting noise. Good sound proofing, and reduction in disruptive behavior, can often bring as much benefit as smaller classes. Interesting, improving student/teacher ratios by adding teaching assistants has been found to provide no benefit.
If correctly targeted, smaller classes have their place, but they are far from a panacea.
Re: That's not news (Score:3, Interesting)
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I'm suspicious of the validity of these studies if their metric was standardized testing
Standardized tests don't measure everything. But if a kid does poorly on a standardized math test, that most likely means the kid didn't learn math. If a student can't read a paragraph and answer questions about it, it most likely means the student can't read well. Reducing class sizes is expensive, more so than almost any other educational intervention. It is not acceptable to assume that it "just works" in the absence of evidence.
Educational reform has a long history of "faddism", where changes are mad
Its about replacing books not paper and pencils... (Score:3)
This. Stuffing technology in schools in this manner has no impact on education. Facts actually sugest that pencil&paper and and show exact solution with answer lead to better brains than smart expensive pads which react to touch and simplify radiobutton selection options.
I think the move to pads has more to do with the move to e-books, and not so much to do with paper and pencils. Also an educational app does not have to implement, say math problems, as multiple choice radio buttons. It can use a graphical mode more like a drawing program and have the kids show their work and their solution in a manner very similar to paper and pencil.
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Every student in LA Public schools gets a good education. Now that would be news.
Wish I had points to mod you up. Sounds like a pretty bizarre waste unless this is going to replace all the textbooks.
so... 900 bucks for one or fifty? (Score:2)
what are they paying?
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By that math they could have gone to the Apple Store online and saved about 15 million or so dollars.
Re:so... 900 bucks for one or fifty? (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article, it looks like that also includes all of the necessary apps and textbook/workbook resources ("Pearson common core system of courses").
Though at almost $1000 per student, that's still $500 allotted to a few apps and digital textbook licensing per student. If mega-mass-produced digital textbooks are costing $500 per *grade school* student no wonder the public school systems have no money...
Re:so... 900 bucks for one or fifty? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Paper books can be used over the course of several years with several classes of students. I wonder if the licenses in this case will only apply to a single student.
Yes
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Question is - is this per student *per year* or per student per career? It sounds like the latter... Personally I think locking the educational system into specific software contract is even worse than locking them into a bad textbook purchase contract, but (as stated by someone else in this discussion) - $650 goes towards the iPad and apps, and the rest to support/maintenance, new administrative payroll, insurance, etc (i.e. overhead).
So that's about $200 per student for the course material. Not as bad
Pawn shop boom predicted... (Score:5, Funny)
.... Dec 2014.
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and narcotics boom, followed by junvie detention center boom
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c: All of the above
Cost (Score:2, Insightful)
$30 MILLION WILL ONLY COVER THE FIRST 31,000 (Score:3)
Holy crap that is expensive. $968 per iPad. Considering how good a Nexus 7 is I can't understand the thinking here.
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the price includes a lot of online course content for the kids
teachers are being commoditized into the role of babysitters and the real work is done by pearson and others
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teachers are being commoditized into the role of babysitters and the real work is done by pearson and others
There is nothing wrong with technology deskilling an industry. We invest an awful lot in educating teachers, if those workers could be directed to something more productive that would be wonderful.
The problem is educating primary and secondary school students is very important and there is not much indication these high-tech solutions are doing it well. So maybe its not yet time to push the qualified humans aside.
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There is nothing wrong with technology deskilling an industry. We invest an awful lot in educating teachers, if those workers could be directed to something more productive that would be wonderful.
The problem is educating primary and secondary school students is very important and there is not much indication these high-tech solutions are doing it well. So maybe its not yet time to push the qualified humans aside.
Counterpoint. What indications are there that the teachers are doing their jobs well? It's not necessarily the case that the technology is better, and the whole mess certainly reeks of a pork-filled lobbyist scheme... but really, how would that be different from the other public school offerings in play? It's not really possible to evaluate how effective the technology will be until it's out in the field, after all, so we may as well let the experiment run its course, now that the bills are paid.
Re:$30 MILLION WILL ONLY COVER THE FIRST 31,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
You're forgetting the infrastructure to support it. Wifi in classrooms, provisioning system. School App Store. Insurance policy. Training for teachers. Licensing for content.
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.
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Holy crap that is expensive. $968 per iPad. Considering how good a Nexus 7 is I can't understand the thinking here.
And you thought Apple was giving all those computers to schools in the 80's and 90's out of good will?
This is what happens when those kids grow up and become teachers and run for School Board seats.
Given that the courseware is available on more than one platform, they should just give each kid
a voucher, and let the vendor's compete.
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A public organization buy a device where you have one source of content and one source of hardware should be criminal when there are alternatives that allow competition in both areas. Basically, they're now tied to Apple in the future. For private organizations, it's just stupid but for public, it should be illegal.
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With Android's market share [businessinsider.com] in tablets exceeding Apple by a wide margin you would expect that this emphasis on Apple will wane.
Not until Apple runs out of payola.
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but just imagine how much money they will save if the kids just wrote their own tests?
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And graded each others tests. Distributed test grading. Can't beat that! Imagine a beowulf cluster of that! And runs linux too!
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Uh, most kids already DO grade each others tests, well, quizzes at least. I remember passing quizzes to the person next to us all the time after taking a quiz and getting it graded right then and there. Furthermore, evidence suggests the act of teaching stuff to someone else helps you learn it much better, so having kids devise tests and grade each other could be quite beneficial, as long as there was some teacher oversight.
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So, when you buy a computer, you don't buy software?
They buy it for the ability to run software they need. Right now, Androids still don't have the software they need. It's as simple as that.
Has the common core standard even been finalized yet? According to one of the links in TFS it hasn't. I suppose it could be by 2014, but knowing the bureaucracy involved in both the standard itself and the LAUSD, I have my doubts.
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It has nothing to do with Android. Pilots operate $100M machinery every day and work in a locked cockpit with absurd security. Spending $1000 for a tablet to replace their manuals is a good idea.
On the other hand, an 8 year old with an iPad walking home from school in Los Angeles is what you would call "fresh meat".
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3 pegs pal....Bette teachers you can control for and in most cases have been achieved....Better parents who raise better children is where you run into 90% of the problems in educating children in poor districts start and then the poor students/parents grind the teachers down until you have teachers who just don't care anymore.
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since the people of the district voted for a bond measure the funds are already paid for by the people who live in the district so you statement makes no sense.
context consumption vs creation (Score:2, Insightful)
Tablets work nicely for casual content consumption; however, they are so limited for context creation. We should be encouraging our student to create and express versus simple digesting information.
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Limit in some ways, GREATLY expand in many others.
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Thousand of dollars for what kind of software? A simple laptop costs a couple hundred. And can be taken "anywhere", too. What do "normal people" use for content creation? Office packages like libre office or MS office. First one is free. What else? Image processing, GIMP is free and good enough for "normal people". Movie cutting... kdenlive is good enough for normal people. Maybe a sequencer for musicians? How about reaper, $60?
So can you me please explain what multi-thousend dollar applications those "norm
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.
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Actually it's the other way around: tablets have opened up content creation in ways that were previously closed to "normal" people who couldn't afford thousands of dollars for expensive applications
Finger painting has never required thousands of dollars worth of anything. It has certainly never required software!
Can't wait for the dog to eat the homework. (Score:5, Interesting)
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A valid question. I'm pretty sure that a lot of those kid's parents don't have the money to pay for a replacement either. Maybe Apple Care will cover them. That would explain why it's around 1,000 bucks apiece for those tablets.
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Your reading comprehension is off. That initial payment is for just the first 31,000 iPads. And I didn't use a computer, I just did a very rough estimate in my head for a ballpark figure. I'll give you a break though, almost no one 'round here reads the article.
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About as many as will get stolen or "lost".
So much for competition and standards (Score:5, Insightful)
This is sad in so many ways. Primarily that there has to be such lock-in with public funds and on such an overpriced device. No need to go into ALL the details, it has already been hashed out on Slashdot before regarding price, toyness, theft, maintenance, battery wear, lack of E-Ink, lockdown, spyware, compatibility, damage, serviceability, insurance, attention span reduction, etc, etc.
Love technology, but sometimes it seems like it is not moving things forward, just sideways.... especially when it gets political.
Oh, and 30 million dollars for 31,000 tablets comes to $968 each. And that is supposed to be some special deal discount??? Meanwhile, the smaller, lighter, faster, higher res, second iteration of the Nexus 7 releases for $229 WITHOUT discount.
I hope they write their essays by hand then (Score:2)
RTFA this time (Score:2)
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iPad a frightening Choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignoring the fact that you are giving children $1000 devices (Several times the cost of the opposition) that puts them vulnerable to attack. They are unfixable, and heavy, have to work with Apples closed garden. In a dynamic market where Apple is a niche player, its tablet sales dropping. You are rewarding a company that prides itself on not paying tax.
I'm glad its not my tax Dollars. This should have been given to a open platform, willing to provide low margin, easily fixable, assembled in America, Light, ugly tablets..that pays tax.
Its a shame because I think its a great idea.
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Considering the planned use of the devices, being behind a walled garden really isn't that big of a deal.
Now was Apple the right choice? Who knows, but i don't think its because of their 'store' restrictions.
Walled Garden an enormous Deal (Score:2)
Considering the planned use of the devices, being behind a walled garden really isn't that big of a deal.
The reality is I would hope that LA would have a separate store with free (cross platform) edutainment created by Local People, to support teaching and learning and the savings on not buying apple could have bought a lot of content, and got a lot of people jobs...rather than it going towards buying its shares back.
I think its offensive Apple have been chosen.
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Yeah, I think this is going to be a disaster (and dislike Apple's walled garden model in general), but honestly they should probably put up as many walls around this garden as possible. Hell, put something in the firmware to prevent any apps from being installed or the device from being repurposed in any way - might make the poor grade school kids carrying them somewhat less of an obvious target to criminals. Otherwise the LA police will soon be opening up a dedicated "iPad Crimes Division" (can't wait fo
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It is your tax dollars, since no matter where you are in the US, you will be bailing out that failing state. And California shows no signs of returning to fiscal sanity either.
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California will not get bailed out.
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California receives 78 cents in federal funds for each dollar that gets sent to the Federal government in taxes.
What the real bailout is the states that receive more funds from the Federal Government than they send. That is pretty much all the Red states.
They tried this in Newark and it failed. (Score:5, Insightful)
America has gone mad (Score:2, Insightful)
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The Ipad is DRM. The kids cannot study, share or modify the code or freely run the programs as they wish. The kids are beholden to whatver rules Apple imposes. A better route would be an open device that allows for an understanding of how it works along with innovation.
Out in the real world nobody gives a flying fuck how their devices work as long as they do work. These iPads are not being bought as devices to help people learn to program, so it really doesn't matter if they are open or not.
The real tragedy here is not that the new shiny text book e-readers are Apple built, but that they are spending the money on shiny technical gizmos of any colour rather than better teachers and teaching. It is a clear demonstration of incompetence on the part of the relevant authorit
Why iPad? (Score:2)
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
(Not just Apple) stands to benefit (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. But MOSTLY Apple.
Sure, the stupid DRM'ed online-only "book" companies too.
Oh, and all the Apple stores around the area for when the little "darlings" inevitably break something.
I'd rather this money have gone into things that would actually BENEFIT these kids' education. Like building new schools or staggered school hours to reduce class sizes. Setting tighter metrics (or ANY metrics for that matter) on teachers to weed out the incompetent. Hell, increased police presence to help tone down the gang bangers.
But nope! Kidz gotsta haz teh bling bling!
Fucking morons...
Care to explain the benefit? (Score:2)
In all honesty, if I was a parent of a pupil in LA, I'd ask them if they lost their mind and replaced it with an iBrain. Or something similarly locked-down and inflexible.
What the hell is this supposed to accomplish? What do they think the kids are going to do with those iPads? Learn? Please, don't make me laugh.
First, these things will be jailbroken before you're done handing them out. It will probably finally give the geeks in class a bit of street cred as they'll be the ones to go to if you want your Pad
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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and how many LA schools teach computer programming? computer programming courses have been pretty much wiped out of the K-12 curriculum nationwide.
Where's the money coming from? (Score:2)
LAUSD already barely has money to buy paper and pencils, and now they've found money for this?
As a Cisco shareholder I thank LAUSD for requiring wireless in every classroom and additional WAN uplinks... etc etc etc...
The iPADs are a way to get around paying the teachers more. "Ok class, now watch the video on your iPAD..."
More waste. (Score:2)
Why an iPad? Seriously if they want to go the tablet form factor there are plenty of alternatives that are cheaper and just as bit as good for the job involved.
This is just another throw-technology-at-the-problem situation that will, yet again, produce no observable benefits. $30 million only for the first 31,000 students. What a joke.
paper and pencil (Score:4, Insightful)
Americans and Russians put people in space with the above. School education was no different. Why do people think a gadget is necessary.
And the usual defense is, "kids need to be ready for the technological working world." They'll have many, many years to become experts with technology, just through their normal use of it. And if they need to know Excel, they'll take a boring business administration course track like the rest of us.
Watch us continue going down in international match scores.
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
Electronics don't replace teachers (Score:3)
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how is this different than buying all the books that a current student uses?
NYC school system licenses some online content that can be accessed via computer or ipad app for kids to catch up on skills at home. my son does a few units every day so that he doesn't forget what he learned last year. LA is just making sure every kid has access to it
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How much can you get for school books on ebay?
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when i was in school if you don't give back your books you don't go to the next grade and don't graduate. until you pay for them.
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how is this different than buying all the books that a current student uses?
One thing that came to mind immediately to me: no one really wants to steal a grade school textbook. But they would be happy to take an iPad that happens to have grade school textbook apps.
It was recently announced that over 50% of *all* crime reported in NY, SF, and LA involved a smartphone theft/robbery. If they don't have a 100% effective way of bricking these devices when they go missing there's going to be a crime epidemic in LA.
At first I was thinking "well, just don't let them take them home" - whi
Re:What happens when this fails? (Score:5, Insightful)
books are cheap to repair.
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Also... why is NYC paying for the followup content? There are plenty of free resources that are acceptable and free for that. Khan Academy is where I send my kids for over the summer and reinforcement work.
Re: What happens when this fails? (Score:2)
The stuff they pay for is better than khan. And khan is lite on first grade level math
What sort of creating? (Score:2)
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Waste is waste, completely independent of who got taken to a nice meal at three star. Lobbyists are not the problem; politicians and public servants who agree to their agendas when said agendas are against those of their broader constituencies are.
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Not all can afford them even at the lower retail price, so no.
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It would have made more sense (And been way less expensive) to have a bond measure that was meant to subsidize the purchase of the iPads for those families who could not afford to purchase them.
Sue over injury (Score:5, Insightful)
Who pays for the new ones? Have a funny feeling the tax payers are going to have fun with this one...
The large costs will be when students get attacked for carrying around $1000 electronics.