L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum
latimes.com
L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum
1–10 of 97 posts
Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum
#2More like seeks refund from Pearson? The body of the article directly contradicts the headline. I'm hope that FBI investigation turns up some dirt, Pearson is a name that comes up too often in public education, and seems like universally negative reactions. How do such shit companies manage to gain such a stranglehold, particularly when it comes to government contracts? Across 50 states and the innumerable local governments which enter into these contracts, is it literally graft all the way through?
Clever seems like the one breath of fresh air into the system. Maybe they will get into actual curriculum development in the future.
Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum
#3More like seeks refund from Pearson? The body of the article directly contradicts the headline. I'm hope that FBI investigation turns up some dirt, Pearson is a name that comes up too often in public education, and seems like universally negative reactions. How do such shit companies manage to gain such a stranglehold, particularly when it comes to government contracts? Across 50 states and the innumerable local gove…
yep their beef is with Pearson:
In its letters, the district said it wants to meet this month to arrange “the dissociation from Pearson and recoup the costs of Pearson licenses that we paid for but have been unable to use.”
Board member Monica Ratliff, who chaired a technology committee that raised serious questions about the effort, said the district has been patient with Pearson but that time has ended.
“I believe that it is time for Pearson to either deliver on its promises immediately or provide us with a refund so that we can purchase curriculum that actually works for our students,” she said in a statement.
Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum
#4I want to know more about the 800MM on "improving" Internet access. that seems absurdly high, even for one of the top three school districts in the nation (by size)
Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum
#5I want to know more about the 800MM on "improving" Internet access. that seems absurdly high, even for one of the top three school districts in the nation (by size)
I work in a k12 ed tech company.
In most schools I've seen, by the time the internet gets to the users device, the quality of service is astonishingly bad. Even in schools that purport to have a big pipe coming in.
Low bandwidth per user, bad access points, frequency clashing, broken switches, aggressive content filtering and firewalls all add up to making it really hard for a student to stream even one educational video from youtube.
5 students in the same class, forget it!
Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum
#6tl;dr There wouldn't have been enough eyes on this article if it correctly stated the issue is with Pearson and not the iPad or Apple.
Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum
#7They've just kept Apple on the hit list because they know they had more money than brains to attempt to purchase an iPad for each student. If they want to add more technology to the classroom, hire some programmers to build educational software with a committee of teachers. Make it a webapp so the district can use whatever array of hardware they already own.
This was just a school district looking to waste money as far as I can tell. "Deasy had said the technology effort was a civil rights imperative designed to provide low-income students with devices available to their wealthier peers."
And what a civil rights effort. Slow clap.
If you want to do something to help equalize them with their wealthier peers, buy them all Learn Python the Hard Way. Which would satisfy their need to waste money, because that book is free online.
Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum
#8More like seeks refund from Pearson? The body of the article directly contradicts the headline. I'm hope that FBI investigation turns up some dirt, Pearson is a name that comes up too often in public education, and seems like universally negative reactions. How do such shit companies manage to gain such a stranglehold, particularly when it comes to government contracts? Across 50 states and the innumerable local gove…
In answer to your question, corruption. Buying influence, access and lucrative contracts is a lot more common than I think people seem to think about on a day to day basis.
Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum
#9They've just kept Apple on the hit list because they know they had more money than brains to attempt to purchase an iPad for each student. If they want to add more technology to the classroom, hire some programmers to build educational software with a committee of teachers. Make it a webapp so the district can use whatever array of hardware they already own. This was just a school district looking to waste money as f…
Contrary to popular belief everyone REALLY doesn't need to be a programmer.
Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum
#10Aside from how Pearson performed, I'm rather surprised that they choose to buy so many iPads.
What does the iPad offer to the pedagogical process? Are they teaching kids about programming or computer skills? Probably not.
Did they expect Pearson to produce an entire curriculum just for the iPad? Why not a website instead, which is so much more easily accessed and maintained? Did these schools want to be "technological" for the sake of it?
And for general student tasks, is the iPad really a good fit? As opposed to a conventional computer running Microsoft Office or a browser with Google Drive? And that computer could do other things too?