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L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum

latimes.com

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Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum

#71

Post by mwcampbell »

tomswartz07 wrote: post #70
mwcampbell wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you had to deal with accessibility for disabled students (e.g. blind, low-vision, or mobility impaired) yet? As I understand it, assistive technologies on desktop Linux are much less mature than on Windows or Mac. And AFAIK, the only desktop environments that are accessible to blind users in particular are GNOME and Unity.

I'm not certain. Although I work in the district, I'm typically stationed at buildings other than where the current 1-to-1 deployment is happening; so I miss out on a lot of the day to day details. That being said; the computers run stock-ish Ubuntu 14.04 with Unity. The students are able to install whatever accessibility tools they wish.

Maybe you guys should challenge one of your student apprentices to use one of the laptops with their eyes closed (or with the screen turned off if that's feasible), try to get through tasks that a student typically has to do, and fix any problems that come up, even if that involves contributing to the relevant open-source projects. The Orca screen reader is written in Python and supports application-specific scripting. The process could be quite educational.

Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum

#72

Post by greedo »

upofadown wrote: post #33

>The district selected Pearson based only on samples of curriculum — nothing more was available. So they bought hardware to run software that didn't exist.

Pearson is horrible, but the educational software field itself is just as horrible. In 2000 I worked for a small startup that created online courseware. Our roots were as a spinoff from a Federal grant to a big name university. Our task was to commercialize the courses the university had developed, and to develop additional courses.

Granted that technology in 2000 was not as advanced as today, but the pedagogy behind online/computer based courses was still in its infancy. It would take us 6 months to develop a basic Biology course, using programmers, SMEs, editors, and graphic artists. We turned out what was a pretty good course all things considered.

Where the real problem lay was the selling/marketing process. School districts are by nature conservative, and new ideas/technology that threaten established teaching methods are viewed with a gimlet eye.

Textbook publishers had a lock on the market and didn't want to give up any ground to an intruder. Teachers were afraid of being replaced by computers, leading to widespread skepticism of distance learning. And the technological competence of teachers and administrators at the time was bad; they had too much other things to worry about than to understand the difference between Java and Javascript.

So to me, it doesn't seem like a lot has changed in 15 years. The established vendors want to protect their market, the buyers, though pushed to embrace technology don't know how to use it well, and the students are left holding a bag of shit.

Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum

#73

Post by tomswartz07 »

Frozenlock wrote: post #69
userbinator wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more, we've given them root access. From your link: each laptop is equipped with a filter to block material deemed harmful to minors. Filters are enabled both on and off campus I bet that won't be much of an obstacle... but I like how you're encouraging them to "hack" - it's great to give them full control over their computers and see what they can do.

Please tell me such filter is for blocking violent images and politicians, not the natural reproduction process of our species.

Traditionally, I believe that the district has aimed to go by the bare minimum CIPA requirements. http://www.fcc.gov/guides/childrens-internet-protection-act

Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum

#74

Post by sentenza »

granfalloon wrote: post #27
threatofrain wrote: post #10

Aside 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 "technologica…

"Are they teaching kids about programming or computer skills?" I had a friend tell me recently how her young child "loved computers and was really good with them," but clarified by saying he was "always playing with his iPad." I'm not a professional programmer, but I did develop my strong interest in computers while playing around with (and often breaking) my parents' PC as a kid, and I've heard the same from many en…

Amen. I'm currently walking around telling fellow parents that "The kids are better with computers than we are" was a transient phase and is not the case any more at all.

Many of us learned the basics of our IT education because we had to fix our first computers to even be able to use them.

This is not the case any more, and we should adjust our perception of how kids learn about computers accordingly.

Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum

#75

Post by ocb »

harperlee wrote: post #55
jimktrains2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Public discussion of education is always hampered by the fact that people not professionals in it have no sense of how complicated it is. My friend's a teacher and the stories she tells me give me a glimpse into it. She's been in an intercity school for about 3 years now and so far, yearly: * 3-4 of her students will be shot dead within a mile of their home or school * 10+ of her students will be in jail or in juve…

> 3-4 of her students will be shot dead within a mile of their home or school I honestly don't understand how can the united states live with that level of violence, seeing by themselves that they are the exception in the first world.

The missing context here that no other comments have mentioned is that the violence in question here is almost certainly perpetrated by and against poor blacks. Race relations in the US--particularly those between the black urban poor and whites--are definitely not ideal. I'm sure you've seen media coverage of the Michael Brown shooting and related incidents.

It's a terrible situation that most people aren't motivated to do anything about because it, for the most part, only affects poor black people. The vast majority of Americans never experience any of this violence beyond seeing it in the news.

Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum

#76

Post by tootie »

tomswartz07 wrote: post #32

I'm currently working at a school district in Lancaster, PA. We have gone with Linux laptops for all of our students. Even more, we've given them root access. We chose this because of exactly the points that many people are bringing up in these comments. What does the iPad offer to the pedagogical process? Not really that much outside of the sanitary iOS enviroment. Are they teaching kids about programming or compute…

My kids' school district had a ridiculous iPad plan that they ditched for a more sensisble appraoch with Chromebooks. I would think the ChromeOS interface would be far friendlier than anything from Ubuntu and still allow you to grant root access.

Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum

#77

Post by click170 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #71
tomswartz07 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not certain. Although I work in the district, I'm typically stationed at buildings other than where the current 1-to-1 deployment is happening; so I miss out on a lot of the day to day details. That being said; the computers run stock-ish Ubuntu 14.04 with Unity. The students are able to install whatever accessibility tools they wish.

Maybe you guys should challenge one of your student apprentices to use one of the laptops with their eyes closed (or with the screen turned off if that's feasible), try to get through tasks that a student typically has to do, and fix any problems that come up, even if that involves contributing to the relevant open-source projects. The Orca screen reader is written in Python and supports application-specific scriptin…

I just want to say that contributing can sound daunting, but its honestly as simple as proof reading docs or filing bugs. No coding required.

Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum

#78

Post by bentcorner »

ams6110 wrote: post #34
jimhefferon wrote: post #19

Public discussion of education is always hampered by the fact that people not professionals in it have no sense of how complicated it is. Some students are genuises, some are cognitively low. Some students have personality disorders. Some students will soak up everything they see. Others don't care. Some students need to be a medical treatments at various times during the week. Some pray five times a day. Some are so…

Are you an education professional? I'm not, but I wonder why we don't go back to the model of segregating students by ability/need. It seems like the trend today is to "mainstream" everyone into a common classroom, so you have high achievers, low ability, as well as genuinely abnormal (mentally retarded, severe behavorial problems, etc.) all together. I see no way that can be effective for any of them because you wil…

What axis do you pick? Kids can be brilliant in one subject but terrible in another. They can have behavioral problems but vary between low and high achievers.

The reality of it is that we group kids by age and geolocation and put them under the same teacher. It works out mostly ok, improving that will be a hard problem.

Even defining an improvement is not trivial as well. While you ask if students can be grouped by ability, some schools prefer to split these students up, with the thinking that there is more to be gained by having children helping each other out in the same room.

Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum

#79

Post by rhino369 »

harperlee wrote: post #55
jimktrains2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Public discussion of education is always hampered by the fact that people not professionals in it have no sense of how complicated it is. My friend's a teacher and the stories she tells me give me a glimpse into it. She's been in an intercity school for about 3 years now and so far, yearly: * 3-4 of her students will be shot dead within a mile of their home or school * 10+ of her students will be in jail or in juve…

> 3-4 of her students will be shot dead within a mile of their home or school I honestly don't understand how can the united states live with that level of violence, seeing by themselves that they are the exception in the first world.

3-4 is probably an exaggeration, however, we live with it because almost all of us don't live it.

By that I mean the murder rates are only high in poor inner city neighborhoods. The crime levels disproportionately fall on poor minorities.

If you can afford to not have to live in those areas, it isn't a problem. And society doesn't care because it's someone else's problem.

Re: L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum

#80

Post by Kluny »

mwcampbell wrote: post #67
tomswartz07 wrote: post #32

I'm currently working at a school district in Lancaster, PA. We have gone with Linux laptops for all of our students. Even more, we've given them root access. We chose this because of exactly the points that many people are bringing up in these comments. What does the iPad offer to the pedagogical process? Not really that much outside of the sanitary iOS enviroment. Are they teaching kids about programming or compute…

Have you had to deal with accessibility for disabled students (e.g. blind, low-vision, or mobility impaired) yet? As I understand it, assistive technologies on desktop Linux are much less mature than on Windows or Mac. And AFAIK, the only desktop environments that are accessible to blind users in particular are GNOME and Unity.

Slightly off topic, but students with disabilities that cripple them on computers will be dealing with those issues their whole lives - I just think that it's awesome that they'll be able to start exploring the technology and assistive devices that will make computer use possible for them while still in the low-stakes world of high school, with techs to help them out.

It's a great opportunity for learning that would be lost if they were simply provided with an Apple device with Apple approved assistive technology, and told to make the best of it since there's no way to customize anything.

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