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Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

nytimes.com

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Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#211

Post by daemin »

ux-app wrote: post #23
dpark wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chromebooks are rubbish too, so I don't really see the move to them as a positive either. What to your mind would not be rubbish? I'm a Microsoft employee, so I have a vested interest in Windows devices being the dominant choice for schools, but I don't see anything realistic students at the high school or below level couldn't do on Chromebooks. Also, where do you live/teach? "Year 7" is not high school in the US.…

> Also, where do you live/teach? "Year 7" I'm in Australia. Nationally we are transitioning to a R-6 = Primary School, 7-12 = High School model. My school is a little unorthodox. We're a private school with a 6-12 shared campus which is why I had experience teaching younger students even though I am HS trained. > What to your mind would not be rubbish? Either Mac or PC is fine in my books. Anything that allows them t…

The schools I went to we had 1-7 in a primary school, and 8-12 in high school. Sometimes there's also college which is for years 11-12 (and sometimes 13), so it depends on which state and schools you go to.

Also we never really did any programming at school what so ever when I did it, I learnt it all myself at home hacking around doing useless things on my home computer. The closest we got was learning a few features and formulas for Excel, and a bit of databases in Access. There was a tiny bit of Visual Basic as well but that might have been tied together with the Access stuff.

What I found about your story most interesting is how you teach them how to look inside files with a hex editor. That sort of stuff seems like fundamental knowledge for people that use computers, and learning it could de-mystify computing somewhat.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#212

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

simonh wrote: post #121
paulddraper wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a middle-school student in the early 2000s, I helped part-time with IT at a Mac-only school. Macintoshes, iMacs, eMacs. People were less familiar with Macs than PCs, but from an IT perspective, it was heaven. There were only a few models, they were reliable, and everything "just worked" together. The most common snag was attempting to get floppies to work with people's PCs from home. Sad to see the Apple desktops…

>Sad to see the Apple desktops gone. Nobody goes to the Apple Stores anymore, they're too crowded.

Seriously. The Apple store on the north side of Indy is in an upscale mall, and you can walk halfway across the place to get to a Microsoft store. The Apple store is always elbow-to-elbow. The Microsoft store is always crickets. The difference is embarrassing. I almost feel bad for Microsoft. (Almost.) I imagine it's one of the few places that a Microsoft store is so close to an Apple store, but I could be wrong. It's a wonder they keep it open.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#213

Post by sevensor »

taurath wrote: post #135
ux-app wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, where do you live/teach? "Year 7" I'm in Australia. Nationally we are transitioning to a R-6 = Primary School, 7-12 = High School model. My school is a little unorthodox. We're a private school with a 6-12 shared campus which is why I had experience teaching younger students even though I am HS trained. > What to your mind would not be rubbish? Either Mac or PC is fine in my books. Anything that allows them t…

I think the key reason tablets were chosen wasn't that it was the best learning tool, but it was the best learning tool that won't cause a maintenance nightmare for school IT when kids go crazy with viruses and bricking their laptops whenever they were late for a homework assignment. Ipads are relatively hard to fuck up fron a software side, and if they do you just do a reset.

It's not very enterprisey, but Tiny Core Linux works great for this -- runs completely in memory, doesn't even mount the partition with the OS on it. Real Linux, but also pretty hard to do permanent damage by mistake. (Easy to make the system not bootable on purpose, but just as easy to restore.)

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#214

Post by zzzeek »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #11
masterleep wrote: post #8

It's sad, but Apple has completely lost it at the low end. The value proposition just isn't there any more. This goes for iOS as well as Macs.

But they've lost it at the high-end too: the MacPro's internals are now over 3 years old with still no update in site, AV pros are switching to HP Z-series and the MBP is high-end only in price and design: perf-wise it's quite lacking. The MacBook Air (with its low price to clear their stock) and Mac Mini are priced right for education, but spec-wise they're poor investments, especially as even web-pages now require…

yet apple's stock price keeps soaring well into the 130s (!) now, despite months and months of nothing but bad news in my own distorted, self-selected information. what are we missing?

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#215

Post by jimbokun »

baldfat wrote: post #203
dpark wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for clarifying. I agree that Chromebooks are not the ideal learning device for coding. I was thinking general schooling and glossed over your earlier comment about teaching coding. I think they can probably work there, but you're right that a "real" computer is a better choice for that.

We are possibly entering the age of thin clients for coding soon. With ssh and remote desktops being the best use of laptops and Chromebooks for coding. I do that now with a personal server that I remote into when coding at different locations. There is a HUGE divide between production and consumer devices that keeps increasing every year. People don't have multi-use devices. Many of my peers use their iPad for every…

But will the average school be able to afford and administer servers For every student to ssh into?

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#216

Post by cptskippy »

ux-app wrote: post #23
dpark wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chromebooks are rubbish too, so I don't really see the move to them as a positive either. What to your mind would not be rubbish? I'm a Microsoft employee, so I have a vested interest in Windows devices being the dominant choice for schools, but I don't see anything realistic students at the high school or below level couldn't do on Chromebooks. Also, where do you live/teach? "Year 7" is not high school in the US.…

> Also, where do you live/teach? "Year 7" I'm in Australia. Nationally we are transitioning to a R-6 = Primary School, 7-12 = High School model. My school is a little unorthodox. We're a private school with a 6-12 shared campus which is why I had experience teaching younger students even though I am HS trained. > What to your mind would not be rubbish? Either Mac or PC is fine in my books. Anything that allows them t…

Wow, that's impressive. Computer education in the 80-90s in the US seems somewhat lacking by comparison. For me 3-5th grade was Oregan Trail, 6-8th was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, and 9-12th was typing using the Edit command in Dos and saving to a floppy.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#217

Post by technofiend »

ReverseCold wrote: post #74
ReverseCold wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chromebooks are the best, my school has them, and they're 100% usable in all non-tech classes. Battery lasts forever, great for typing, and everything is a web app anyway. We had iPads at one point, but luckily the school realised those were bad and I haven't seen them this year at all.

I also see comments about programming on them, that'd be painful. For everything else (that matters at school) though it's 10/10.

Isn't programming on a chromebook just a guacamole session away?

I could see giving kids access to a unix system via guacamole or a similar shell-in-browser solution and letting them run riot.

https://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#218

Post by microcolonel »

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #61
microcolonel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest though, I think these environments make new programmers go through the trouble of learning a platform which they can never ship a real application in; except maybe Cloud9. Scratch has been around for about 15 years now, and 12 years in a workable state. And while it seems superficially to be helpful (none of that fussy text editing!), I have never met a programmer who got their start in Scratch.

I think what you're saying is true in a sense but misses the point of this part of their education. I think the idea is less about making grade school students into career-ready programmers and more to expose them to programming concepts in general. They're increasingly useful in a wide variety of fields, even if you don't end up being a programmer or touch code again.

I'm not saying it absolutely prevents people from moving forward. I just fondly remember my first programming environment being an HTML file with a script tag.

It was a real environment, people were doing real things, and I learned based on the (at the time, quite bad) example of professionals. It also made it easy to go on Wikipedia and directly transfer concepts into my program from the pseudocode or C. Learning first in a real language gave me the opportunity to read many real programs very quickly.

I think GoMix and, to a lesser extent, Cloud9 give you a real language environment. I think that's a good step, though I have some minor qualms about the quality of the integrated text editors (which is really the web's fault).

Forget career-ready, I want naturals to never need to be told or convinced to program.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#219

Post by ams6110 »

blipmusic wrote: post #107
ux-app wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, where do you live/teach? "Year 7" I'm in Australia. Nationally we are transitioning to a R-6 = Primary School, 7-12 = High School model. My school is a little unorthodox. We're a private school with a 6-12 shared campus which is why I had experience teaching younger students even though I am HS trained. > What to your mind would not be rubbish? Either Mac or PC is fine in my books. Anything that allows them t…

This is so nice to read after having seen my sister's children receive laptops at school. No one was actually giving them any system knowledge. No programming, no "how does a computer work, what is a file...", no support/teaching on how software can help when e.g. writing an essay. Nothing. They were carrying 10+ kg (no joke) in their bags every day because of course they were forced to bring the (heavy) laptop to ev…

Same with my kids' schools. iPads handed out to every kid, but incredibly, they were incompatible with the online Math textbook selected. Millions spent on technology for its own sake, without any real plan.

Honestly I think paper, pencils, and books are still the most effective tools for most primary education.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#220

Post by ams6110 »

masterleep wrote: post #8

It's sad, but Apple has completely lost it at the low end. The value proposition just isn't there any more. This goes for iOS as well as Macs.

Apple has never had a low end. They've always been a premium product at a premium price, going back to the Apple ][.
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