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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

#221

Post by intoverflow2 »

ecspike wrote: post #63
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.

There are a couple of Chrome apps that can run offline and do coding. I've used Caret and Advanced REST client on occasion for things. It gets a bit tricky if you need something that can't work without a real webserver but there's a lot of beginner stuff you can do with it. crouton unlocked a bit more functionality giving you the possibility of a Linux base layer, albeit likely not a great idea to have kids put the m…

> crouton

Correct me if I'm wrong but is this not the hack where every time you boot your system it tells you to press a key to reset it and if you press that key it instantly blanks the partition.

This seem absurd even for an expert user to use full time let alone school kids.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#222

Post by lotsofpulp »

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…

Macbook Air is by far the best laptop, price, value, and quality wise, for 90% of users today. The hardware hasn't been updated simply because it needs no updating, there haven't been any big advances in the past few years. As long as you have quality components, any SSD/intel core processor/8GB+ RAM is sufficient for pretty much everything day to day.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#223

Post by intoverflow2 »

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.

I get the reference but they may as well just be Facebook stores because that's the only thing people are looking at in them.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#224

Post by JoeAltmaier »

ams6110 wrote: post #220
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 ][.

Well, premium price anyway. The performance has often been sub-par. They upgrade hardware late or never.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#225

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

> I also see comments about programming on them, that'd be painful.

There are plenty of programming-in-a-browser tools available that are far from painful, plus now that they support Android apps, there's plenty of Android-based programming tools that are non-painful.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#226

Post by jacobolus »

subspaceman wrote: post #190
jacobolus wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPads with Apple’s stylus are amazing tools for illustration, hand-drawing diagrams, sketching out ideas, proofreading PDF files, taking technical notes, doing mathematical scratch work, and so on. Think of it like a notebook/scrapbook with pens/markers that doesn’t take any consumables, takes up less space in a bag, allows undo/redo, and makes sharing the products digitally a snap. Works best when used alongside a l…

Yep, this is exactly what I do with my Surface - except then I do code on it, which is why I picked it instead of an iPad pro. This one device has replaced my MacBook pro while still letting me sketch and draw and annotate.

I tried a few versions of Surface, but I found the Apple stylus to have about half the latency (or maybe less), with better precision/accuracy, and the signal processing done by the software I tried to convert pen inputs to strokes/lines seemed more polished/effective.

I’m sure there are some customers / use cases where those differences aren’t a deal-breaker. Personally I really appreciate it. I have been very impressed with the iPad pen input. It’s clear their hardware and software engineers collaborated closely to make a really impressive device and experience. (Again, as long as you mainly are using pen input.)

It’s possible there’s other software out there that does a better job than Microsoft’s first party stuff or the couple of third-party apps I tried.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#227

Post by agmcleod »

daemin wrote: post #211
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…

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…

I'm not sure if that's something people should have to learn though. For example, not everyone knows how the engine of a car works, and that's okay. For using computers, I feel like getting comfortable with a phone or tablet is useful at a younger age, and maybe get introduced to a mac or windows machine when they're a bit older, provided those are still main stream by the time they get there. Not everyone needs to be a developer. Though maybe I'm wrong with the way automation is going :)

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#228

Post by ageofwant »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #164
taurath wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This does match my usual experience of IT philosophy in educational institutions that says that the easiest way to maintain infrastructure is to not let people use it. That it defeats the whole raison d'être of that infrastructure is apparently beyond their care. It's like a city would give a company a long-term contract for repairs to a stretch of important road, and the company started by locking it down and decidi…

Educational institutions ? I currently work for one of the biggest resource companies in the world. It generates many billions of dollars of revenue each year. It spends millions on infrastructure and then refuses to allow anyone to actually use it.

A thousand chinese state hackers on adderall can not disable a network so thoroughly as "Infrastructure Security" can, I don't even...

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#229

Post by carussell »

dpark wrote: post #32
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…

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.

Someone has undertaken getting VSCode builds for Chromebooks.[1][2][3]

I understand that you're (probably) not on the VSCode team, but if you have any influence to get somebody who can reach out there, that'd be swell. Anyone using VSCode on Linux seems to be relying on MS's freely-downloadable-but-technically-not-OSS builds, and just building wrapper installers around that. I might be wrong. Something like diverse builds that aren't dependent on Microsoft would be the first step to getting VSCode into various distros' system images so you can do "sudo apt-get install vscode" on Debian or possibly find it in the default install on Ubuntu.

1. https://headmelted.com/why-we-need-the-best-tools-on-chromeb...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12956597

3. https://github.com/headmelted/code-builds/issues/10

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#230

Post by agmcleod »

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…

If I can ask you, what do you find the benefit is of teaching this as a standard curriculum? It makes sense to me for people wanting to get into development or IT. But not everyone is going into tech, and may not benefit from it. Most non tech people I know only use a computer at work, and get by. Otherwise they use phones, tablets, etc. I agree that the iPad is awful for the kind of things you're teaching, but for standard school work, I feel like it or the chromebook (due to price and a keyboard) are fairly good choices.

Thanks!

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