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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

#281

Post by ryandrake »

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…

At a company where I used to work, we jokingly referred to our Networking Support office as "Notworking Support", since the policies they had to implement pretty much all involved making sure we could not do our work.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#282

Post by intoverflow2 »

carussell wrote: post #245
intoverflow2 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's not crouton. That comes from Google's coreboot-derived firmware. See https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/2014-firmware-summit It's true, though, that the whole process needs to be made more straightforward and easily circumventable. It's just not a part of crouton.

Ok but one press of space during boot on this scary looking screen [1] and the whole system will need to be reinstalled and all data on the linux partition will be lost correct?

Just finding it ridiculous that HN users suggest this with a straight face every time we have this discussion.

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/os-veri...

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#283

Post by ryandrake »

cptskippy wrote: post #216
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…

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.

For me, (rural PA, early 1990s) it was exactly that, but we had one teacher who was kind of into computers and they let him run--for grade 12 seniors only---a very, VERY basic programming class consisting of old (for the time) IBM PCs and UCSD Pascal. As the rest of the class was struggling to put the floppy disks in the right way, I spent the first week finishing up all of the year's worth of assignments so I could use the rest of the year to screw around and try to make games, write joke programs to mess with fellow students, etc. Fun class, got me excited about structured programming languages as opposed to BASIC, but pretty inadequate if your goal was to prepare future software engineers.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#284

Post by atonse »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #212
simonh wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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'…

No, even in our local mall in a Maryland suburb, the Microsoft store is a few doors down from the Apple store.

I think this is a common strategy.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#285

Post by anonymfus »

andybak wrote: post #276
ams6110 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like the "online Math textbook" was the main problem. How on earth would that not be compatible with an iPad. What the hell was it?

Probably Flash. Or may be some JavaScript using mouse or keyboard events not provided by iPad.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#286

Post by draw_down »

ux-app wrote: post #13

I'm a HS teacher. I was so happy when my school finally phased out iPads as the designated device for our year 7 students. It's such a rubbish device for content creation. The touchscreen is a POS for anything other than web browsing and casual games. Teaching coding, image manipulation, file manipulation was utterly painful or impossible. Typing on them is beyond painful and of the hundreds of students I taught, few…

Yeah, typing on glass screens is probably the worst thing about tech today. Autocomplete is pretty good, I'd say, but it doesn't matter.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#287

Post by illumin8 »

leadingthenet wrote: post #176
warcher wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most professors, you really gotta slow them down. This is their life's work and they know it bottom to top. If you let them run at their natural clip, you're gonna miss stuff. Making them write it down is great for that. If you let them use slides, you gotta ask them questions and break their rhythm or they'll just roll right over you.

Thank you, somebody other than me finally said it. I hate lecture slides with passion, so much so that I barely even go to lectures anymore. I mean, what's the point if all they're going to do is read them out loud? I can do that at home.

If your professor is just reading text bullet points from a slide, he sucks at public speaking and presentation skills.

Don't blame the medium for poor public speaking skills. I was just in a 2-day classroom setting this week and the presenter was brilliant - switching from slides, which they annotated with a digital pen while presenting, to whiteboard, to discussion seamlessly, without losing interest or focus from the students.

Public speaking is a skill like any other that any educator needs to be good at. Don't blame the medium for your educator's poor public speaking skills.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#289

Post by donutz »

sperglord wrote: post #233
cmdrfred wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the entire purpose of the Raspberry Pi project is education. I'm certain they would work with anyone using them for that purpose.

Education and a 1:1 program are vastly different usage models. You're not going to be able to take a Rasperry Pi, a monitor keyboard and mouse home with you in your backpack to do your homework on.

You could take home a pi, keyboard, and mouse though. Assuming you have a TV you can plug your pi into.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#290

Post by ams6110 »

andybak wrote: post #276
ams6110 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like the "online Math textbook" was the main problem. How on earth would that not be compatible with an iPad. What the hell was it?

The textbook was the big red flag that this was all a theater production. "See how modern we are, all the kids have iPads"

It likely was Flash-based. All I know is it didn't work in iPad Safari.

My kids didn't use them for much else other than games at home.

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