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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

#291

Post by dpark »

sperglord wrote: post #244
dpark wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as? I think having computers at home is the one compelling reason for all the "let's give everyone laptops/ipads" initiatives. It means that everyone has a device they can do typed reports or homework research on. I'm much less convinced that computers in the classroom are a clear value-add in many cases.

The idea is that you're no longer constrained by planning around the use of a shared computer lab space. Instead, any activities that benefit from computer use can be used immediately. You don't have a "pencil and paper" lab that is used the entire school day and scheduled around, and now computers have reached the commodity price point where they don't need to either.

I don't think the vast majority of education gets much value from a computer lab, either.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#292

Post by digler999 »

nicky0 wrote: post #188
christoph wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple need to take a long hard look at the nose dive their customer service has taken in the last few years. I love Apple kit, I really do, but Apple the company are starting to become increasingly difficult to like and do any sort of business with. I have many personal data points on this, but below is the worst i've encountered in any retail store in my life: I went into an Apple Store to purchase 3 (yes, 3) Macboo…

I like this story, I like the part where you walked in thinking buying THREE laptops they would fall to their knees in joy. So did you buy online or.... ? ;)

I can't speak for the UK, but in the US, if you go to anything other than a luxury boutique, they will jump all over you for a $7k sale. That customer may change their mind or take the sale elsewhere if you put them off for 90m.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#293

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> I also teach Web dev. We use MAMP which is cross platform. We install VSCode, interact with the FS, create a local DB, file uploads, programmatic image resizing etc. My understanding is that this is not possible without jailbreaking (is that the right term?) a Chromebook.

Sure, you can't do that locally on a Chromebook without breaking out of the default system paradigm (I'm not sure it's technically jailbreaking, but that's not really important to the point.)

OTOH, if you aren't attached to locality, you can do most of it from a Chromebook without doing that, if you are running appropriate software on the backend to support it (e.g., for pretty much all but the "install VSCode" part, running something like Eclipse Che.)

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#294

Post by dragonwriter »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #166
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.

I would expand coding to include general computer use. Sure, you can teach biology or physics or English using whatever device is most convenient. But if you're trying to teach the workings and use of computers (i.e. what most people will have on computer classes), using iPads and Chromebooks is teaching them lies that come from user-hostile pseudoabstractions.

> using iPads and Chromebooks is teaching them lies that come from user-hostile pseudoabstractions.

Only if you are using them wrong; while I think iPads are poor tools forany purposes, including that one, from a UI perspective (or, at least, inefficient by the time you address the interface issues), iPads and Chromebooks don't restrict the ability to teach full-spectrum computing, as, they are perfectly capable tools for accessing and interacting with general purpose computers.

Now, clearly, the exact details of how you use them in that teaching and th supporting infrastructure might be slightly different than if you were giving students PCs, but then, you need a network environment with educational infrastructure if you are teaching full-spectrum computing with modern relevance anyway, and the detail are going to vary by what you use on the front end. That doesn't rule out any front end choice, it just means that the front end choice impacts other choices.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#295

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

atonse wrote: post #284
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is the traffic at the MS store there anywhere close to same as the traffic at the Apple store, or is it night-and-day, like Indy?

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#296

Post by wvenable »

illumin8 wrote: post #287
leadingthenet wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had a philosophy prof that would put up his lecture on (relatively) dense slides and then proceed to stand in front of the slides (not looking at them) and give the whole talk exactly as the text on the slides. It was quite amazing. And since he wasn't actually reading them, it was a good presentation.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#297

Post by eric_the_read »

illumin8 wrote: post #287
leadingthenet wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Using powerpoint (or related tech) enables sucking at public speaking and presentation skills, in a way that lecturing in front of a {black,white}board does not.

One of my favorite education-related blogs is University Diaries, by Margaret Soltan (an English professor at George Washington University). She writes quite entertainingly and excoriatingly about the use of PowerPoint as an alternative to teaching: http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?s=powerpoint

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#298

Post by dragonwriter »

foldr wrote: post #139
gaius wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High school in the US == 6th Form in the UK.

No, 6th form is from 16 to 18 years.

Which is almost exactly what high school is in some parts of the US (that is, in places where it is 10-12 grade.)

The thing is, while the US tends to have the Elementary/Middle or Junior High/(Senior) High split in most places, the grade levels aren't the same.

I've seen (and this may not be exhaustive) the splits with the following grade levels:

1-5/6-8/9-12

1-6/7-8/9-12

1-6/7-9/10-12

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#299

Post by Balgair »

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…

Wife is a HS teacher that has access to Chromebooks (CBs): Yes, they are useless. Even if you could get the 35+ kids per class to stop sending each other pics of their sex-organs during class the CBs are still futile. The district has mandated that you cannot use a CB without logging into the main district server. That is fine and dandy, but the wireless routers only have so much bandwidth, so you can only have ~15 kids per router logged on until they are auto kicked off. That then starts a ring-around-the-rosy of kids trying to log back in and kicking others off the wireless. Bonus points because there is only 1 router per ~5 classrooms. The CBs are also on a cart to be used and so my wife has to push that to each class she is in, so trying to get all the CBs out, set up with the lab, logged into, made actually useful, then logged out of and put back, charging, and ready to be pushed to the next room is difficult to do in the allotted class time. There are not enough classrooms in the school for the kids, so they have many 'lunch' periods that kids alternate in so some can be in class while others sit in the hall. Again, this clogs up the wireless routers too. Also, the Mirai botnet clones are still attacking the central district server and causing havoc with trying to log into it to make the CBs useful. As such, its a total gamble if the CBs will function at all on any given day and between classes or within a class period.

Maybe the CBs are not the culprit, but the whole system has made then useless to everyone but the company that sold them to the district. iPads are just finessed off to pawn shops for cash by the kids, so they never really took hold to begin with.

Re: Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

#300

Post by josefx »

douche wrote: post #148
exodust wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what is being taught. Electric whiteboards, displays and projectors can provide obvious benefits and time-saving for things like updating values, neatness, illustration, demonstration. Ever noticed when a lecturer writes a sentence on the chalk board, the only sound in the room is the sound of chalk? That isn't efficient use of time.

It's super awesome, especially when the professor is effectively just transcribing the textbook onto the blackboard while mumbling in a monotone. Really demonstrates the value you're getting for that $40-50k tuition.

That is work, he could just project the same slides he wrote down 20 years ago on to the wall and tell you to copy them down. I guess that's what I get for not paying $40k, lazy profs.
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