Maine School District Gives iPad To Every Kindergartner 478
An anonymous reader writes "'An Auburn, ME school district spent more than $200,000 to outfit every one of its 250 kindergartners with [iPads], along with sturdy cases to protect them. School officials say they are the first public school district in the country to give every kindergartner an iPad. Mrs. McCarthy says the tools give her 19 students more immediate feedback and individual attention than she ever could.' Will this improve low test scores, or be another case where spending more money does not produce a better educational outcome?"
i must be missing something (Score:2, Insightful)
$200k / 250 students is $800...why would you pay more for less?
Did we not already go through this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Same as always. (Score:4, Insightful)
That depends entirely upon the software/content that the kids will be running.
Otherwise it will only be a distraction.
Also, has the school invested in some means of recovering these when they are stolen from the kids? Or is it a distraction toy that also makes them a target for crime?
Awful value. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It will .... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not at all apologizing for our horrible public education system, but there's much more to it than per-student spending. Books are much more expensive, wages are much higher. Those one-room schoolhouses were often owned and operated by the one or two teachers that ran the joint and they were able to handle what little administrative needs there were by themselves. Nowadays we have big schools with scores of teachers, large administrative staffs, etc. Plus you need to keep the facilities maintained and have a maintenance staff on daily duty. The districts have their own administrative buildings and staff as well as the need to maintain a fleet of buses, etc. There are nutritional programs because kids often get their food at school rather than packing lunch, etc.
That all being said, our educational system sucks and is in dire need of improvement... but again, it's not just "per-student spending".
Wasted money (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, I'm still having to supply basic community-use classroom materials that the school should be supplying (kleenex, hand sanitizer, paper towels, etc.).
Standard practice in school. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's no great secret that tech companies target schools intensively in their marketing. Microsoft has been doing it for years. So has Apple. So has just about everyone else. Sometimes they do it by offering equipment or software at a discount, even to almost or entirely free at times. Sometimes it's by lobbying, pressuring curriculum writers to mandate a particular vendor's technology or urging administrators to buy it.
Schools are just irresistable. Get the students familiar with something, and they will go buying it once they get out. Teach them Office, they buy Office at home. Teach them to use iPads, and they will want to buy iPads - or in this case, tell their parents how cool iPads are. Simple, highly effective marketing. Business sense says a vendor needs to get their product into schools, and so they will - even if it means intensive lobbying and selling at a loss.
Throwing money at the cradle!?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a reason home-schooling is on the rise along with the growing demand for vouchers and more private-school flexibility.
Re:Standard practice in school. (Score:5, Insightful)
Get them used to computing devices that exist entirely within a walled garden, and they won't go looking for alternatives. If they get curious about how it works, just tell them it'll cost a bunch of extra money to do it and they'll have to get permission from someone else to even run their software, and that they can't because of it.
Sadly, Apple's approach to technical literacy seems to be catering to the ignorant instead of educating them, and this is an example of people encouraging that ignorance and borderline corporate subservience.
Re:It will .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:i must be missing something (Score:5, Insightful)
My tests consisted of drawing the alphabet (which was above the chalkboard), and sleeping during nap time.
Re:Throwing money at the cradle!?!?! (Score:2, Insightful)
why can't schools just get by on redistributing free material and then working off that?
Liberals would refuse because then they can't waste shitloads of money to make themselves look like they're doing something for the little people.
Conservatives would refuse because then they can't rewrite history to remove Thomas Jefferson.
Re:i must be missing something (Score:1, Insightful)
But the real question is, why would anyone think they are "paying more for less" in the first place?
Because they're buying Apple products?
Why America is dead last in education... (Score:2, Insightful)
schools just buy ipads so when the teacher asks the question you are graded on how fast you can google the answer rather than any comprehension or memorization skills.
the movie Idiocracy was a very perfect prediction of what this country is turning into... everyone singing commercial jingles, while everyone gets dumber and dumber. Computers shouldn't be allowed in normal subject classes.
I graduated college in 1995, and even then you were not allowed to bring a laptop to class, unless it was for your class, since I was a computer science major, which I got my associates degree as. But my core subjects, math/english/science laptops weren't allowed, and only basic calculators in the mathmatics classes. I remember professor made it very clear only old style calculators would be allowed, everything had to be worked out on paper and work shown and no graphing calcs or laptops could be used.
But even a decade later look at schools now, ipads in kindergarten? that's stupid waste of money, and would be a waste of money at any grade level unless it's computer specific classes such as college computer science, microcomputer specialist, or the multitude of programming classes that one could be required.
But yea, learning it first before relying on computers in normal subjects will always be better, and which is why private schools that don't allow such devices usually average higher test scores, at least going by Georgia and Florida Dept of Education sources.
Re:Did we not already go through this? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a waste of money. ipads are a luxury device. I'm sorry to tell all you hipsters this but these are not mainstream computing devices in the hands of most working class people. These are not even yet being used in the corporate world except by people who buy their own. Why buy students something that is merely a trend? Sure they may help some students but the cost is immense. You could hire three teachers for this amount of money, fix the crumbling classrooms, etc. If its ok to waste this money on frills, then why not buy the students all their own bicycles and put gourmet food in the cafeteria?
If it's a great idea then implement it AFTER you get all the finances in line and the economy is up and running again. When we have record unemployment rates and the quality of US education is ebbing then it is not the time to give a green light to all the crazy ideas that come along.
And why an iPad? Is someone getting kickbacks from Apple? You can get a tablet that does the same stuff for less than half the price. Why pick the most expensive product?
Depends on more than that (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if it runs all the right software, the question isn't can kids use it to learn on, the question is if they learn more efficiently or better than with cheaper means. Remember these things are pricey. So to be worth it they can't be as good as what you had before, they have to be a good deal better.
Re:i must be missing something (Score:4, Insightful)
I knew that. Just as I knew about the power saw in shop class. I knew what guns were too. And explosives. I knew what they were and treated them with due respect.
I don't think anyone gave the situation a second thought.
Its called living in the real world. Common sense. Who of us were not aware of the kinetic energy of a moving car? Even dogs and cats knew of these things.
My school made available to me stuff of a very expensive nature, and let me open it up and see how it worked. I am very grateful to Glenn Peterson, the principal of the Junior High School I attended for the trust he placed in me. I kept that machine working the whole time I attended the school, and that prepared me for my summer job of fixing things at my neighborhood radio repair shop.
I am also aware of just how fortunate I was to be schooled in that time frame. There is no way I could ever get *that* kind of education today. I would have never seen the power of "nature in the raw" that my teachers were able to show me.
Yes, it was dangerous. I could have killed myself touching the wrong thing in that chassis. I could have cut my hand off with the power saw. I could have blinded myself with the drill press. But I didn't.
The worst damage I did to myself during school, all the science labs, all the shop classes, all the experience with guns - the worst was I snapped my ankle during a wrestling match, and to this day still walk with a limp.
I don't think an $800 thingie way beyond my comprehension would have helped much. It was my teachers, and my relationship with them, that made the difference in my life, and that is what I remember.
Re:i must be missing something (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a new age, American children need to hit the ground running out of the womb in order to compete versus the vast numbers in China and India. We have to build better everything, and that includes kids. Now if only we are smart enough not to hold these kids back as they blossom and grow under the tutelage of our machine friends. Get with the times Grandpa.
Really? You think an iPad will give Western children the competitive edge they need? Here's a free clue:
Indian and Chinese students have one deadly advantage: motivation.
Basically, Western kids can aspire to being mediocre at everything they do, knowing full well that they will thereby enough income to live comfortably well-off for their entire lives. Chinese and Indian kids know that if they aren't amongst a very small percentage of the best of their cadre, they will earn poverty.
Western kids don't need to be taught how to multi-touch gesture-smear on an $800 doo-dad. They need someone to motivate them to compete. Angry Birds and fart apps won't help with that.
Re:i must be missing something (Score:4, Insightful)
I blame parents, because frankly they have no clue, they have been spoon fed reptile brain tripe about how capitalism is their God and proceed to bang their heads against a wall waiting for that "lottery ticket" of sorts to project them to their place in the circle of idols. Hence the values they impart unto their children are lacking because they frankly are lacking any good ones to pass along to them. We are vastly outnumber, and unless we work together as a nation, with goals and utilize all of our assets in concert, we will pass like a shooting star.
Your libertarian outlook is one of a long gone era of frontier-ism. This is a modern world, a smaller world, with limited resources. The days of robber barons setting on top of the heap have to end, lest they will be setting on a heap of burnt trash. If you haven't noticed, China has put the major hammer to us with Capitalism, oh the irony and karma. It seems that we haven't learned the object lesson that "business is war" or "trade is war". We have let our officials whore themselves out to out of control multinational corporations, whom have become the real power on this planet outside of some elements like China, and even that is questionable.
You have been rendered obsolete, American worker. All you are good for now is to wring the last of your countries wealth out of you, so that more of your land can just be bought out from under you with your own money. Please keep cutting the throats of your own people in order to keep your head above water, that is just less that China has to evict when at last you default. Those at the top will just skip off to their luxurious retreats; you don't think gold is at a all time high for willy-nilly reasons do you?
So by all means, keep bitching about education programs, it makes it easier to dominate dumb fucks if they are kept ignorant. I hate to break it to this forum, but just because you post here doesn't make you a genius. Most of you don't even have an original thought, when it comes to these national issues. Factor this, at least they bought IPads, and kept the money here SOMEWHAT in America with Apple. Of course the object lesson of this; tending to the ecology of one's national economy is lost on this generation. It will serve as a cautionary tale for other countries of course, but frankly I am pissed I am going down with the ship with a collective bunch of retards led down the path to destruction by their own greed, played by the Pied Piper of Corporate Greed and the back up band, Government Lackeys.
Take your heads out of the sand, this is the era of "Slash, burn, and liquidate" in American business. They start at the bottom and work their way up. The canary in the coal mine isn't just dead, the damn thing has rotted to bones in it's cage. We've lost something, besides our minds; we have lost an identity as a nation. We aren't a people, we are a collective of fuckers trying to get theirs. That doesn't cut it in the modern world. People need to stop sucking the propaganda tit and look around at the world and get an objective bearing on just how low we have sank. Once it sinks in how fucked we are, we need to examine why. Why is because we have some faulty thinking. Why do we have faulty thinking? Garbage in, garbage out. Figure out what the garbage is and who's shoveling it in your trough. First clue, follow the money.
Re:i must be missing something (Score:3, Insightful)
Did somebody seriously just accept and then promote the race to the bottom? Maybe if we starve our children or force them into abject poverty they'll work harder! *flexes his austerity muscles* Or perhaps we simply need to accept the reality of western society as a whole (which frankly includes India and China) are moving towards a middle-class consumer culture and that hard work has always been a questionable ideal since we have millions of accounts where workers since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution did just enough work to live comfortably/feed their families and no more. This whole "work yourself to death" ideology is a propaganda tool used during two world wars where the US had to go 24 hours a day to keep up with demand for war implements with a precursor in the protestant work ethic. Of course the protestant work ethic never existed either, it was merely a tool by protestants to justify their position over other Christians and non-Christians.
I remember as a kid thinking a computer in every classroom would aid and I still do. iPads are relatively costly compared to a desktop but for sheer mobility and the fact that that form factor is beginning to dominate our world then we need to learn to accept it and welcome it into our society. Course test scores aren't everything and the average slashdotter had above average grades but won't stop them from whining about the new aids that show up in the classroom even though they mostly had the advantage of better computers, teachers, and standards living in suburban/exurban US.
Or we could just have a policial system (Score:4, Insightful)