Isn’t that part terrifying. You’ve got shoddily built apps like Infinite Campus integrating with big dollar silicon valley tech like Clever to track your child’s every move through the education system and as parents we don’t get a say in any of it.
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Apple’s lifeline in the 90s was getting students to take out loans for $2000 powerbooks. No one could really afford them, but the through magic of credit and the inscrutability of loans, everyone had one. Unfortunately this time, they really are trying to get blood out of a turnip. I mean these schools need to save up for all the guns they have to give to teachers, right?
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I agree; these are crucial questions to ask. How about apprenticeship, and trades? Emotional intelligence?
There is so much that won’t digitize or print, which need to be hands-on. Those are some of the skills / jobs we are most desperately lacking and losing right now.
That being said, the merit of going digital with what could be printed is the reduction in dead tree waste, plus the myriad accompanying conveniences of dealing with data in digital form. (easier to distribute, process, collaborate with, revise, etc.)
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I’d be very interested in seeing a comparison on the environmental costs of giving a kid an iPad vs. the environmental cost of just giving them traditional supplies over the life of the iPad.
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My sister teaches APUSH and APWH, along with several other high school level social sciences. (She’s also the master teacher & senior for her school’s social science department.) She uses 85% primary sources, including images, music files, documents (both text and images of scanned originals), video when available; and secondary sources such as experimental history documentaries and re-enactments. Her curriculum is mandated by AP standards, plus her school district’s and state’s requirements.
She’s become a pretty decent WYSIWYG web developer (which she hates doing, and which I talk her through every summer), because she has to assemble/check her master sources every school year. Currently, it’s a 15gb master file. Her first year at this school, they wanted her handing out thumb drives with all this. (Two malware infections and 14 lost drives later…) Now, they just leave it all on the school servers and use the tablets.
Not everything is in a textbook. Not everything can be in a textbook. Classroom time is too valuable to waste watching a video; it’s better to assign that as homework and talk about it in class. Handing out a ream of paper in off-printed documents to each student over the course of a year is expensive, time-consuming and wasteful for both the student and the teacher.
You’ve definitely got a touch of nostalgia there — what you describe makes social sciences the hated subject. And per my sib, the English and foreign languages teachers are on the same page. Or tablet.
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It’s not about the difference in price. My beef is that a company is once again trying to sell an effort to pad their bottom line as a means of doing parents and students a favor.
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How do voters or the gov “reel in” a company? Apple (or any company) only makes stuff… it’s the consumer’s decision to buy it or not. I don’t get how Apple fleeces anyone who isn’t happily willing to be fleeced.
While I don’t argue that there are school districts that do that stuff… I’ve never heard of it and if my kid’s schools did that… I’d leave. I’m not powerless.
Apple doesn’t give a shit about your kids
Whatever you do, don’t upgrade your iPhone to the new IOS, it summarily terminates your contacts and calendar. Sorry kids, I had to get that out there…
I’m still not with you. Any company needs to make money or people lose jobs. Ideally you find ways to profit while helping others but profits need to come first.
At the end of the day they’re just selling stuff. If parents / consumers / schools aren’t interested they can tell them to go fuck themselves. Consumers are not powerless or victims because Apple has a new iPad.
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I can think of several extremely good use cases for them – textbook replacement, obviating the lugging/switching out books between classes; enhanced textbook authoring, e.g., animated mathematics demonstrations (go watch some 3Brown1Blue YT videos, wish they’d been around for me to clear up some matters); automatic explanations of wrong answers on a quiz, to accelerate the learning cycle.
Now, I’m not saying this is what will happen, but it’s certainly something that could.
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But… you don’t need the tablet in class then? Again, having some sort of computer available out of class, at home most likely, seems to suffice perfectly for being sent links to videos, supplementary material, &c. I’m all for using tech where it makes sense. But I can’t see it actually does anything useful during the class itself. Afterwards? Goodness yes. I can even see certain specialist classes demanding some sort of device (you can’t teach coding without something to code on. and language classes are well served by something that can do spaced repetition and the like) in the class itself, but for most things? I can’t see that tablets would help. In fact, all I see is how they hinder.
If you want to high-tech the classroom, put some sort of depth-sensing camera gizmo in a corner, have it track the teacher and shoot them constantly, and have whatever YouTube uses for automatic caption generation create a running transcript. Having classes you can google after the fact would be a great help revising.
(Declaration of bias: I actually did research on e-learning systems for a bit and am in all other respects quite a technophile by inclination and a techie by trade)
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I was one of those students. As I was attending a university journalism class, I all but had to have my own Mac if I wanted to succeed. At the time, my laptop costs as much a a semester’s worth of my meal plan did.
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I think you’re missing my point or purposefully being obtuse. Taxation. Closing tax loopholes. Raising the effective rate on the wealthy. Stricter regulations on supply chain and raw material sourcing. I’m not saying Apple can’t make a profit or that school districts are being forced to buy this device. I’m saying we’ve allowed Apple and companies like it and the people that run them to make insultingly high profits thanks tax laws and loop holes that have effectively fleeced those unfortunate enough to have not been born in the top 0.01%. So is it that surprising that when they turn around to sell us something under the guise that they’re doing us little people a favor we look at them and shout fuck you?
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Those all sound lovely and I’m a long-time subscriber to 3Brown1Blue. Man’s a genius-level explainer. I recommend his video on visualizing the Fourier transform to any of my students who struggle with how DCT-II works.
But I don’t want my students watching the video or an animated showcase of anything during class. I want them paying attention to me, not out of egotism, but because we have limited time together, and if they want to ask me things now’s the time. Videos are on demand. I occasionally have to sleep, or so I’m told. After class, of course, they should certainly check out supplementary material or use automated learning software, by all means, but they hardly need an iPad for that.
I guess you could replace a textbook with a iPad, sure, and I can see some benefits, but textbooks don’t crack their screens if you drop them. And I’ve never used any sort of stylus on any sort of screen up to and including professional-grade drawing tablets that lets you take notes while looking somewhere else. The haptic feedback just isn’t there yet. Now, I’ve not used the iPad for this purpose, so it is possible that Apple has cracked what Wacom can’t, but I doubt it.
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Well, they used to give several general shits-in-general as far as shits by generals were generally concerned about shits.
Or was that shnitzengruben? I am so confused.
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Good points. I may be overly biased from my days as an instructor in astronomy, where I would have fought an ocelot for the chance to offer up a hands-on demonstration of concepts about a realm that is, by nature, extremely not. It’s hard to draw the scale of the Universe on a standard-issue whiteboard, and even in a modern lecture environment, trying to show concepts of orbital mechanics seems harder than saying “set the orbital speed to whatever you like and see the results”.
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Yes, I think that would be interesting as well. iPads can live quite a long time: Many get jobs as kiosks after they finish their first tour of consumer entertainment duty.
Regardless, costs of dealing with all that paper are far more than just material itself.
Astronomy, certainly, would benefit from more robust visualization methods. Honestly, you’d have probably done the best with some sort of cheap VR display for everyone. And for out-of-class use, I’d be hard pressed to think of a single subject where interactive tools of one sort or another wouldn’t be a boon.
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You should read the user agreement they sent. Exonerates the district from all culpability and threatens legal action for “misuse”. I even got EFF involved to help craft a sensible policy, but the tech administrator clearly is in over his head.
Caring is an emotion.
Corporations do not have emotions.
Q.E.D.
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