We’ll said Sir, ‘Don’t buy the hype’.
“Apple doesn’t give a shit about your child’s education. But then, neither does any other tech company.”
I think the Raspberry Pi foundation have amply demonstrated they do give a shit about children’s education and are a hardware manufacturer.
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Disclosure: I write educational software, and I use educational software daily (memrise, duolingo, anki, all for language learning).
I’m suspect of educational software from a grit standpoint: learning to suffer is a valuable part of school, and educational software often is less painful than using, for instance, workbooks and textbooks.
But educational software:
- must prove efficacy. It may fail at the task of “building children into adults” but it has to succeed at building literacy / numeracy / whatever its target.
- replaces textbooks at a fraction of the price per student
- lightens the grading burden on teachers to provide more time for course prep
- etc etc etc
I am a human being and I care about my work and I care about the teachers and students that use my software. If that weren’t the case, I’d go and get paid more elsewhere.
I’m sure that there are exploitative educational software providers, and I’m also suspect of Apple’s profit margins. But I ask that you try to paint with a finer brush.
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I like this argument, “businesses need to make money to improve their products” but it doesn’t pass the smell test when you’re a company that can’t come close to spending their money as fast as they rake it in, mostly from cell phone sales.
There’s a question of, “should schools buy apple products” and the answer is, “because the products are better and are more broadly supported” As a software developer, supporting six or seven different iPads is way easier than supporting hundreds of chrome and android tablets. Is it worth the difference in cost? My roommate was a district administrator and from his war stories, I’d say: schools should buy Apple products despite the cost.
Should we be suspect when Apple boasts about their support of schools? Also: yes.
I teach at an HBCU, and Google basically gives away G-suite to HBCUs, so I can say this: the academic account has different privacy policies and is pretty isolated from Google’s normal practices. I don’t actually care that much–I want people to know what I do at work–so I haven’t checked into it. There may be more to it than I know.
I really came here to say that ASUS has a new Chrome OS tablet coming out that seems to beat an iPad in several ways (like an sdcard slot), and it comes with a pen. And it costs $329.
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The library already holds more books than the students could ever hope to read.
IF students actually used computers to read books or do research rather than play Fortnite or use Snapchat, I would agree with you. But it’s obvious from your arguments that you do not actually teach US students in the 21st century.
My argument is that there are even more reasons why it’s a bad idea. To respond “well there are lot’s of good reasons why it’s a good idea” is begging the question.
The students with paper notebooks usually do better in their classes. That’s because the students who insist they need a computer to type their notes are actually on Snapchat or playing games the whole class period.
Education and learning are really two distinct things. Anyone, including children can learn on their own – especially if they have internet access. What education is about is motivation – a teacher’s job is to motivate their students to learn, and they do that by fostering personal connection with their students – to inspire them to want to learn.
Putting computers in the classroom fucks that up because it is putting literally the most distracting object possible between the people who need to foster a personal connection. There is no more sure way of making sure that connection isn’t made than to give the student access to an entire universe of distractions right on their desk.
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iPads don’t come with any ‘spyware’.
They come with productivity software that makes music and presentations and art.
Not true.
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It’s called “flamebait” and “shitposting”, but yes, those things also hit nerves. Not productive ones, but nerves nonetheless.
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I was on school board when we approved a one to one initiative with iPads. Granted, we were only committing to leasing a little over 1,000 iPads per year and purchasing MacBooks for all of our teachers, but I can assure you, I did not get a free iPad out of the deal.
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Please see the argument in my previous comment. It has nothing to do with the value or quality of educational software per se and more what access to computers does to the student/teacher dynamic.
That said:
It doesn’t, because they still buy/use textbooks.
- Actually not true. It’s not any harder (and often a lot easier) to use decades-old Scantron systems than whatever you have in mind for computers.
- Grading is a burden teachers put on themselves – effecting teaching/education doesn’t necessarily require very much grading in the first place.
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Which is why you can’t just give all of the students a computer (regardless of whether it is an iPad or Chromebook or whatever) without updating your teaching methods and curriculum at the same time. Apple provides a lot of resources in this regard for little to no extra cost. They specifically recruit leaders from the K-12 environment that have had success integrating technology into classrooms in meaningful ways and give you access to those people. Google does not provide a similar level of service when you are in the process of evaluating their products.
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OK, references would help make your case I think. But even with references, nothing you’ve said addresses the fundamental problem I have posed:
kids with access to the internet will not listen to their teachers.
Maybe some will – but those are the kids who are already motivated to learn on their own and teachers never had a problem with them anyway.
The majority of students in US schools are not especially interested in learning for its own sake, and putting the most distracting object in the world in front of them isn’t going to help that situation even if the teacher had a four hour Professional Development course on Integrating Technology in the Classroom.
Edit to add: if the answer is really “well all the teachers in the US just need to learn to do their jobs completely differently” then the situation is pretty hopeless. You can’t just suddenly develop new teaching methods and expect them to work for all students and all teachers without a few years of experimentation to work out the problems and refine the techniques. And you can’t expect teachers who have been doing what they do for years to be able to just suddenly master a new set of (unproven) techniques and employ them flawlessly. And in the meantime, all the students who are part of this grand “technology in the classroom” experiment are being failed by the educational system (brought to you by Apple™!)
And the real shame would be that it’s all completely unnecessary. If I saw educational outcomes being measurably improved by access to technology that would be one thing – but I really don’t. If anything, it seems like literacy is a lot worse among students now that we’ve dispensed with the need for old-fashioned obsolete things like textbooks and paper notebooks.
That is true for certain teachers. Kids with a pencil and paper will not listen to their teachers, either. I have enough old notebooks full of doodles to prove that.
I agree with your sentiments that teachers can’t just pick up these new skills tomorrow and we will see outcomes change after the next set of standardized tests. However, I don’t think that we can just let teachers do what they have been doing for years and expect different results, either. Does technology help in all situations? No, of course it doesn’t. Does it help in some areas? Certainly, especially if we are talking about accessibility (think of changing the text size of a book on the fly for a student with low vision as one example). Part of implementing technology in the classroom should be a discussion about when it is appropriate and not just assuming that they should immediately be used in all classes.
Our current education system in the US is falling behind other countries, and something needs to change. Implementing iPads not only improves access but it gives the opportunity to rethink how we teach students. It opens doors for differentiated education which allows us to keep the advanced students in the same classroom as the struggling students, and it allows my english only speaking daughter to work with the Spanish only speaking student that just moved into the country work on a group project together.
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Not sure if sarcasm, but it’s not the native apple software that’s the problem, it’s the third party crap that the school district installs and the students are auto-enrolled in.
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Ah, good to know. It’s unfortunate that they felt the need to do that. You’d just said their iPads were issued “loaded with crap spyware” but didn’t say that the district were the ones to do so.
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Yes, this is an example where technology is actually helpful to the educational process. But:
- it could be done as effectively on a smartphone – doesn’t require providing a computer to every student in the classroom
- doesn’t look very much like most of the grand dreams of the classroom of the future Technology in the Classroom advocates like to talk about
Ugh, what a straw man.
- It’s true for all teachers, not “certain teachers”. I’ll gladly bet $10,000 you’ve never met a teacher who hasn’t experienced a student not listening to them.
- It’s true that students often did not listen to teachers regardless of their access to computers. The question is not whether taking away computers completely solves the problem but rather whether it actually makes the problem worse. And empirically it makes the problem worse.
Let me tell you a story about this last point. I know a teacher who was having a lot of trouble getting through to one particular class. So one day she’s frustrated and she just asks, “What am I doing wrong? What do I need to do differently for you guys to be successful in my class?” And the response was “Take away our phones!” They consciously knew that they were struggling largely because of their constant access to messaging, social media, and games, but even knowing it they couldn’t prevent themselves from taking advantage of those distractions.
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One of the things with the older version of the iPad school software is that 1. students don’t get to install anything. And, no, this isn’t like the old take home laptops where kids can figure out pretty easily how to hack them. No Fortnight for them. While in the classroom, the teacher can actually quickly force an app to open up – and lock out anything they don’t want. You want students writing a paper? Well, Word starts to run and nothing else.
That said, this was pretty common across ALL the platforms we saw. I liked how the iPad stuff worked better – but given that I was working mostly in student assessment and psychometrics…I didn’t have much need for this (I still had a few publicly accessable student labs that were purposed as public labs when we weren’t doing this).
The arguments folks are making against ipads and Apple have been fixed a decade ago – at least for the classroom. BY EVERYONE. Not just Apple…Microsoft…Dell had an education division, IBM…and a shit ton of others. All that essentially locked your computers / tables / whatever down while the teacher was speaking. Again, DECADE AGO. If you are screaming that this needs to happen, obviously you aren’t working in educational technology and just making shit up in your mind. Much like the author of the "I Hate Apple Rant’…
There are schools that have absolutely no IT fund…which makes sense because we can’t even afford to pay teachers living wages (HEY! YOU SHOULD GET A $100k DEGREE AND THEN GET YOUR MASTERS, AND WE WILL PAY YOU $32K A YEAR!!!)…but if you are in a school with no IT budget, this isn’t Apple or Microsoft or anyone else’s problem…its the tax payers.
Oh yeah, no kid should be able to BYO their gadgets into the classroom at least until high school. HS? They are practically adults…I know working in a college, kids are still fucking annoying, but they have to start somewhere.
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Uh, no…I’m citing the experiences of teachers working in classrooms today right now in 2017.
If you think this stuff is fixed, then I’m pretty sure you’re the one who’s clueless about what actually happens in schools.
Apple / Microsoft / IBM etc are all smarter than “hey, you get $50 off, isn’t that great?”. They know quite well that getting kids learning on their platform is a terrific way to earn customers when those kids go to college, buy the same platform they learned on, etc etc. So for literally decades they’ve all been extremely generous towards schools, way moreso than people realize. I went to a lower-middle-class suburban-midwest elementary school in the 80s with zero IT/media budget (we were still using slide projectors and movie reels for films, no TVs for us) but Apple gave the school five Apple //c’s loaded with software. My high school had some old junky PCs but IBM selected our computer teacher as “top computer teacher in Ohio”, and gave the school two dozen top-of-the-line PCs loaded with art and productivity software, plus scanners, printers, and video cameras.
My school district is close to 40% free and reduced lunch. Not every student can afford a smartphone. BYOD is great, unless you want to guarantee that all of your students are using the same technology and have the same software available.
You’re right. Every teacher has struggled with this, my point is that there have always been and always will be students that don’t listen in class. In your example story I would ask the teacher why she was allowing the students to use their phones when they should not have had them out in the first place. Again, this gets back to my point about appropriate use of technology. Didn’t she see them using the phones when they should have been listening? When my wife is teaching a class and someone is on their cell phone, she doesn’t hesitate to call them out on it, and she’s only a substitute.
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