Schools and ipads

[editor]

Did you read the Mail article you linked to?

How much do you think they've wasted already? And I don't suppose the new, incredibly low figure has anything at all to do with the school being featured as a poster boy on Apple's own website?

No, that would be far too cynical of me.

http://www.apple.com/uk/education/profiles/honywood/

 

[Dovydaitis]

some of the kids have their own in the school Mrs Dovy-in-law works at and she says they are just a distraction. Granted they are not used in class but they are the next step up from the mobile phone and woe betide anyone who attempts to tell them to turn it off never mind tell them to put it away

 

[dylanredefined]

some of the kids have their own in the school Mrs Dovy-in-law works at and she says they are just a distraction. Granted they are not used in class but they are the next step up from the mobile phone and woe betide anyone who attempts to tell them to turn it off never mind tell them to put it away

WHAT! if its not needed in class it should be off and in their bag or confiscated till end of school /term.

 

[spanglechick]

so all hove muggers now know that every child in this new uniform i carrying an ipad in their bag. awesome.

 

[Sigmund Fraud]

oops

 

[weepiper]

http://www.lfgss.com/thread103411.html

wrong thread sig

 

[likesfish]

so all hove muggers now know that every child in this new uniform i carrying an ipad in their bag. awesome.

That was pointed out I guess find my iphone will be installed as standard or though just going to cash converters once a day might help as well.

 

[Winot]

Bring back slates that's what I say. The kids would love using them; I remember having one as a toy at home and loved the scratchy noise that the special tool made when you drew or wrote upon it. Then to wipe it off a damp cloth did all the deleting you needed.

Also if this was taken up nation wide it could lead to a revival of the Welsh slate industry.

Not slates, but mini-whiteboards in my kids' school. Same idea. Seems to work well.

 

[Dovydaitis]

WHAT! if its not needed in class it should be off and in their bag or confiscated till end of school /term.

my point exactly.....But you can't keep it till the end of school apparently as it's theft or something stupid.

 

[sim667]

We sometimes ask all students to put their phones in a box until the end of lesson if they're not paying attention, theres no problem with that afaik.

 

[spanglechick]

Our school confiscates phones used in lessons. End of day for first offence, rising to end of term for I think the fourth time?

 

[DRINK?]

corporate toy not a corporate tool if you ask me, imagine the same for use in school.... big drive to get people at our place all using them though can't do a 10th of what my laptop can...

 

[stuff_it]

If they really want them I don't see how they can't have a box of shared tablets (probably not ipads) that they get out for certain lessons then put away at the end of class.

 

[UnderOpenSky]

If they really want them I don't see how they can't have a box of shared tablets (probably not ipads) that they get out for certain lessons then put away at the end of class.

Indeed. Seems mad to use ipads when you could get a decent spec android tablet for less. The other thing with going android if schools do start adopting them, you can bet someone will make special toughened ones for the job, something apple is unlikely to do.

 

[weepiper]

Argh Edinburgh wants to do it too now

http://www.scotsman.com/edinburgh-e...puter-plan-for-all-edinburgh-pupils-1-2850200

Not clear from the article who's paying for them though

edit, actually yes it is, looks like the council wants to pay for them well blow me down

 

[Sigmund Fraud]

I work for an IT in education company so I will throw in my two penneth worth.

Schools want ipads and other apple kit for shall we say 'front of house' flashiness. There are a few schools who have gone down the very expensive road of apple everthing - servers, Adobde CS, macbooks, ipads etc...but in the most part schools buy apple kit because they feel pressured to look good in front of governors, parents and have some nice shots for the website. Almost every school I see apple kit in has it positioned near the reception area, so you can't miss it. We are reselling a lot of apple kit as window dressing.

If they really want them I don't see how they can't have a box of shared tablets (probably not ipads) that they get out for certain lessons then put away at the end of classIf they really want them

The current buzzwords in education IT provision are 'technology agnostic' solutions. Feeding into this will be cloud applications running on BYOD kit - mirroring this trend in industry. At this years BETT show the majority of exhibitors had suites of applications running in web browsers on wireless devices. Very forward thinking schools are aready on nexus 7s running office 365 and have invested in very robust wireless infrastructure. Same schools are thinking about families that can't afford to provide a £150 tablet and thinking of ways round this...but key to the idea of all this working is the kids owning the tablets, carrying them around all day and (hopefully) taking more care of them. If they don't £150 is less the end of the world than an ipad and classes will retain some desktops for the kids who forgot / broke / didn't charge tablets. Early days but the whole tablet thing has really shaken up the entire market.

 

[equationgirl]

Argh Edinburgh wants to do it too now

http://www.scotsman.com/edinburgh-e...puter-plan-for-all-edinburgh-pupils-1-2850200

Not clear from the article who's paying for them though

edit, actually yes it is, looks like the council wants to pay for them well blow me down

Council & schools. So what's getting cut?

 

[sim667]

I work for an IT in education company so I will throw in my two penneth worth.

Schools want ipads and other apple kit for shall we say 'front of house' flashiness. There are a few schools who have gone down the very expensive road of apple everthing - servers, Adobde CS, macbooks, ipads etc...but in the most part schools buy apple kit because they feel pressured to look good in front of governors, parents and have some nice shots for the website. Almost every school I see apple kit in has it positioned near the reception area, so you can't miss it. We are reselling a lot of apple kit as window dressing.

This is definately the case in my place. Its a bit like keeping up appearances rather than student achievements around here most of the time.

 

[Maurice Picarda]

I work for an IT in education company so I will throw in my two penneth worth.

Schools want ipads and other apple kit for shall we say 'front of house' flashiness. There are a few schools who have gone down the very expensive road of apple everthing - servers, Adobde CS, macbooks, ipads etc...but in the most part schools buy apple kit because they feel pressured to look good in front of governors, parents and have some nice shots for the website. Almost every school I see apple kit in has it positioned near the reception area, so you can't miss it. We are reselling a lot of apple kit as window dressing.



The current buzzwords in education IT provision are 'technology agnostic' solutions. Feeding into this will be cloud applications running on BYOD kit - mirroring this trend in industry. At this years BETT show the majority of exhibitors had suites of applications running in web browsers on wireless devices. Very forward thinking schools are aready on nexus 7s running office 365 and have invested in very robust wireless infrastructure. Same schools are thinking about families that can't afford to provide a £150 tablet and thinking of ways round this...but key to the idea of all this working is the kids owning the tablets, carrying them around all day and (hopefully) taking more care of them. If they don't £150 is less the end of the world than an ipad and classes will retain some desktops for the kids who forgot / broke / didn't charge tablets. Early days but the whole tablet thing has really shaken up the entire market.

This is really interesting. How does the tablet and BYOD adoption - and the iOS/Android mix - break down by primary and secondary? Is there any discernible difference in what foundation schools buy?

 

[magneze]

The Register has a decent take on this today.
http://theregister.co.uk/2013/03/26/ipads_in_school/

 

[sim667]

The Register has a decent take on this today.
http://theregister.co.uk/2013/03/26/ipads_in_school/

The bit about art at the bottom...... ipads (well tablets generally) would be excellent for our photography students doing research at their books at the desk in the classroom, rather than what we have to currently do, send them to the IT room, or the library (in a completely different building), especially when we have to stay in the photographic room because of the studio lights and darkroom chemicals which their classmates are using.

 

[spanglechick]

The Register has a decent take on this today.
http://theregister.co.uk/2013/03/26/ipads_in_school/

yup - that all sounds pretty much right to me.

design a tablet which is waterproof and shatterproof, and costs ballpark £100, and which will work seamlessly with the programmes teachers are already using... and then i'll subscribe to this idea. Until then, it causes many, many more problems than it solves.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

The Register has a decent take on this today.
http://theregister.co.uk/2013/03/26/ipads_in_school/

Subtitle "Why are we giving these playthings of the Devil to kids?"

So it's another Reg article about Apple, then. (Doesn't really get any better.)

 

[spanglechick]

The bit about art at the bottom...... ipads (well tablets generally) would be excellent for our photography students doing research at their books at the desk in the classroom, rather than what we have to currently do, send them to the IT room, or the library (in a completely different building), especially when we have to stay in the photographic room because of the studio lights and darkroom chemicals which their classmates are using.

but couldn't they do it with netbooks/laptops/other tablets?

 

[spanglechick]

Subtitle "Why are we giving these playthings of the Devil to kids?"

So it's another Reg article about Apple, then. (Doesn't really get any better.)

they may have an agenda - i don't really give a toss. I find the whole rabid fanboi stuff from both camps tiresome and pathetic... but the points raised in that article are, from an education perspective, entirely sound.

 

[sim667]

but couldn't they do it with netbooks/laptops/other tablets?

They could, but tablets are lighter, more maneovarable (spelling?), easier to store, and dont need cable running across the floor to plug in all the time, more intuitive (we've had loads of laptops before, the batteries only ever seem to last about an hour). Believe it or not we still have students who refuse to use computers because they dont understand them, but are quite happy to do the research on their phones and write it into their books..... Tablets are just scaled up phones tbh.

And we'd get mega kudos with ofsted, parents and governers.

 

[spanglechick]

fairynuff

 

[FridgeMagnet]

they may have an agenda - i don't really give a toss. I find the whole rabid fanboi stuff from both camps tiresome and pathetic... but the points raised in that article are, from an education perspective, entirely sound.

I think it's pretty awful tbh. The main issue I have with it is that a large chunk of the article depends on arguing that iPads are no good for schools because you can't teach IT, which to this guy means programming, on them. Like the only point of having a device in a school is so you can teach programming on it - and I'm quite biased in that direction myself, being a programmer and all. The money issue, which is the best one to oppose the use of them in schools, is oddly only a minor part of the piece, and it's peppered with factional bullshit about "consumer devices" / "toys" (yawn) and abuse of teachers, particularly IT teachers, who are apparently just uneducated dimwits seduced by evil Apple flash if they even sniff at anything like that, and always have been.

As an added point, anybody who says "ferals" is a cunt, which would be the case even if I thought the rest was sense.

 

[magneze]

I think it's pretty awful tbh. The main issue I have with it is that a large chunk of the article depends on arguing that iPads are no good for schools because you can't teach IT, which to this guy means programming, on them. Like the only point of having a device in a school is so you can teach programming on it - and I'm quite biased in that direction myself, being a programmer and all. The money issue, which is the best one to oppose the use of them in schools, is oddly only a minor part of the piece, and it's peppered with factional bullshit about "consumer devices" / "toys" (yawn) and abuse of teachers, particularly IT teachers, who are apparently just uneducated dimwits seduced by evil Apple flash if they even sniff at anything like that, and always have been.

As an added point, anybody who says "ferals" is a cunt, which would be the case even if I thought the rest was sense.

If there were credible non-anecdotal results that showed that giving tablets to kids for learning was useful then maybe this would be worth it. Are there?

I'm all for IT in schools but an tablet for every child? It's a waste of resources. I'd bet that there are schemes of comparable costs with proven results that may not be being deployed because some management half-wit has decided that tablets are "cool" and wants to spend the budget like that.

The trouble with schemes like this is that more uses will keep being found for the devices for more subjects, even if it doesn't really make sense, because it'll need to be seen as a success. That's where the damage happens IMO.

 

[magneze]

Oh, and I'm not being anti-Apple or anything. Apple and other IT suppliers are just doing what they have to do in this world - sell more stuff. This is more a criticism of the way IT decisions are made in the school system than anything.