You need a keyboard to do any serious writing. Students should write and they should never have gotten iPads in the first place. What are these teachers thinking?
A lot of people claim that the on-screen "keyboard" is a keyboard, so it's plausible that some people bought into that. Lack of keyboard is a non-starter for me for any serious device, but I lost count of the number of people that told me I would be able to touch-type on the iPad's "keyboard". (This should be obviously false, but in case it isn't, I'll point out that the apostrophe---which I've used five times so far in this post---isn't (6!) even on the main keyboard, and if you "touch-type" an apostrophe, you hit the enter key. Emergency backup keyboard maybe, but this is not usable as a touch-typing device.)
The apostrophe is inserted automatically by most spelling engines (even if they get it wrong some of the time). If not automatically added, you can put the apostrophes in pretty easily when you go back to review what you wrote (because you read what you wrote before you hit post, right?)
A keyboard is an obstruction when you just want to read, paint, or do non-text-entry work (and even for some text-entry work like dictation).
I found the best of both worlds was a Logitech "Ultrathin Bluetooth Keyboard": it attached to the iPad magnetically like a Smart Cover and provided a keyboard and stand when you needed it.
Ultrabooks don't work so well in portrait orientation. It's hard to type on them when they're sideways. On the other hand, my iPad + bluetooth keyboard weighed more (and was thicker than) than my 11" MacBook Air.
Ultrabooks are also harder to read on, since vertical space is at a premium. I prefer tall narrow pages, rather than short wide pages. The main orientation on an Ultrabook is "short, narrow" pages (a format that photographers love, but there's no talking sense to photographers and their fascination for "square" pictures).
Why impossible? The rules for when to use each is well-defined. We know this is true, because *we can recognise when the apostrophe is used incorrectly". Yes, you need to parse the sentence that contains the apostrophe, and yes, in some particularly odd sentences you can trip up a computer's understanding of the sentence's grammar, but current tech is capable of getting this right with very good accuracy.
Any time I use the word "ill", I need to explicitly tell the auto-correct not to change it to "I'll", regardless of context.
Also, given that "I see the house. I see its eaves." and "I see the house. I see it's tilted." have the same opening, I can't see how a computer could possibly decide correctly between the two.
Highly unusual, yes, but you need to have the full sentence available for parsing before you can make that decision. I would say that having a sentence change itself after having written part would be horrible for the user, and so autocorrect's knowledge is limited to what has been written before the questionable word, with no knowledge of what comes after.
I used to think that crowd-sourcing suggestions would be useful, but the it's / its mistake is so common that crowd-sourcing it would just contaminate the data.
But still, how hard would it be to have an algorithm that hits 95% accuracy?
There exists 'Yoga' notebooks [0], where you can rotate the screen all the way back. One can use it in portrait-orientation for reading, art, and similar tasks. Or one can use it just like a notebook PC.
My best-of-both-worlds has been a Surface Pro 2, although I'm aware that isn't a solution for everyone.
As for "The apostrophe is inserted automatically", there are two big problems with that: one, I turn off auto-spelling-correction systems, because I have good spelling and therefore they make incorrections more often than they make corrections; and two, more importantly, if I am touch-typing then I'm not just going to skip the apostrophe so it can be inserted later; I'm going to hit where the apostrophe belongs on the keyboard, and get a newline inserted instead. Which I'm guessing the autocorrect will not correct.
I can't type nearly as well on my iPad as on a normal keyboard, but I bet I can type better on my iPad than the average person on a normal keyboard. For most "real life" tasks you just need very basic typing skills. Plenty of people hunt and peck and still perform their requirements competently.
I wrote the first couple thousand words of a book on an iPad last summer and even using an external keyboard it as painful - you have to keep touching the screen to do things, which is a long stretch compared to using a trackpad or mouse
Which is why I laugh when people waste time or money on alternate input methods that involve more than wiggling my fingers very slightly. No one wants to use a Minority Report style interface for more than three seconds. There's a reason input methods (mouse and pushing discrete things on a flat surface) haven't really changed in nearly fifty years, even with the advent of computers-in-your-pocket.
I write a new book every 8 months or so. I use my iPad a lot for writing and editing. I use leanpub so my manuscripts live in Dropbox shared folders, and editing on an iPad is very convenient. Writing is more about thinking than entering text.
I'm wondering whether this is true for tablets since the distances are much greater. I personally had the experience that the skin on my fingertips got sore and dissolved from a lot of swiping (reading through several hundred pages in GoodReader).
Chromebooks are just much more useful than ipads in so many ways. I've recently finished getting our html5 web conferencing app working smoothly on chromebooks because pretty much all our educational customers are moving from laptops to chromebooks right now.
I was skeptical about chromebooks, but having owned one myself for the past few months I can now see the benefits, and I would recommend them over Windows laptops to anyone who is not a developer. For all intents and purposes chromebooks are essentially virus-proof and screwup-proof. (I'm sure you could get a virus or screw it up, but you would have to try damn hard!)
I think you're forgetting a few categories. Graphics designers. Architects. Gamers. Or basically anyone who needs to use software that hasn't been ported to a web-app (of which there are still many).
You are right on with that, there are still so many. I work in b2b and meet with a lot of business owners and office managers. So many small to medium sized business are dependent (and happy with) on their desktop software systems. iPads are great as nodes in some software cases, but essentially any industry where mass input is required I really don't see desktop / laptops going anywhere.
On the financial side, I work for a company that destroyed the entire desktop side of things. Within 5 years they destroyed all the competitors just by doing it all on the web and cutting admin and management costs.
With respect to hotels/booking systems, I'm tackling that one myself. All the software already out there is crap.
All the markets above apart from possibly medical are ripe for the taking.
This is always the biggest concern. The smaller firms use 3G based connections anyway as they're mostly on the road. The mid size guys have ADSL and 3G back up. The big guys use leased lines with SLAs.
We have 3 fully redundant data centres and a separate archival site. Its cheaper to pay us for the redundancy than fuck it up themselves. Their data is better in our hands as we centralise their DR strategy. Previously their stuff was stored in infected windows laptops with no backups and at best tapes being taken home by staff (unencrypted). They can access it all and export at will too.
(I once asked that question of a salesperson flogging eportfolios - student work for portfolio based qualifications stored entirely on their servers. There was no answer)
Source escrow - we release it to clients if we go bankrupt, all data is freely exportable and best of all we're rolling in cash so going bankrupt is going to require some seriously hard work.
We're trying not to be that bastard enterprise company if you know what I mean :)
Perhaps, though I have my doubts for many of them in the short term. Especially gaming: I'm a big fan of what Canvas and WebGL are doing and where things are going, but we're still not there.
Regardless, the parent comment was talking about buying Chromebooks today, and today there are still many people and companies that rely on desktop only software.
the software out there might be crap, but I can tell you it is not going to be replaced on an enterprise level with tablet devices. you are definitely right there are a ton of industries that are going to be totally shut out by what is going on but until then I don't see graphic designers and dozens of other industries using tablets to do their job.
I'm not talking about tablets. Tablets are a passing fad. They don't work well for productivity. They work reasonably well for phones and that is about it.
Enterprise is going to be Chromebook like devices.
I'm with you on that all the way. I don't see very many people lugging around computers with massive power supplys and complex raid arrays when most data lives on a cloud platform and most modern b2b apps aren't starving for RAM the way they used to.
Unless you develop specifically with Microsoft technologies, Chromebooks can easily be used by developers as well. You can easily dual boot or run crouton[0].
The problem is the browser on the iPad is nearly useless for anything but the most casual of browsing due to memory constraints on the device and the lack of virtual memory/swap.
I often run into situations where I literally cannot have just 2 tabs open in Safari and switch between them without losing everything I've typed into text fields since it runs out of memory and dumps the other tab.
I bought an iPad 2 on release, and still use it to this day. I've literally never run into the problem that you describe, and for a few months I did all of my work on it.
> I would recommend them over Windows laptops to anyone who is not a developer.
Really? Would you recommend it to your (hypothetical) 17 year old sister about to enter college, or 85 year old grandpa? Asking because I've never used a Chromebook, and this thread has made me very curious about them.
For the 85 year old grandpa, absolutely. I have an uncle (around 85) who went through multiple computers (edit: all Windows), and kept getting virus and other malware; he kept falling for sites that would advertise to "clean" his computer, and it just kept getting worse and worse as a result. The instant he switched to a ChromeOS-device, that all went away, and my tech-support burden also went away instantly.
His biggest issues with ChromeOS is printing (his printer of the time was not compatible with Google's cloud printing service), but after he bought a new printer that basically went away too.
I got one for my 25 year old brother (history teacher) as a replacement for his old Macbook. All he does is watch YouTube, browse Facebook, listen to Pandora, check his email, and use Google Drive.
He loves the device (an Acer C720) and his only complaint is that he can't run Skype. He switched to Hangouts.
For the average user I recommend Chromebooks without question unless they need Microsoft Office.
Skype is a pretty big dealbreaker for my grandparents, though. All of their elderly friends are on Skype and many have no idea what Hangouts (or Google Plus) are.
Hangouts is a deal-breaker for those who don't want the integration and privacy costs that come along with data from search, chats and email all integrated through a single provider. On top of that, hangouts doesn't even work in some parts of the world.
I bought Chromebook for my Dad who is 66 (who never used computer before) and my daughter who is 8. Both have been using chromebook regularly with little to no help from anyone else.
Fair warning. Chromebooks don't support Java browser plugins (arguably a plus) and some big colleges still need them for their student websites. Something that you'd want to check out first.
Mind if I ask which model? I had a chromebook 3 years ago and found it too slow to do anything beyond basic usage, and especially not software development. I have however heard good things about the Pixel.
Mine is an Acer C720 (I got that because it's what most of the schools were using). It's fast enough for anything I've used it for (web browsing, web conferencing + ssh client). Takes literally 6 seconds to boot up (or 1 second to wake from sleep). It seems a lot less sluggish than my 2-year old MacBook Pro - I think the SSD helps a lot.
I'm surprised at how much downmodding my comment is getting. Frankly, it really goes to show just how much of a bubble HN is in if people don't see 'gaming' as being something a 'typical user' does. Gaming is a huge market, full of non-technical users, and Windows is a strong market segment.
I mean, seriously, you've just likened gamers to being as rare as AutoCAD users.
You're reading too much into this, I was just throwing up other examples of other minority use cases.
But, if we assume using Steam (arbitrary) as the benchmark for being somewhat serious about gaming, then there are 75 million[0] computer gamers. Compare that to the number of Windows users[1] at 1.5 billion and they are a definite minority outside the realm of a 'typical computer user'.
And if I had to guess and why your comment is being down voted, it's probably because it comes across as a bit nitpicky as gaming very obviously isn't the focus of a Chromebook.
The original comment was 'recommend a chromebook for any windows user who isn't a developer'. It's hardly nitpicky to say that there are plenty of people who have a use case that this doesn't fit (business software users are another very large segment). Oh, well, if it's 'only' 75 million people, I guess they don't count - they're not true Scotsmen.
I live close to the rustbelt - far far away from the tech "bubble" and I can happily tell you that barring the undergrad kids at the university I have rarely seen a person use his/her laptop for gaming. So no, gamers are not "typical users" in my mind either.
In the UK I don't see anyone much bar some specialists playing games on PCs. It's done on xboxes and phones these days.
Even I as an ex-gaming, clan membered top 20 ngworldstats unreal tournament player who attended many a LAN party doesn't play a single game on a PC now and doesn't own a graphics card past an integrated Intel one...
Ah, the good old "there is no PC gaming anymore" argument, when PC gaming is still vibrant. As sehr links above, there are 75 million active Steam users, and Steam is not console-focused. Yet another No True Scotsman argument.
Edit: Numbers from a year ago show that Steam active users (65M) is higher than XBox Live users (48M), and while XBoxes aren't the only console, it's clearly just not true that 'gaming is [only] being done on xboxes these days', no matter how many leaderboards you were on back in the day.
Then why say "anyone but a developer"? The wording doesn't make sense if this usage of "everyone" means "everyone but designers, music producers, engineers, etc."
Chromebooks have hard disks (or more usually SSDs) so they can cache that data.
Also, would it not make more sense to automatically download parts of that 10GB of game data if/when you actually need it, rather than leaving it sitting on your hard disk? With today's broadband speeds that shouldn't be a problem.
I have witnessed this taking place in the enterprise sector as well. Without naming names, I've seen one large company here in Australia in particular move away from using iPad's to laptops because iPad's are too limited in what you can do, they don't offer the freedom of choice when it comes to different software options and date very quickly. From a cost point-of-view, you can buy a decent laptop for the same price as an iPad which will last for years.
I believe Apple's closed-source nature of pigeon-holing you into using applications only on their tightly controlled moderated app store is actually coming back to bite them. The fear of knowing eventually your iPad will no longer be able to use the latest and greatest version of iOS forcing you to buy a new iPad to install the latest applications developed for later iOS versions your iPad doesn't support meaning more money is also another factor that works against Apple.
Don't get me wrong, the iPad is a pretty great device for simplistic Internet browsing, checking your email and updating your social media, but if you want to do anything serious with it, the iPad shows its shortcomings.
I do enterprise architecture focused on client delivery for a living. The problem isn't the iPad, it's the enterprise. "iPad for all of the things" isn't a successful strategy. iPad isn't optimal any more than 4" thick corporate laptops were.
IT is used to hammer/nail solutions, End User Computing groups in enterprises tend to be focused on routine. Hell, many still call themselves "the desktop team", although that era is fading into the sunset. Along with the desktop sunset is the "desktops for the drones, bricks for the mobile drones, thin laptops for the execs" model.
An iPad is:
- A companion device for executives or others who travel throughout the office all day.
- A primary device for users whose computing needs are task oriented.
The executive use case is web access, document access, IM/chat, email. Think big blackberry with document reading capability. Biggest "transformational" use cases that drive satisfaction are making things like approval processes easy. The typical corporate VP VPNs in after dinner to approve stupid things in some system or via email. iPad lets them do that during conference calls instead of playing brick-breaker on a BlackBerry.
For task oriented workers, you can buy or write apps very easily that let folks get work done.
Example: Salesmen & Auditors need to share/present information with clients. iPad with file sync tool makes that easy, with better customer engagement.
Example: Field force needs to conduct inspections or complete checklists for reporting purposes. iPad makes it trivial to deliver forms, case notes, etc -- complete with geocoding and photo evidence. I've worked with industrial equipment vendors who deliver service documentation and procedures to customer engineers via iPad apps -- it avoids the need to deliver hundreds of pounds of binders via Fedex.
For both groups, the iPad offers a much better user experience vs. a corporate laptop. It just works. When they break, you overnight a new one to the employee, and MDM delivers replacement apps/data based on user ID automatically.
All of the above is true for Android tablets as well in some cases. But in regulated industries where you have lots of compliance requirements, providing supported Android solutions is onerous to both IT and the end users.
$399 laptops rarely last more than a year and are rarely robust enough for any type of work. I could make practically all the same criticisms about a $399 laptop as an iPad.
That being said, I don't know who would replace an laptop with an iPad in any sort of robust, non-mobile workflow, so I'm inclined to call BS on your statement.
Traditionally laptops have had far too many moving parts to be durable:
- 1 or 2 fans
- Keyboard
- display hinge
- Hard disk
- CD Drive
- often various flaps or expansion area
Whilst laptops are improving in this area, iPad have not had any of those from the beginning - it clearly makes for much more durable device. Additonally almost all laptops are high maintenance software wise with the possible exception of chromebooks.
iPads are really useful for kids in the K-3 or so age range, especially in the lower band. However, once the kids get to 4th and 5th grade they need to start writing more and that's where the full keyboard and ability to create content makes a Chromebook a better decision.
My company works on products that help kids increase cognitive skills and overcome issues such as auditory processing disorders and with the younger kids the touch aspect of tablets has made them superior to laptops either with mice or touchpads because touch is just a simpler motor skill for these younger kids. As they get older however this advantage starts to disappear.
Basically the trend I think that will play out is that you see a mix of devices with iPads predominantly at the lower grade bands and Chromebooks in the mid to upper grade bands. Chromebooks are nearly disposable at their price point, are incredibly easy to manage compared to Windows machines or iPads and do 95% or more of what kids need to use devices for at school.
Too bad the article does not really go in the insights as to why the IPads are being replaced by something else. It's just being hinted, but that's the main point they should have focused on the article.
-perceived as more of a game device than a work device
-inferior cloud capabilities to a Chromebook (harder to issue replacement device)
-harder to use with some educational web applications
-cost
I never really understood the "tablets for schools" thing. Laptops are better on a desk than on a lap, whereas you might prefer a tablet when you don't have a desk: on the bus, on the couch, in bed...
Maybe we just need more laptops with touchscreens.
> Maybe we just need more laptops with touchscreens.
I'm probably very old school (no word pun intended :) ) but I still don't really get much of why you'd need a touchscreen in the first place. I don't see tons of people drawing with their ipads or on their laptop/tablets, most of the time you just use fingers as a mouse replacement - yeah, it's pretty useful for browsing, but for most of the other applications a touchscreen feels very much "nice to have", i.e. not necessary at all. But again, I'm not in the target population.
When I've used my mom's Transformer Prime, I've found the touchscreen/keyboard combo much more convenient than my own traditional laptop's screen/trackpad combo.
A USB/Bluetooth mouse can be helpful, but there are many situations where that is inconvenient.
That said, if you are a wiz with keyboard shortcuts it won't make much of a difference. But most people aren't.
Unless the students have a mouse plugged in to their chromebooks, it's more of a comparison between a touchscreen and a touchpad. If the comparison is between two methods where you're dragging a finger around, I think that a touchscreen makes sense to have. You lose the precision of the cursor (and the convenience of the buttons), but you have a more interactive experience, which I imagine is especially convenient for younger students.
I agree, I've never seen the need for a standard touch-screen laptop, it seems like the touch-screen is in an inconvenient position since the keyboard sticks out of the computer. That said, I've been eyeing touch-screen laptops that can fold into a tablet form-factor for taking notes in class. It's one of the areas where I find I simply can't type in most notes I take. But, paper's still cheaper and works pretty well.
For browsing instead of touching the screen at arms' length I guess the mouse is the most practical thing to use to scroll down in a page - especially those mice with touch sensors.
As for laptops that can transform into tablets, I guess this makes more sense to have touch-screen anyway.
By the way are you saying that you can not type in class using a keyboard? Is there a reason for that?
Honestly I've used touch-screen laptops before and using the mouse is just more convenient because you have your hands down there to type 90% of the time anyway. You can get 'used' to using the touch-screen for certain things but for regular laptop usage I've never seen a reason to.
I can type in class if I wanted too (Though, typing it a bit loud, it'd be kinda annoying for my other class-mates). The issue is actually entering in my notes. For example, this summer I took Linear Algebra, and most of the class involves lots and lots of matrices. It's easy to write them on paper, but setting up the formatting correctly to have something readable on the computer is easier said then done. There were also a few classes where we had examples involving drawing two ovals next to each-other with dots inside and then drawing lines between the dots. I'd simply be fussing with my computer to much to actually pay attention and get all the information down when trying to draw out stuff like that. Using a simple notepad is just hands-down better. A tablet interface with a pen would be perfect though, because I could write all my notes down just like a note-pad into the computer, and then go back and reorganize them fairly easily.
I'd rather just buy a laptop that can fold into a tablet because I have no real need or want to have two separate devices considering I probably won't use tablet mode that much.
> -inferior cloud capabilities to a Chromebook (harder to issue replacement device)
Also harder to share a single device among multiple users (related to the cost issue mentioned already) since unlike Chromebooks or most traditional laptops, iOS devices seem unlikely to ever support real multiple-user usage with profiles, logins and everything else.
> "you might prefer a tablet when you don't have a desk"
... on the floor, in the hallway, working with a group where you're passing work samples around. All use cases I regularly saw with my 4th graders last year.
That said, for the cost of iPads for one classroom the previous year, we got enough chromebooks for the whole grade level last year. Cost is a huge factor, particularly in a school like mine (97% free/reduced lunch; surplus budget was hard to come by.)
I visited a middle school where all the students had laptops. The teachers would instruct the students to put their laptops in 1 of 3 positions: closed, open facing the student, and open facing the teacher.
The "open facing the teacher" seems strange, but it was incredibly useful because the teacher could quickly verify that all the students were looking at the right thing. It seemed like they turned their computers around 7 times during the class, and so it has the added benefit of not letting them screw around on the laptops.
I don't know if this is standard practice, but it worked well, and would be more cumbersome with a tablet.
The article mentioned several reasons - price, ease of pushing apps, ease of using new one if current one breaks, keyboards, being perceived as more work device than the iPad (less distracting and general perception of the iPad as a gaming/entertainment device).
Yeah, I know, but still I felt this was very light. I'd like to hear more about what kind of things they do differently with a Chromebook vs an iPad, how kids react to a more PC-like device vs a tablet (not just perception, but usage impressions and perceived benefits), how educators use both devices, etc... I was expecting a bit more.
Maybe for your use these are light reasons but for public schools these are pretty sound reasons. Cost, manageability and keyboards specifically are enough to make a decision.
So the schools are discovering that iPads are a toys rather than work devices? What a surprise!
Notice how all those teachers were "at first disappointed that they weren't getting an iPad". Really? If you choose the tool based only on its coolness factor, you'll hardly get the right one, especially for education.
I'm seeing this change in the workplace as well. I work in a large IT shop and have about 15-20 meetings a week with different departments. Until the past 6 months, everyone was sporting iPads with some sort of bluetooth keyboard case. Now it's ultrabooks or Airs. I used to carry a tablet/keyboard combo as well, but over time the ultrabook became more appealing because of several factors, namely, the keyboard, screen size, and Office suite. Battery life and portability are also now acceptable for all day mobile use on the ultrabook. I don't think there will ever be a tablet compelling enough to switch back. Even the Surface (to me) has too many compromises over a lightweight ultrabook with a usable keyboard.
Its because workplaces/schools are centered around producing, and tablets have a terrible user experience for producing. They're fine for consuming, but that's not what people do most of the time in offices/schools.
While I was working in the Google Apps group a few years ago, we would bring in groups of teachers for focus groups and feedback on upcoming features for Apps.
My biggest takeway from those meetings was that educators have a really hard job, much harder than even what educated people assume. On top of actually being a useful educational tool, there are a ton of other boxes to check in order to get any kind of technology into the classroom:
* Compliance with the myriad of federal, state, and local laws surrounding education procurement, student data, what can and can't happen on government property and around children, and cash-strapped educational IT departments.
* Able to be simple enough for any educator to use and maintain, but also have enough features to add value as a educational tool.
* Bureaucracies and procurement policies that run the gamut: administrators, local government, state government, federal government, parents, the school board, the PTA, the teachers union, etc.
* Extreme price sensitivity.
* Long life: Even rich districts struggle to get budgets to upgrade technology regularly, and by regularly I mean every 2-4 years.
* The mechanics of running a classroom filled with children ... who would often rather spend a class period figuring out how to bypass a firewall to get to facebook, rather than half a class period writing.
Getting by all these requirements, and reaching educators at the end, requires a concerted, long running effort on the part of the company. We were lucky that Google had a running a edu program for Apps/Chrome and made it a priority. Consequently a lot of the core features of the offering are targeted specifically at educators:
* Strong central administrative control. In order to use your chromebook at all, you really need to log into your web account. It's only able to install things locally (and bypass administrative restrictions) if you really work hard to get around it. This helps get the tools approved by IT departments and administrators. Compare this to the fleets of windows machines or ipads that lots of IT departments have to maintain, where they basically solve the problem by re-imaging the machine regularly to wipe out locally installed apps.
* Price. Edu Google Apps accounts are essentially free. Compared to other computing solutions, Chromebooks are cheap and get the job done.
* Tools that both educators and students can use. The biggest selling point on apps is actually calendar. Gmail is great but most schools already have a email system in place. A calendar that syncs, has proper access control, is central to your school, and free, saves educators a lot of hassle. Once a teacher is hooked on calendar as a "gateway drug", it's not hard to take the leap. Docs, gmail, chrome, and chromebooks all have the same login, contact list, and access control. Being able to use these tools makes it easier to pass this knowledge onto the student.
* Maintenance: A student can work on one chromebook, drop it in water, and then immediately log onto another one and have all his work. Also for a educator in the classroom, it's easy to understand that refreshing the page will fix the problem 90% of the time.
* Shared home / school: A student can log onto his apps account at home, and get all his state as if he were still at school.
* Platform cross compatibility: Apps can work well on a Chromebook, but also will do a best-effort attempt on IE9 on windows. Apple's core philosophy has never tilted that way. This isn't just to adapt to varying levels of tech in classrooms, but also for taking the tools home.
* And finally, lots of bells and whistles that often get overlooked: ADA compliance, language support, student data compliance, etc.
All that being said, for young children, an iPad is an irreplaceable educational tool. I doubt any Google product has the kind of widespread appeal as iPads do among young children. Maybe YouTube, but even that is a stretch.
> All that being said, for young children, an iPad is an irreplaceable educational tool.
IMO, for young children, the iPad is an irreplaceable brain-destroying tool. It's scary when you see a 2-year old glued to a TV screen playing a cartoon, completely detached from reality. Even scarier when they play with an iPad, then try swiping picture book pages and finally throw the book away for being boring. (Having said that, I also find it scary how much time teens spend oversharing on Facebook.)
Although I hated it at the time, I'm actually infinitely grateful that my parents limited the time I could spend on the computer when I was a kid (30mins/day, no GameBoy). It made me develop in ways that I never could using just a computer, and made me appreciate "real life".
I had exactly opposite experience. I'm infinitely grateful for unlimited, unsupervised computer time since I was 9. Without that, I wouldn't have picked up programming at 13, read as much as I did and be the person I am now.
Also, "real life" is overrated. A lot of things that technophobic people spend their time on in "real life" feels like total nonsense to me - especially all that gossips, interpersonal dramas and poking their noses into lives of others.
I always pictured it as a difference between soap opera vs. space opera (like TNG), where most people seem to live in the former, while I strive to live in the latter.
I was given a lot of access to the computer, but for a long time that access was restricted in terms of what I could use the computer for. Ultimately, I wasted a lot of time messing around on computers because I wasn't able to do what I wanted (I didn't have admin privileges). It was only when I got my own computer that I was able to really excel and start to do things that really interested me.
Also, I agree as well that there's a sort of zen in mostly minding your own business and not over communicating via social networks. Compared to many of the people I know, I socialize very little. However, I find I am much happier by having less frequent but very rich times with friends, compared to frequent but low-quality time. There's a saying "absence makes the heart grow fonder" and I find that's true for socializing in general.
I had both experiences. When I was at my mom's house, technology was heavily limited, and in the hour a day I was allowed online, they were hovering over my shoulder the whole time. When I was at my dad's house, unlimited access.
I definitely gained more benefit from the unlimited access. However, I've always been a person who has been both very inquisitive and strongly ethical. I self-censored a lot of smut from myself online. I also used my time constructively. At age 12, figured out the ins and outs of audio codecs (I wanted to get audio files from my favourite NES/SNES games but wasn't allowed Napster, so I figured out how to convert MIDIs to WAVs with WinAmp). Started learning about emulation, first as a way to play video games and later as a programming exercise. I stumbled across the Earthbound hacking project as my introduction to assembly. Learned how to rip videos from video games. Fucked around with Blender for 3D modeling, and made a few shitty Flash programs. Eventually wired up my computer into the home theatre system. I played with network sniffing tools and taught myself the details of TCP/IP, wireless, mail protocols, etc. I played with various linux boot disks (Slax, Ubuntu, Arch) just to see what happened, figured out how to do sysadmin stuff from that.
I did all of this before I turned 17, and I did it specifically because I had unlimited, unsupervised access to computers and the internet. I can definitely see that perhaps others wouldn't be quite as driven as I was (my brother and sister, same opportunities, but they just fucked around on Facebook/youtube/etc). But at the same time, I think there is a certain subset of people (such as myself) who drastically benefit from unrestricted internet access.
And, TeMPOraL, I'm right with you. Most of the things that technophobic people spend their time on in "real life" feels like total nonsense. My mom, stepdad, and extended family still mock me for wasting all my time online, and yet they spend an ungodly amount of time watching shitty TV all day.
Unfettered access to a computer at 9yo is quite different to the same at 3yo. Particularly if that 9yo was accessing the computer more than about 10 years ago.
I picked up programming as well. However, I also played outside, talked to people, did well at school... I have nothing against the image of the stereotypical herbivore men/"neckbears", but I have goals in my life that I don't think I would be able to accomplish with a computer, goals like sports, travels, girlfriend/wife/family, ...
My brother, on the other hand, only played computer games. For him, the restriction was even more essential.
Also, I agree that dramas and gossip are not an interesting or worthy part of "real life" - however, gossiping and drama over facebook is even worse, because it can haunt you forever.
Fair enough, but I don't see a reason to single out computers as something dividing one's goals between good (not related to computers) and bad (related to computers). I personally don't care about sports or typical tourism, and I'm a bit tired of being called a "no-life" for that.
> however, gossiping and drama over facebook is even worse, because it can haunt you forever
Yes, and the people who do that gossiping and dramas tend to be the same that tell you to "get a life". People's behaviour on social networks reflect their behaviour in real-life interactions.
I didn't mean "real life" as something opposed to "living in the network" (whatever that means). I meant "real life" your non-geeky friends tell you to get. Also "real lifers" tend to use social media much more than "nerds" (posting mostly photos of food, babies and such nonsense).
Exactly. Saying that Facebook is not real life is like saying that phones calls, radio and letters are not real life. Looking at the volume of letters they sent, people like Abraham Lincoln must have had absolutely no life.
If you think about it, (fiction) books are even less of real life. It's a fictional world invented by someone else, and you get engrossed in a book and don't talk to anyone.
But books are old and socially admired, so no-one who complains about Facebook also complains about books.
Ham-radio is real life as well and I know a lot of radio amateurs who are very reasonable and intelligent people, and who owe a lot of their skills to their radio hobby.
It's this stupid meme in the society that doing "technology" is somehow "less real" or impoverishing in comparison to things like sports or tourism. But why would it be so?
Facebook is lots of people putting on a charade. I've played, too. You put on a fake persona that is your maximally awesome self. Every like, share, or comment, is done with calculated forethought and with the result in mind. How will people interpret this? Will it project the right image of me? Will my net opinion be increased or decreased among my Facebook friends' by this action? Is it compatible with current and/or future employers?
Of course, there are probably people who don't care what other people think about them on Facebook and are just totally open. But I don't know any of those people.
> You put on a fake persona that is your maximally awesome self.
Well, that's what you do. Others just write what they think and share what they life, caring only slightly to stay within the cultural norms. Exactly like in real life. There are lots of people who are calculating how they look, what they say, etc. in physical world as well. "How will people interpret this? Will it project the right image of me? Will my net opinion be increased or decreased among my friends' by this action? Is it compatible with current and/or future employers?" are they questions they ask themselves all the time.
Sure they do in certain contexts. But every action on Facebook except for private messages has to be this way because of the nature of the platform. If "real life" encompasses "every human experience" then there are many many opportunities in which you can be honest about yourself, be candid, be true to your own whims and desires, without giving much consideration as to what other people will think about it. Facebook is then a subset of real life where certain types of facades and maneuvering are the rule.
"My biggest takeway from those meetings was that that educators have a really hard job, much harder than even what educated people assume"
I appreciate all the things that cause the job of teachers to be very hard. But as someone whose wife is a teacher, let me just throw out there the reason the job is really hard is the 'kids' and the 'parents'. It's the people.
Kids who don't want to be taught and the parents (some who care 'too' much and some who 'do not' care)...
This culture is somewhat prevalent in the UK as well. There is a self destructive portion of society who tend to see education as a negative thing. Hell some of them dont even have a book in their house. I don't get it myself.
With respect to the parents who care too much, I'm forever making my kid's teachers' lives hard because the education they receive is very variable and I would noy be fulfilling my job as a parent if I didn't raise it every time :)
I've tried but they always seem to have their own agendas, usually the popularity of the child and playground politics rather the education. Slightly depressing.
> All that being said, for young children, an iPad is an irreplaceable educational tool.
This has been shown to be true for children with disabilities, but from what I've read nobody could document any educational improvement for the rest.
Isn't it interesting that MIT, in their open courseware videos, shows advanced programming taught with chalk and blackboard? (Of course, those aren't young children, but still...)
Blackboard is for the lecturer; it is easier to write formulas or draw diagrams interactively than with any digital tool. Plus the size; you can dump a lot of information without having to scroll anywhere.
You might be underestimating how helpful they are for the student. I would prefer seeing board work any day to a slide deck. Board work imposes a natural rate control, and seeing things cancel out makes mathematical concepts easier to internalize. Board work lets you see the sausage being made. Slide decks typically have the sausage on a platter with a neat little bow, I say typically. For me the best case scenario is that the instructor works thing out on the board, and has handouts of latex notes for students to take.
> Strong central administrative control. In order to use your chromebook at all, you really need to log into your web account. It's only able to install things locally (and bypass administrative restrictions) if you really work hard to get around it. This helps get the tools approved by IT departments and administrators. Compare this to the fleets of windows machines or ipads that lots of IT departments have to maintain, where they basically solve the problem by re-imaging the machine regularly to wipe out locally installed apps.
IMO this is completely backwards. IT staff which regularly re-images the machine is doing a much better job wrt. to education. You can't get anyone to become a competent computer user if you don't let them to poke around and break things. The only thing you get by locking everything up is producing people who are afraid to install anything on their machine and call their "friendly computer whiz" every time (yup, been on a receiving end of many of those calls).
Yeah, I learned a ton of stuff by breaking the computers in high school. We even went so far as to open the tower and pop out the BIOS battery while the teacher was out for a few minutes to reset the BIOS password so we could use a boot floppy to circumvent the imaging software. I don't even remember why we did it, I think it was just a Mallory "because it's there" kind of thing.
Now I have trouble installing a custom OS on my own hardware :) I'm not sure this is an improvement.
Edit: Now I remember. I wanted to put a little smiley face on the Win95 boot image. I succeeded.
No, the computers they're handing out to the kids to do work on need to be locked down. There's no way that a school district would have time and resources to help every kid work through fixing the issues on their computer after they've bollixed something up. And they don't want the kids using a broken computer as an excuse for not being able to do their homework.
What they should add though is a IT admin/hacker elective that would be like shop class. They'd have a bunch of hacker computers that anyone in the class can have root access and would be allowed to try things out.
> There's no way that a school district would have time and resources to help every kid work through fixing the issues on their computer after they've bollixed something up.
In other words, "there's no way a school district would have time and resources to do their job of facilitating knowledge acquisition". I say yes, let kids break their computers. Make them feel that they do whatever they want with those machines and the worst thing that will happen if they break something will be an mildly unhappy IT guy who'll fix the problem anyway. Let kids play in a sandbox.
I remember reading somewhere that an effective environment for learning is the one in which you can do whatever you want without serious consequences. This claim matches experience.
> And they don't want the kids using a broken computer as an excuse for not being able to do their homework.
The solution is very simple - don't accept that excuse. Make it clear that if the computer stops working, they're to bring it to a school IT person, and that it's in their best interest to be able to do their homework.
Great post. As a programmer who's also worked IT in education, most of this rings very true.
Can you clarify what you meant here, though? I haven't yet used Chrome OS in this capacity, and I'm a little hazy on where the security boundaries lie when it comes to centralized administration.
> It's only able to install things locally (and bypass administrative restrictions) if you really work hard to get around it.
You obviously haven't tried to do your math homework on iPad. Give it a try and may be you would replace the word "irreplaceable" in your this statement:
All that being said, for young children, an iPad is an irreplaceable educational tool.
It's a crying shame that for the people in charge of purchasing, the most important criteria seems to be keeping the poor saps using the devices from doing what they want with them.
I beg to differ. From my memories in school, "doing what I wanted" had more education value than sticking to what teachers wanted me to. Heck, education is about exploring, experimenting and playing with things. The exact things schools nowdays try to prevent kids from doing.
Yes but you are different. A lot of children, even with proper guidance, don't want to learn.
Often times, even hard-working, smart people will phrase their learning pursuits entirely as a means toward financial, sexual, or social success. And outside of school, there is little or no independent learning. If there isn't a test and a deadline, they'd rather be doing something else.
I don't think this is a statement that applies to simply children. I think it applies to almost everyone from every culture.
I think it's a bug, not a feature. People don't like doing things for no perceived reason whatsoever, and that's what schools look like for many kids. They remove all the fun they can find and replace it with discipline, standardized tests and the idea that one day you'll find it useful (not for anything worthwhile, mind you, but to get to that thing called "college", which will help you get that thing called "job", which is what adults do to have money for food).
I'm not surprised people don't want to learn - because they are not allowed to learn in order to build rockets, or have fun with the subject, or do something rewarding. Instead they are told to learn for points that will give them more points, that will give them more points, that will maybe give them money one day.
Young kids go to school because that's what you do. They see their friends and have lunch and sit in classrooms with teachers they totally hate or completely adore. Maybe High School students think more about it, but not kids.
Those devices often block literally everything out of small box, whether in-class or out of class. Yes, blocking the facebook while in class makes perfect sense. There is zero reason to make big deal about them reading facebook, wikipedia or random blogs in the evening.
> filled with children ... who would often rather spend a class period figuring out how to bypass a firewall to get to facebook, rather than half a class period writing
One could argue that the learning process around bypassing a firewall might be much more useful education for their future than the standard curriculum
My high school spent thousands of dollars on 30-40 iPads which we "used" primarily in Spanish class in my senior year. Overall an enormous waste of money and time not limited to problems connecting to the spotty Wi-Fi. Our teacher was not aware of any good apps that she could tie into lessons so the iPads were used primarily as a web browser for a crappy textbook website.
Virtually nothing was accomplished for a semester with the iPads. The IT director at my school was right when he referred to the devices that were supposed to be a revolution in education as "toys".
It sounds like your IT director didn't support the teachers use of the iPads well (or the WiFi for that matter). Reading Fraser Speirs' blog (http://www.speirs.org) about how he did a 1:1 program for his school (he was the computer teacher and IT professional there), it's clear that you can't just hand the iPads out and that's it.
If you don't put some effort and funding into application selection, you're going to have teachers using the iPads and ChromeBooks to teach kids lessons from free & crappy web sites that have no idea how to present lessons in a clear, concise manner with correct spelling and grammar.
If the person responsible for a particular technology isn't going to spend time supporting colleagues using that technology, they're basically abandoning the technology.
There are a multitude of language training resources on the App Store alone. I'm sure that someone in the US education system has done a review of various course material available through the App Store and Apple University (plus all the online courses) and determined which ones are best in particular brackets of student age, course price, etc.
That a teacher was resorting to crappy web sites rather than the best available resources indicates that there were problems outside the technology environment: I'm thinking either management support or financial.
When the deal comes to educational practices, a device mostly created for the consumer (as in content consumer) practices does seem to fit the bill at first glance, doesn't so in the long run.
I have used ipads, e-readers, laptops and desktop computers nearly all my life. I was one of the first students who were taking his notes with a palm tungsten e2 with a stowaway keyboard talking to it via IR.
The problem here is as same as the palm's however. I HAD to buy an external keyboard to take notes or write stuff. Even though palm had ingeniously offered a "handwriting method" to take fast notes. But lecture notetaking is a different beast.
"Students saw the iPad as a “fun” gaming environment, while the Chromebook was perceived as a place to “get to work.” And as much as students liked to annotate and read on the iPad, the Chromebook's keyboard was a greater perk — especially since the new Common Core online testing will require a keyboard"
Actually, come to think of it, a dream machine invented for the educational purposes should have three things as essential:
- a turnable (and good) cam to record the lecture with sound
- a comfy keyboard
- A 13' IPS screen. 13 inch is the maximal range. Although screen real estate is a brilliant thing, lugging it out in a huge backpack with charger apparatus does not make it worthwhile.
I think iPads could be great for K12 education, but only if they are used effectively. You can't just take the current curriculum and stuff it with technology hoping to make it better. You have to pair the content and methodology with the technology. It seems like they are just buying iPads/Chromebooks/Whatever, shoving them in classrooms, and hoping they make a difference.
It might be more effective to start with iPads outside the classroom, not inside. Inside the classroom they have access to a teacher. No current or near-future technology is going to be able to replace the benefits of a teacher.
But at home, many kids are stuck with boring paper homework assignments and static, old (sometimes 10+ yr) textbooks. If we replaced paper homework with interactive questions, and textbooks with engaging iBooks (or other iBooks like) textbook[1], that could make a real difference.
Apple had created great interactive textbook creation software, and it seems great paired with iTunes U. However, there don't seem to be great books coming from it. Apple probably should have made many demos (instead of just 1) to give educators and the public an idea of the potential interactive homework and textbooks could have on student engagement.
> However, there don't seem to be great books coming from it. Apple probably should have made many demos (instead of just 1) to give educators and the public an idea of the potential interactive homework and textbooks could have on student engagement.
They should have started a textbook publisher, incubated it for a year or two, and then spun it off (even letting it be purchased by an existing publisher if that made sense).
K12? Maybe K-3. You're not allowed to program or share programs on iPads by Apple's rules so once any of your kids show an interest in programming or if you want to teach programming you'll have to get them something else.
actually this is an old myth. You can program on an iPad (there are even programming apps) though you can't run executables and it's far from good enough.
There are alternative solutions, like Scratch at the MIT Media Lab, which is now available on the iPad to teach programming.
However the vast majority of K12 education is not programming.
My high school was either the first or one of the first public schools with PDAs (Palm Pilots) over a decade ago and it ran into the same problem. Not only was their not curriculum for them, but my guess is that half of the teachers simply didn't use them in classes at all.
I agree that the technology needs to trickle into the schools by way of the teachers (I think that's along the lines of what you were getting at) before anything new really gets adopted.
In terms of what has measurable effects in the classroom there is a very rigorous study by Hattie: "A synthesis of over 800 meta analyses relating to achievement"
In it, things like computer assisted learning, simulation and games, testing etc have a very low effect. Primary is things like feedback and other things that come down to the teacher. A partial list is contained here: https://www.det.nsw.edu.au/proflearn/docs/pdf/qt_hattie.pdf
That said, a big theme for what works seems to be personalization, custom feedback, custom progress, and computers should be great for this. It'll still be hard to beat a great teacher: in grade 1 alone there are close to 20 different reading levels that each student needs to be supervised through on their own pace
My startup makes PDF annotation software for chrome & chromebooks ( http://www.notablepdf.com ) and we've been getting a huge amount of interest from schools deploying large numbers of chromebooks. Dell even stopped selling their chromebook to individual purchasers since they are struggling to keep up with demand from the education sector [1]
It's a very interesting space at the moment especially with Google Classroom on the way.
There is a saying in education that if something new comes in and threatens the education system - the system will co-opt and neutralize it so that it does not threaten the system.
For example, when computers first started being used in classrooms, they were usually used by progressive teachers in a single classroom (they could usually only afford one). The school 'neutralized' it by moving them to a dedicated classroom and teaching the students secondary skills like typing, rather than using it to create with/explore with as part of the curriculum. This continues to present day - with app literacy (Powerpoint) substituted for typing (usually).
iPads are an interesting case. They are not necessarily coming in from the grassroots (the teachers) but from the top-down. Teachers, in some cases, are the ones fighting the iPads. In fact, most of my educator friends, view the iPad 'magical device' moniker with disdain. It's not so much the walled garden as the hype.
This co-opting is also happening with the Maker Movement in schools. As soon as the Maker Movement moves beyond the single classroom, questions start getting asked. Why do you need a dedicated space? What is this Maker thing? How does making things align to Common Core (no joke).
One of the problems of using Khan Academy self-styled learning is that it is very hard to map Khan Academy lessons to traditional student learning objectives (as mapped out in 1.2.3.4 level detail by the school district or state). Without explicit mappings, it's a hard(er) sell.
It is important to realize that Apple products are accessible luxury products. They are used just as much for their functionality as for status signals. Do you know a person who bought one and is using it for reading email? Yeah I know a bunch.
The paradox in accessible luxury is that unlike other goods -- cars, homes, clothes. The wealthy don't necessarily get higher end devices. You'd have to be a multi-billionaire to have your own iPhone or iPad designed, built, tested. Otherwise chances are even if you are Warren Buffet the highest end smart phone you'll own will be an Apple one. And the paradoxical thing is that someone poor living on food stamps can also probably swing getting the same model with 2 year contract.
So people will shell extra money to own one to show off status. (Not saying everyone does this, it is just some do). This then extends to school districts as well. At some point it doesn't matter about features or functionality someone "up there" with a check-book decided "we are getting the best technology out there for the money. Hey Joe what is the highest end coolest technology out there? Hmm well my kids all got iPads for Christmas... -- Ok we are getting iPads for everyone.".
It's also partly convenience. iPads are seen as 'good' (whether justifiably so or not), and rather than pore over the specs and weigh the pros and cons, many will just get an Apple device and be done with it, if the budget allows for this.
I actually switched to Apple a few years ago for precisely that reason. I used to have a desktop pc that I manually updated, but I found that it took too much time. I then switched to a Dell laptop that was pretty decent. But finding the right model took a while.
When I finally got annoyed at reinstalling windows every year (or so) and when I needed a new laptop anyways, rather than doing all the research again, I just went for a MacBook. The convenience was a major factor in this decision, and after spending a week or two getting used to 'this weird operating system', I've been happy with Macs ever since, despite the fact that I might be able to get cheaper/better with a bit more work.
I guess in a roundabout way status did play a role ('apple just works').
The one that fits their requirements, probably not a tablet at all. Something easy to centrally manage.
In general. The point was that signalling of status is _one_ of the reasons Apple products are bought for. There are of course other reasons, but I wasn't talking about those.
I agree with the both of you! I prefer reading on my iPad, but I was often annoyed at how annotations were either stuck on the thing, or harder to make.
GoodReader (iOS) is decent for making and syncing pdf annotations. It's still not as easy as a laptop, but sometimes the benefit of reading on an iPad is worth it for me.
For epub files, however , I almost always exclusively use my iPad. There's an app called Marvin that allows you to instantly select (or select + highlight) a sentence, and grow the selection with one tap. I find that almost more convenient than my laptop. It also syncs with Calibre, although that can take a bit of work to set up properly.
I do the same actually. Can't beat a pencil and cheap HP AIO printer/scanner. I tend to annotate errors in books more than anything - it seems recently that publishers have lost the ability to review books...
It's ok for reading websites on the couch. Less cumbersome than a laptop. Also for reading books. They're devices for consuming content, not creating it.
Maybe I got brainwashed by their video, but I indeed think that a laptop like the Dell Latitude 13 (http://youtu.be/rq5dqKWymP8) is much better than a tablet.
There is a keyboard, a network activity light on the back of the screen, removable battery, spill resistance, compatible with the Dell Mobile Computing Cart to store and charge them, the laptop can open flat and has a touchscreen so it can do all what a windows table can, 8H battery life, USB ports, they claim that it's sturdy. But most important, there is a keyboard! And with the new features of windows 8 where you can reset the computer with factory settings with or without keeping your data, that's good, but still not as good as not being able to have any software problem like on an iPad.
I really like the network indicator on the back so that the student is immediately spotted when going online, nice idea.
The article is wrong to call it "Common Core online testing". Common Core is short for Common Core State Standards [CCSS], and thus are a standard, not curriculum or tests. Tests and curricula can be Common Core-aligned, but the standards do not outline any specific test.
With that in mind, there are different CCSS tests out there from the usual corporations that produce school tests. States/school boards adopting CCSS are free to buy into any test that is CCSS aligned. Some are online, others are traditional.
Inevitably, schools will go with online tests because they will appear less expensive in terms of administering and grading. The efficacy of administering computerized tests and how that affects the outcome (particularly for writing and math) will be the new cultural bias for tests.
The two main consortia developing Common-Core-targeted testing are both aiming for computer-only. Among other things, it enables new question types that are still objectively scorable but have more flexibility than the traditional single-selection multiple choice question. (Although, all of the new question types that I know about are mouse/pointer-based, not requiring keyboards, so maybe they're talking about some other thing. Perhaps the subjective-scoring portions (i.e. the essays)?)
For the first 1-3 years, I believe, states/districts will have the option of paying extra for paper versions of the test. That's only a transitional option, though, and paper will be deprecated in favor of the online test. (One exception -- paper tests will be available indefinitely for students with special needs who can't take the test online.)
One of the big problems with online tests that we're seeing in some of our school districts is that many students don't have great typing or computer skills. Even though most students can probably type well enough to complete the tests, the extra mental challenge of typing is likely to artificially lower scores. So a test that purports to measure math skills might actually be measuring a combination of math skills + computer skills, and a school that's worked really hard to teach math might get docked because students haven't had a lot of computer experience.
This doesn't necessarily mean that online testing is a bad idea, but just one of the many things that we need to take into account.
I'm all for more computer based assessments. But the idea of taking a math test on a computer sounds horrible. I remember MyMathLab in college. you could have the right answer, but if you did not enter it in the precise way that it wanted, then it was wrong.
Our business is built around a Chrome Extension that provides interactive Google Apps Training. At Synergyse we have seen massive adoption of Chromebooks in the education market, which represents a majority of our valued clients. In fact we have grown the business to over 1 million subscribers in 1 year. https://medium.com/@majidmanzarpour/how-we-grew-our-b2b-star...
Hm, nobody is mentioning the Raspberry Pi. Isn't this their target audience? Is it too slow, Raspbian not good enough for what they want to teach, or what's the reason?
(I'm not a teacher nor have I tried to use a Pi (although I own one, haven't had the time to play with it yet); I'm just wondering.)
I fail to understand why any school would need iPads or similar devices. Use the classic blackboard and invest every $ in recruiting and training GOOD teachers.
Yes, a computer room or some sets of LEGO mindstorms kits can make good sense. But iPads or Chromebooks for every kid? Come on...
Apple probably knows and they probably don't think it's that significant for them. They didn't hire the CEO of Burberry and st Laurent to sell digital notebooks to grade schools
.. but you get young minds entrenched in your ecosystem and you've got a head start.
Fast forward a number of years with all of your school work online, maybe a 'school' email account/drive and profile linked with your 'personal' gmail account and drive - it's seamless to transition between the two etc. Now company x comes along and wants you to move ecosystems, it's going to be a lot harder.
I for one couldn't even contemplate changing from the gmail/drive ecosystem now. Get a new phone, put in your creds, boom - all there. The hardware is irrelevant at that point.
At the same time isn't that kind of how Apple created their customer base originally with Apple II? Then, once the kids grew up, they would still buy Apple products.
Apple is a marketing company at the end of the day. They got to where they are now through great marketing and great products. I don't doubt for one second targeting school students in their most influential years isn't on Apple's marketing priority list.
People tend to stick with what they know and if they're using iPad's for the duration of their schooling years from primary to high school and then college, that's a long time to build a following and I would guess most people who grow up using Windows stick with Windows later on in life and those who use Apple products stick to using Apple in their later years in life.
If you use Google Drive, you can have your whole life, all your files, pictures, etc.... accessible with a simple login across all your devices. Google's Cloud services are second to none, iCloud doesn't compare.
Since Chromebooks encourage you to work entirely in the cloud, you can have access to all your school work by simply logging in to Drive...
