Los Angeles School Kids to Get Free iPad by 2014

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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It was announced on Friday that Apple has signed a deal with the Los Angeles school system to provide iPads to every student in the system by 2014. Apple will supply a total of 640K iPads to the system at a cost of $30 Million.

The program hopes to prepare students for the real world by exposing them to new technology that may not be available in their households.
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Looks like apple is more interested in molding future crapple customers than exposing them to new tech.
 
Wow. You guys are in eye balls deep in debt and you keep spending.

Didn't the silly politicians learn that education spending per student actually has a negative result?

Look at Detroit they spend a lot per student yet most of the population there is functionally illiterate.
 
Jack Hammer said:
Pfft. Next year for our school kids here. :) Mine two have their school laptops already.
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The happy enslaved male.. Its ok its for the Kids.. Who do you think will be tax burned by this in the future? You or your kids?
 
I think its not a big deal. Getting ebooks and interactive learning to the kids might be awesome if they handle the risks and manage costs well.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
I think its not a big deal. Getting ebooks and interactive learning to the kids might be awesome if they handle the risks and manage costs well.
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Yey Liberal/Socialist justifications.. Since when is the government or any Bureaucracy responsible and risk responsible for spending?

Study showed the digital media actually decreases vocabulary.

Keep spending. That's everyone's solution. Sooner or later everyone will just work for the government.
 
Translation: our policies aren't working, and we're out of ideas. So, we'll spend more money we don't have, bribing kids to come to school. Fucking brilliant. I can just imagine how many of these are gonna go "missing". Its like its a requirement to be a complete god damn moron to work in education administration.
 
B2BigAl said:
Translation: our policies aren't working, and we're out of ideas. So, we'll spend more money we don't have, bribing kids to come to school. Fucking brilliant. I can just imagine how many of these are gonna go "missing". Its like its a requirement to be a complete god damn moron to work in education administration.
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THIS :D
 
yup -- how many of those 640k ipads are going to end up on craigslist because a POS drunk father pawns it for beer money?

Of course this is a stupid idea -- and if they keep going, they are going to look like detroit with their spending habits like this.

The extra kick is - when they break it, steal it, lose it - who's responsible? In a sane world you would tell them to replace it or go without - since the government of that state is particularly retarded, they will say some BS like: "if we don't give them a replacement they won't be able to keep up with the other children"

So out the window goes any lesson on personal responsibility.Apple is probably going to profit off this in the long run, 640K new itunes subscribers, all of them being children who have no idea how to control spending or what the value of a dollar is, that, and just imagine an entire school disctrict playing angry birds all day instead of, you know.... learning?

Worthless waste of money and tech.
 
I know someone who does IT for a school district and it really is appalling. Every teacher having a macbook pro, ipads everywhere, I thought apple sold luxury goods. The best was when a teacher broke their macbook pro screen when they dropped their ipad on it. You cant make this stuff up.
 
Los Angeles is rapidly turning into one of the worst cities in the country. Bad schools, disfunctional traffic, vicious thugs with pension benefits...what the fuck is an iPad going to do for kids? It doesn't teach reading or math. They're going to be taking pictures of their junk in class and sending them to each other, when they're not playing games.
 
This money would be better spent on paying quality teachers than on a shitty gimmick like this. Kids are going to lose, break, or sell these things by the end of the first week. Those that don't will be playing games in class. Who thinks this shit up?
 
Wrench00 said:
Wow. You guys are in eye balls deep in debt and you keep spending.

Didn't the silly politicians learn that education spending per student actually has a negative result?

Look at Detroit they spend a lot per student yet most of the population there is functionally illiterate.
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Funny how China still manages to churn out kids who can read and do math with a teacher and a chalk board.

Hell, a teacher, chalk board, and a book was all I got for most of my classes at UCLA. We didn't even have calculators for calculus and physics classes. This is year 2000+. But I guess the best public university in the country doesn't know anything about teaching.
 
Anything other than a good teacher, a good parent, and a good textbook is just a useless attempt try try to make up for not having a good teacher, and/or a good parent, and/or a good textbook.

It really is as simple as that.
 
Accursed said:
Is my math bad? An iPad for less than $50...
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Good math, bad summary information.

FTA: 31,000 iPads for $30 million.

N(ot)FTA: ~30,000 iPads is the first phase of the goal to get all students one in the next 14 months. The full deployment of 640k iPads is expected to cost around $300 million total, which seems to get a volume discount.

The $30 million figure includes software + other content, training, repair/replacement and other stuff for phase 1 of deployment. The cost of the iPads is around $680 each. "Apple will also replace any lost or stolen iPads, the LA Daily News reports."
 
The question to be asked is whether that price tag includes electronic textbooks. If this breaks the school district out from under the thumb of the textbook cartels, and keeps kids from having to lug a cubic foot of dead tree around every day, I can kinda-sorta see the justification. If not, well...let's just say I wasn't a fan of the whole "laptop per child" thing, and a change in form factor doesn't alter my opinion in any way.
 
Wrench00 said:
Yey Liberal/Socialist justifications.. Since when is the government or any Bureaucracy responsible and risk responsible for spending?

Study showed the digital media actually decreases vocabulary.

Keep spending. That's everyone's solution. Sooner or later everyone will just work for the government.
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Not a liberal...maybe a little bit socialist, but I don't like to try to fit into a political or economic system category. They all have their faults after all.

As for decreasing vocabulary, I saw that article. I think in the right context, tablets can be a useful learning tool. The study you're probably alluding to is limited to the impact of sticking a munchkin in front of Angry Birds or whatever rather than actually attempting to harvest some sort of learning utility. The same thing would be true of any child playing video games all the time. They'd turn into stupid, obese, violent gaming nerds and that's bad.

I'm pretty sure that people said the same stuff or thought the same stuff as you when schools started to purchase computers for their labs when they were a little newer as technology. TVs and overhead projectors probably struck morbid fear in people who were alive in the 1950's when they became common in schools and so did chalk or paper and pencils for people who were used to stone tablets. It's okay to be afriad of change and perfectly natural. That's why you've been outspoken about Windows 8 and I can completely understand your fear here too. It's scary and different.
 
XenIneX said:
The question to be asked is whether that price tag includes electronic textbooks. If this breaks the school district out from under the thumb of the textbook cartels
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Unfortunately, the textbook cartels make textbooks that are acceptable to schools. While there are a couple of great open source textbooks, most are awful.

Pearson will be providing software and digital books in the LAUSD deal: http://www.citeworld.com/tablets/22178/ipad-los-angeles-unified-school-district . I imagine that will be an ongoing cost every year.
 
Apple trying to get 'em while they're young at the city's expense? Hell, that worked on me when I was in junior high, just at my family's expense. My school's computer lab only had Macs, and after a year or so of using them I ended up convincing my family to get me a Mac. Granted, I loved that Mac, used it for years, and I was quite productive on it (no internet and few games), but I remember it costing a lot at the time for what it was and it being incompatible with everything almost immediately and especially after I hit high school.

Anyway, on top of the horrible mistake LA's making in trying to "buy" education for the kids in the form of luxury electronics (versus good teachers, books, or even just affordable electronics), I can totally envision the kids wanting the same stuff once their schools stop playing sugar-daddy, resulting in the next generation quite possibly racking up more credit card debt buying iPads because those are all they're used to.
 
I laugh every time our school district pitches ideas like these. It is not coming from the teachers, but administrators and management within the district that feel it will be a great idea.

There is currently no way to get books on these things cheaper than buying traditional text books that I am aware of.
 
I'm all for spending money at schools but seriously, wtf... 640k iPads at $30M would have been a "decent deal but with seriously questionable education benefits. 31k iPads for $30M? Yeah seriously fuck off. Learning how to use computers is probably a good educational goal, learning how to use a tablet? Again seriously fuck off.
 
96redformula said:
I laugh every time our school district pitches ideas like these. It is not coming from the teachers, but administrators and management within the district that feel it will be a great idea.
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Yeah, somewhere there's someone making a teacher's salary x 5 or so and they're coming up with "new" ideas to justify their position. I've seen what my niece has for a schedule in high school now, with a floating schedule, different classes each day, getting out of school at various times... uggggh. Yeah because having the same 6 every day was such a colossal failure it stuck with the school since it's inception.
 
The converstations about purchases usually go like this:

Person 1: Hey, I read Ipads could benefit all students....

Group : Great, lets get them.....

Person 2 :How are we going to get books on them?

Group: I dunno, we will figure that out later. Ipads for everybody!
 
Even though I see a benefit for the school, I wonder what they'll do when the kids drop their backpack and can't afford to fix or replace it...
 
Wow, I'd be pissed if I lived in LA and my tax dollars went to this bullshit. Kids don't need iPads, they need a school system and parents that care, and this is going in the exact opposite direction.
 
How many of these will wind up in pawnshops or become mommy or daddies?
 
Mr. K6 said:
Kids don't need iPads, they need a school system and parents that care, and this is going in the exact opposite direction.
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^This.

Ask yourself, what separates the top performing students from the bottom performing students amongst children of equal potential? It sure as shit isn't an iPad.
 
Wrench said:
How many of these will wind up in pawnshops or become mommy or daddies?
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The lost and stolen ones will probably be remotely locked, and shouldn't wind up in salable condition. If any do wind up in pawn shops, they'll be easy to retrieve.

The plan I heard is that it hasn't been completely decided how devices will be allowed to go home. Some smaller districts in the state have parents sign forms and pay for insurance before sending iPads home with kids. The iPads are supposedly also getting restrictions against software installation and web filters, so I'm not sure it's as desirable as a regular iPad.
 
What a joke! Just install a network in the school that does not have internet connection and at every desk is a monitor, mouse, and keyboard.
 
I do IT in schools and while they do have their benefits, I'm still not convinced. This year the school purchased 200 for grades 7-9. I guess we'll see. What's really difficult is that Apple totes these as being school friendly but the deployment tools out there are horrible. Makes my job that much harder.
 
96redformula said:
The converstations about purchases usually go like this:

Person 1: Hey, I read Ipads could benefit all students....

Group : Great, lets get them.....

Person 2 :How are we going to get books on them?

Group: I dunno, we will figure that out later. Ipads for everybody!
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This too.
 
The title says the ipads will be free but then the tricky thing of the first phase costing 30 Million Dollars.
Thats Public School for you these days. No concept that taxpayer's are paying for this garbage.
 
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