The Mac lab at my High School has been "Dissolved"

[Macmaniac]

Well lack of space in my HS has taken its toll. The first room to go was the Mac lab, which has now become another classroom. The blue iMacs have been distrubuted throught the school instead of getting rid of them.
One upside to this is that our TV studio now has 7 more computers to use.
Fortunantly PCs have not taken their place. Our school really needs to wake up we still have some 10 year old PCs in our library:(

[eyelikeart]

That's a big problem in many schooling systems...funding to keep computers current & in use. It sucks to hear they dissolved your Mac lab though. What was it used for exactly?

[tazo]

*hides in corner*

My school just got another technology grant; we might be getting a G5 for the video editing class [which already has dual 867 quicksilvers with those 21'' apple crt's....i am lucky to be in a very mac oriented district; snow imacs all around, flat panel imacs in many classrooms, airport network across campus open to students... ;)

[chadfromdallas]

None of the schools I've been to have had macs :eek:

[kungfu]

The school where I go is 100% Mac.... every student gets an iBook or 12" PB... and wi-fi everywhere... :)

[Daveman Deluxe]

The applied technology department at my former high school (photography, graphics, yearbook, etc.) uses Macs exclusively (except for one PC used for Dreamweaver. The guy who runs the department is really good at writing grant applications. Last year he got seven new eMacs. When I was there, there were a couple of 7200/120s, one 8500/240 (I think), a molar G3 all-in-one, a smattering of Snow iMacs, a Grape iMac, and the rest were sawtooth G4s. It was a pretty sweet lab.

[rhpenguin]

Any time ive used a Mac, its been on my own time.

And my highschool was still using some Win3.1 boxes before i left..

(I came from a small farmer hick town)

[Durandal7]

The High School I went to had a broken down 7100 hidden in a corner. That was about it.

[Abstract]

Originally posted by kungfu
The school where I go is 100% Mac.... every student gets an iBook or 12" PB... and wi-fi everywhere... :)

This is what I don't understand about American schools. I've heard of some States giving iBooks to their students or something. Is it free for all students? Are they seriously just giving out hundreds of thousands of these puppies?

Anyway, in my high school, there was only a single room with Macs, and it was only used for a few select courses (maybe 2 or 3). There were around 5 or 6 machines. Of course, that was 6 years ago, so I'm not sure of the situation right now, but I live in an area where we get more money for education per person than anywhere else in Ontario (a province in Canada). Actually, we may get more money than any city/region in Canada, but I'm not too sure about that. ;)

Of course, when my younger brother was in HS 3 years ago, their school had bought over 100 new Dell systems, and their school was only 3 years old at the time, so they already had relatively new computers!! They got them every year. I never heard him mention Apple, only Dell. :o

[chadfromdallas]

Private schools usually issue computers to their students in the U.S. No public schools in Texas that I know of do.

[Daveman Deluxe]

Originally posted by Abstract
This is what I don't understand about American schools. I've heard of some States giving iBooks to their students or something. Is it free for all students? Are they seriously just giving out hundreds of thousands of these puppies?

I believe that they loan the iBooks to students for three or four years. They're paid for with Apple's lease program by the school.

[voicegy]

San Diego Unified School District (7th largest in the nation) boasts a nearly 73% install of Macintosh computers.

And I'm going to keep it that way.;)

[uhlawboi80]

nope, not in texas! and this is Dell country, with is being based in austin...so my school district was all Dell and compaq (the contracts flip flopped alot) but no Macs at all...though when i was in elementary school it was all apples and in middle school we had a few macs mixed in.

College of course ws different...huge FP iMac and powermac areas and the viz lab was all on top of the line G4s, and from what i am told waiting at the near top of the list for the dual 2 ghz G5s :D

[FriarTuck]

I got my property tax bill today. It went up 10 percent. Seriously. In one year, up 10 percent. Funny, my paycheck didn't go up 10 percent.

Enjoy all those computers, kids. Download some more music or pr0n with my tax money.

</grumpy old man>

[Les Kern]

Originally posted by eyelikeart
It sucks to hear they dissolved your Mac lab though. What was it used for exactly?

Doesn't suck, they have forward thinking administrators.
Labs are dead, and I'm doing some killing myself. By the time I'm done at www.mchs.net/technology/tech.html I will have one teaching lab, one classroom lab for newspaper, yearbook and the like. The rest of my 700+ computers will be either wireless laptops or small classroom clusters, where info can be obtained quickly without taking up a classroom. Any school board who buys into the "gotta have labs" belief, should be made to reconsider after looking at how children should be educated, or rather how the search for information should be done. The answers surprised us a few years ago, and they will you too if you get rid of the preconception of the REAL value of 30 computers in a room.

[Durandal7]

Originally posted by Les Kern
Doesn't suck, they have forward thinking administrators.

Isn't that an oxymoron?

[Les Kern]

Originally posted by Durandal7
Isn't that an oxymoron?

Hey, they run the world. Usually that's said by folks who WANT to run the world, but are missing some crucial enzyme. :)

[voicegy]

Any forward thinking educational institution will have thought about the elimination of static labs a few years ago.

Our districts' Educational Technology Department, which I was a part of a year or so ago, saw the trend when portable lab technology and wireless Internet access started appearing. We now recommend school sites AWAY from room-dedicated static labs in favor of portable solutions such as iBooks, wireless access points and mobile carts.

Static labs have their place (professional development, CAD work at High School sites, etc.,) but we turned the tide in our district years ago, for the most part, in favor of portable solutions, especially when faced with class-size reduction in elementary.

[bcsimac]

The school district I am from had an installed based of 75% Macs and was buying 10 XServes. I think that is pretty good. They however were also going to buy a PC business lab for high school. The tech president is a Mac guy but his tech administrator is a PC guy. I am not sure how things will mix there. I just hope the tech president(also co-high school principal) is able to keep the Macs as he believes he will be able to do. He did tell me that they might go 60% Mac and 40% PC by 2006 because of the need for business PC labs. All video and music though is done on Mac and almost all servers are Macs.

[plinkoman]

my school is stupid, the music technology class just got brand new dells. c'mon, what professional uses a pc for sound production? that makes no sense. i hear complaints about them crashing too much, or going to slow, or acid being able to do virtually nothing, but i bring up the word mac, and they just say, "eh, we've never really been into macs"

[Flynnstone]

The closest thing to a computer in my high school was a punch card writer. Talk about turn around time to run a program :)

[smada]

My school just got all new ibm desktops for the whole campus. Then one of them got that blaster virus and it spread through our email system. By the end of our second day, every computer in every classroom/lab was down, save for our lonely 500 mhz g4, my old chemistry teachers 15" powerbook, and some ancient performas in the physics lab.

[Squire]

That's hilarious.

I don't think my school even had a computer room until I was in my last year. Even then, I only stepped foot in there once or twice.

I feel old.

Squire.

[voicegy]

What an interesting turn this thread has taken...

Well, to join in the fun, this is what I got to play with when I was in high school...it was connected to the mainframe computer in the education center building several miles away via an "acoustacoupler"...rubber gasket things that fit around a telephone handset. 1976, as you can tell by the hanging plant and fashionable outfits.

I now work in that very education center, in the IT department, where the old mainframe used to "live."

There...now I get to feel old, too!:cool:

[Squire]

My first computer's modem (optional- I didn't purchase it) had one of those rubber coupler's for a phone handset. And I used to run my games of cassette tapes! A few years later, I splurged for a 5 1/4" floppy drive. Lightning quick.

The computer was 16K. (I don't know which part of the computer the 16K memory was. Would it be the RAM?)

I remember my dad telling me that we could make our own games for it.

Ah.

<cue: Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days">

Squire

[rundevilrun]

Ha ha, great thread!

I grew up in a small town where the only computer store was a radio shack so of course our high school had a couple of TRS-80's a.k.a Trash-80's. I think they finally got rid of them and went to pc's around 1991. For some reason the kindergarden kids got macs and I remember an Apple II was in one school.

[TEG]

My School Districe has had a large persentage of Apple Computers, Infact, they were still running Apple II for students (for the most part) until 1994. There had been some Macs, but mostly Classics and Classic IIs. Since Then Most of the computers are now Macs, however, several teachers have recieved technology grants from M$, and purchased PCs with the money (Even though the grant does not specify that the teacher must buy PCs, just M$ Office for the machines). Also, the District's Technology Manager is a big Mac fan (Bought a G3 on their first day of sales), and has a small use for PCs (In small doses), however, the newly hired (read: hired 4 years ago) IT guy for the Vocational Studies (Yearbook, Shop, Career building) is a PC Zelot. He has replaced about 10% of the macs at the high school (Which was 80/20) with crappy, constantly crashing PCs. However the only problems with the Macs, are trying to run software not designed for the age of the machine (Most Machines when I was there being LCIII, LC575, PM5200/75LC, PM5260, or PM6100.) However, even though I graduated in 2001, I still get calls from the teachers to fix their machines, because I'll tell them the truth, and they know I won't pressure them.

TEG

[addsapple]

The college I go to has about 4 rooms full of colour imacs, emacs, dual G4's, and a room of older G3 powermacs. There is also loads of old apple computers around the college protected by glass. then they have apple stickers stuck around on doors. Not only that all the teachery people recommend we all get a mac for home use! But then I am doing Graphic Design, and its an Art's college so...

[Abstract]

Originally posted by Squire
That's hilarious.

I don't think my school even had a computer room until I was in my last year. Even then, I only stepped foot in there once or twice.

I feel old.

Squire.

You're ancient!! :eek:

Now get away from us "young people". Old people have cooties. :p

[Gus]

I used Apple ][e's up through college when I bought my first Apple-a Performa 405. Ugh, what a horrible machine.

I'm finishing up at University of Nebraska where they are about 90% Mac. The architecture school just received a huge shipment of about 115 G5's that they are putting in their lab. They previously had a lab full of Dual 1.42Ghz machines, while over in the music lab we have about 20 iMac SE 400's.

Wish I was an architecture student. ;)

Regards,
Gus

[wdlove]

Originally posted by Gus
I used Apple ][e's up through college when I bought my first Apple-a Performa 405. Ugh, what a horrible machine.

I'm finishing up at University of Nebraska where they are about 90% Mac. The architecture school just received a huge shipment of about 115 G5's that they are putting in their lab. They previously had a lab full of Dual 1.42Ghz machines, while over in the music lab we have about 20 iMac SE 400's.

Wish I was an architecture student. ;)

Regards,
Gus

Is that in Lincoln or Omaha? Go Cornhuskers! ;)

[Squire]

Originally posted by rundevilrun
Ha ha, great thread!

I grew up in a small town where the only computer store was a radio shack so of course our high school had a couple of TRS-80's a.k.a Trash-80's. I think they finally got rid of them and went to pc's around 1991. For some reason the kindergarden kids got macs and I remember an Apple II was in one school.

That was the machine I was referring to in my other post but I was too embarrassed to actually utter the name of the thing.

I was sooooooo jealous when my buddy got a Commodore 64.

Squire

[jefhatfield]

Originally posted by Flynnstone
The closest thing to a computer in my high school was a punch card writer. Talk about turn around time to run a program :)

those were weird machines and the keys on the typewriter (and many early silicon chip based computers) went a, b, c, d, etc instead of the standard qwerty we use now on our computers

it was steve wozniak who popularized the idea of using the standard keyboard and making the idea stick...some computers were still using cards or levers right before the apple II came out...for those of us who were there, the revolution of the apple II coming out as a mass produced product was as profound as the moon landing several years before...but that was still an invention that many thought was just for nerds

but of course to be fair, for those who don't type, a keyboard that is sequential is a lot easier to figure out than the qwerty

the valedictorian of our high school could not type and entered college that way:p

[Macmaniac]

The Mac lab served as an extra video editing room, the typing room for the newspaper, all the foriegn language software ran on the macs, and it served as an extra lab for typing.
The loss of the mac lab means we can't use our foriegn language CDs and there are fewer computers to type things on.
Fortunantly our TV studio got half the macs so we have enough computers to video editing.

[themadchemist]

Originally posted by Les Kern
Hey, they run the world. Usually that's said by folks who WANT to run the world, but are missing some crucial enzyme. :)

no, they run microcosms of the world, usually inefficiently.