I'd say a 3 year old iPad isn't ridiculously slow - maybe a 4/5 year old one, but not 3 year old. However, I do agree with what you say. Laptops have a longer lifespan. You could probably get through the whole of high school with one laptop.. an iPad you'd be stretching things wayyyy too thin.
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Apple Offers to Replace iPads With MacBooks in Maine State Classrooms
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I'd say a 3 year old iPad isn't ridiculously slow - maybe a 4/5 year old one, but not 3 year old. However, I do agree with what you say. Laptops have a longer lifespan. You could probably get through the whole of high school with one laptop.. an iPad you'd be stretching things wayyyy too thin.
Apple should fear what chromeOS will become once the android playstore is added to this operating system. The future of hybrid tablets and laptops will involve chromeOS . I thinks it's a little too late to try to replace ipads with macbooks in school.
iPads are mostly good for casual use, media consumption and as ebook reader.
For sure you can use it for other things as well with dedicate app but always it feel like you need to compromise. As for writing papers\documents (not talking about short messages\mails), you already need to get keyboard, and for that price i prefer having real computer with much more power.
iPads are good for feeling the gap between phones and computers, it can't replace real computer, but maybe can replace certain tasks.
PS - my 'old' 2009 MBP is much more powerful compare to any new tablets...
I don't think so. I believe kids are easier to adapt then adults. My 10 year old girls picked up quickly on the iPad and that was a couple of years ago. They were easily drawn to the iPad and took to it like fish to water.
They one an iPad in second grade (they're in 4th now) from a school contest.
Absolutely, they don't. Unless posters on here teach at this school or even work in a different district that uses iPads, it's a bit presumptuous, if not arrogant, to say both the teachers and students don't know what they are doing. That's an awful lot of people in the wrong there. But, no, we need all the experts on the Internet, of all places, to share their opinion as if it's fact.
When I am using my iPad, I don't feel like typing on it. It's very much a "view only" type of device. To me, it's hard to create anything on an iPad. Unless you want to draw, an iPad pro might be a good option. Other than that, my laptop is where it's at.
Actually, I agree with this person regarding the typing on hard surfaces. I've learned how to touch type when I was in 7th grade way back in the 1980s ( and still have that ability ). The old school switch keys were a godsend and comfortable to my fingers. What you probably don't realize is that typing on a hard glass surface long term can cause RSI on your finger joints. When people learn to touch type, they tend to ' attack ' the keys. It's an old habit and I think Apple f---ed up on that design based on ergonomics. The virtual keyboard on the standard iPad is not bad but needs to be a bit wider so that the phalanxes of the fingers and knuckles actually type more naturally rather than in cramped fashion.
This is why I'm seeing a LOT of people use keyboards attached to iPads for this reason, especially at the local cafe with a bunch of college students and professionals. AND the number of Chromebooks cropping up and I can understand why people are preferring these machines for focused purposes. iPad is a nice device, but iOS can be a very distracting platform due to the App Store and fomenting the 'swipe, swipe, tap, tap' culture when there should be better and more efficient manners of interacting with an OS.
I think Apple needs to create a hybrid touchscreen laptop for the educational sector. HOWEVER, iPads may be appropriate for certain things or in other educational areas such as art school ( I went to one ). I know for a fact that my art school provides iPads for students to create, draw, observe and notate ideas they work with. They have an iPad Curriculum program there and this was launched about a year or so after I got the original device.
I'm pretty sure they are already switching to iPad Pros with the Pencil. But then again, the school uses the Wacom and probably the Surface Pro. It wouldn't surprise me one bit.
Here's the link to that school's article on this program from 2013: http://www.cia.edu/news/stories/cias-ipad-curriculum-turns-two
I studied there under the Design foundation professor named Richard Fiorelli back in the 1990s and he was very well regarded who has just retired this year. I can say that if he went face to face to Jony, he'd cut him down with the BS Jony has been cooking up lately. Fiorelli has a temper which is the last thing you want to see.
I'm basing my opinions on the quotes from teachers in the article, which says things like students used them as toys, you can't word process on the iPads, and they added no value to the classroom. I don't need to work in a school to know that students distracted by iPads is a result of poor discipline, or that finding that iPads add no value to classroom and isn't good for word processing AFTER buying them is a result of poor planning. This is common sense, we don't need to be education experts to know this.
I, too, learned to touch type on mechanical typewriters back in the 80s, and I know that if people can't shake the habit of hitting keys hard, that would cause repetitive stress injuries on a hard glass surface. But young people today are growing up learning to type on glass to begin with, and I believe they will learn to type without hitting hard. God help them though, if they ever have to type on a mechanical keyboard!
My friends and I used to have Halo Combat Evolved LAN parties all the time on school computers.
That is just as ignorant and brainless as the article.
There are a number of very productive uses for an iPad.
For me it is eBay. It is far easier and faster for me to do this on an iPad than on computer.
I have seen videos taken and edited on iPad very quickly.
I bet there are lots of very productive uses for iPad, naturally not as much as a full computer.
I, too, learned to touch type on mechanical typewriters back in the 80s, and I know that if people can't shake the habit of hitting keys hard, that would cause repetitive stress injuries on a hard glass surface. But young people today are growing up learning to type on glass to begin with, and I believe they will learn to type without hitting hard. God help them though, if they ever have to type on a mechanical keyboard!
I'm curious how you can learn touch typing though on a keyboard with no tactile feedback though. there's more too it than just resistance of the key. speration of keys, feeling the physical diffrerences and borders help know when you've hit a key, or not. With touchscreen, even one emulating a keyboard, there's absolutely no way to know by "feeling" that you've hit the correct key, nevermind any key, and not the middle / borders between.
Using a touchscreen keyboard will always require your eyes to be focused on either your fingers and where they are, or the output of your typing for errors.
This defeats real touch typing which allows you to accurately type while looking elsewhere. real typists can look somewhere completely else and still type accurately. teaching kids these days to stare at your fingers or your output while typing sets them behind where we are today. its trying to re-invent something that already has a good solution. And thats a physical keyboard.
its for this reason, that Tablets and Laptops are separate devices. And at the end of the day, while many can do some content creation using tablets, a keyboard is irreplaceable for most advanced tasks.
For the intended use: School. Are there really that many apps/programs missing?
Well, when I type on the on screen keyboard, the keyboard and the output is in the same place. It takes only a slight eye movement to switch between checking my fingers to see if they are hitting the right keys, and checking the output to make sure there are no errors. I find that this type of typing is sufficient when I'm composing my own writing.
As for looking somewhere totally away from the keyboard/screen, well, the reason people had to do that was to retype things. The more things get digitized, the less need there is to retype them, we can just copy and paste. Or scan and do OCR. So while you are right that on screen keyboard isn't good for true touch typing, I don't think there is as much need for that skill anymore.
Depends of the school, for an computer science or art driven school, there is not enough serious applications available. Chromebooks may outsell MacBooks, but they have to double check their usage scenarios agains each other, and compare carefully before making such senseless comparisons. With MacBooks you can do anything, as long the hardware is powerful enough to master some kind of work. With Chromebooks you can't do anything, doesn't matter how powerful the hardware base is, the operating system and its software simply does not handle all situations.
I do agree. However for most general use situations in school a Chromebook works very well. Also very cost effective. It's when you get into the specialized scenarios that mayhap an OS X, Linux, or Win10 driven machine is required.
I'm in database admin and sys-admin and I can tell you, that I regularly need to be looking elsewhere. Manuals, Guides, howtos while I type commands or write up scripts.
its going to be one of those things where some professions can get away with it, while others can't
[QUOTE="
Why do you say that? I can understand not many middle school students might be interested in Linux, but if a kid that age happened to be motivated to do such a thing, I wouldn't put it past them to figure out how to do it.[/QUOTE]
My point was not that they can't or won't... It is just highly unlikely. Thus the major software interruption on Chromebook (that is introduced by the user) is highly unlikely. From a school deployment view this makes Chromebooks far more desirable than traditional computer labs.
Why do you say that? I can understand not many middle school students might be interested in Linux, but if a kid that age happened to be motivated to do such a thing, I wouldn't put it past them to figure out how to do it.[/QUOTE]
My point was not that they can't or won't... It is just highly unlikely. Thus the major software interruption on Chromebook (that is introduced by the user) is highly unlikely. From a school deployment view this makes Chromebooks far more desirable than traditional computer labs.
The company I work for deployed iPads blindly to its mobile workforce. We have them locked down but no internal mobile apps. So our users were expected to use a virtual desktop and screw around with that on the 9.7" screen. It didnt go over well and after about 2 years of no development to try and fix the issues they are now switching them to Windows 10 convertible laptops. Another example of exactly what you said - introducing tech to be with the times but then not doing ANYTHING to make it work.
Our school is using Chromebooks too. They're perfect for school precisely because they are so limited in performance and functionality. Kids aren't tempted to steal them or hack them or playing around with them because they're pretty much only good for going google docs and web surfing which are the two functions the school wants.
I think you missed the rest of the post, where I referenced the fact that I know a teacher who has used them successfully. Her whole school has, actually. That was why I was calling what you said into question, because I know they can be extremely helpful as long as the implementation is done well. I have a feeling they probably just threw them into the classrooms and didn't do much else.
Last "informative presentation" I went to for the school district regarding the adoption of iPads was a lot like a political rally; lots of great one-liners, presentations by motivating speakers, sound-bites that make great headlines. Specific detail on exactly "how" was glossed over and missing. $$$$$ savings!!! Great for the students!!! Fantastic for the teachers!!!!
The followup presentation on how they were switching to Chromebooks and fixing the current iPad issue was much more process / solution oriented. With detail. With user buy-in. A big change.
The Sun Journal article is not an accurate representation of the "Refresh" Apple and Maine Department of Education negotiated. There are several reasons that lead to the refresh, but the primary one is the process that Apple uses to handle student's under 13 years old is changing. Apple School Manager requires a newer iPad than currently deployed in Maine. The current method will be taken off-line next month. The MLTI project would have no way to deploy the iPad retina to seventh graders this fall.
Schools gain many other "upgrades" with the refresh: our own JAMF Casper JSS rather than a state wide JSS (still hosted by JAMF); iPad Pros replace the iPad retina; current MacBook Airs replace the 2013 versions; and those schools that need improvements to their WiFi networks will receive them.
The forth MLTI deployment covered four years with options for early renewals over ten years. I imagine that each of the four year agreements will see early refresh option taken by Apple and MLTI/Maine D.o.E.
Concerning the iPads-to-MacBook Air switch. Apple School Manager provides the means for better limitations on inappropriate applications (games) on iPads. Faculty are reacting to what has been true without hearing about the changes in iPad deployment. To be honest the devices that a student "learns" best with will be different. I argue that typing skills need to improve regardless of the device.