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Quite disappointing for me (I run an NPO that works through school districts to get iPads in classrooms) so see such a big failure
 
Right. How dare these evil companies to undercut Apple.

After all, Apple only wants to make their customer happy, and does not care one bit about profits and CEO salaries.

Oh, and let's not forget, Apple is donating the little profit they made on the most "underfunded" disease of all -- HIV/AIDS: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0016837 ("NIH Disease Funding Levels and Burden of Disease").


Seriously, why does Apple not donate large amounts of money to Pancreatic Cancer research? Would that not be a good way to honor Steve Jobs?

But I guess, in today's PC-crazed society AIDS research is perceived as more PC...


oh you know what...? shut up. jeez.

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Hmm.... 1. Steve Jobs was very passionate about AIDS research and it honors that legacy.
2. Pancreatic cancer affects a very small number of people, and preventing any cancer is somewhat connected.
3. You're probably one of those idiots who thinks it's a gay disease and are at the highest risk of getting it because of said iggnorance or do not know that woman are 90% more likely to contract hiv than a gay male.
4. Apple does a lot of charity... and the red line generates most of the money donated.


not that i disagree with you... but, truly, you can't misspell "ignorance" during a slap-down. it just takes a lot of wind out of the sails..... fwiw.
 
iPads and other tablets for education are a bad idea:

- expensive to buy
- obsolete, broken, or needing new batteries within a few years
- batteries not user replaceable, expensive to send in and replace
- taking notes with a stylus sucks compared to pencil and paper
- Galaxy Note with S-pen is alright, but an S-pen is $30 and easily lost
- defects and network congestion interrupt the curriculum
- on-screen keyboard takes up too much screen real estate + not easy to type.
- schools go cheap on bluetooth keyboards that aren't reliable, don't connect
- teachers aren't apple technicians and can't always troubleshoot it
- overall just a big, expensive, "politically correct" waste of money.

Fact is, tech is just not there yet. Would need a $100 tablet with next generation battery (1 week per charge, 5000 cycles), superior stylus system (responsive and fine like paper and pen, stylus itself under $5 and sold everywhere in the pen aisle).

I think for now, iPads if used in education should be kept at school like mounted to a desk, and only put in classrooms that crucially need them.
 
You can give ALL students access to technology for a lot less that 1.3 billion dollars.

We really don't have to put iPads in every single students' hands or in every single classroom. Especially if it's going to cost 800 million just to update and support the technology.

This is another one of those, "sounds nice on paper" kinda things.

Should have been spent on more and better teachers, healthier cafeteria food, renovating old schools, etc..

Agreed! I teach Kindergarten in LAUSD and this is the type of tech we have for my students to work with. I'm now on sites like donors choose trying to raise money to get them a better computer.
 

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Working in IT for 30 years and EDU for the last 20, all I can say with certainty that you can bet if Pearson is involved there will be "issues". Never before has education been made into a profit center with quite the bravado as is has been with that company. They do some things VERY well, like PowerSchool. They also stick their noses in to make a profit in the most sensitive areas, like PARCC, sending school districts REELING. I know this first-hand. And as for the "Chromebooks are better for education" because of content, nothing could be further from the truth. For that security issue, there IS a way to lock them down securely, but it seems a few important steps were overlooked. All this being said, Chromebooks do have a real place in EDU if you decide that what they do fits your curriculum.
 
AIDS is (easily) avoidable *. (Pancreatic) Cancer is not.
...
I know with 100% certainty that I will never get AIDS

No one knows with 100% certainty that they will never get HIV/AIDS... and only a fool would make the claim.

Are you not offended?

Yes, I'm highly offended by your minimisation of the 1.5 million people who died last year from AIDS globally given that most were in countries which have neither the resources or the education and awareness needed to make AIDS "easily avoidable".
 
This money should be spent on the classrooms, there was no reason to spend this on Tablets.
 
Sounds like someone is trying to get out of buying all those iPads. Give it more time and they'll find reasons to not do chrome as well. I give it 12 months for them to announce the project is a failure. Everyone says they want to help educate kids in school but no one wants to spend any money.
 
With Wikileaks founder saying that Google is working for the state department, FBI getting mad at Apple over encryption, and this. It's starting to sound slot like US GOV vs Apple. And the GOV (and Google) are pulling all the stops into slicing Apple with lawsuits and undercutting products.

Sad world.

Govt loves Google. Google has surpassed over 30 privacy violations. However the govt does not like apple. Changing Mac addreses on wifi, apps whose security you can actually control, etc
 
I feel like Chromebooks would be a better choice anyway. Much more educational content — including Pearson's — is available on ChromeOS than iOS.
Really? What content exactly?

iOS has a perfectly good web browser. It can do everything Chrome OS can do.

Honestly I think it's bu1lshit to compare iOS and Chrome OS. The question should be "do you want a keyboard"? If yes, then Chrome OS.

Also, I'm concerned about the durability of Chrome OS. An iPad can handle a lot more punishment than any laptop - especially a cheap laptop.
 
iPads and other tablets for education are a bad idea:

- expensive to buy
They're not buying latest model ones. They're getting older/cheaper ones and also a huge volume discount.
- obsolete, broken, or needing new batteries within a few years
Laptops are also obsolete and broken within a few years. My 1st Generation iPad is 4 years old now and still works just as well today as the day I purchased it, although it can't run the latest iOS and struggles with some third party apps (eg, clash of clans has slow framerates and RAM intensive web pages crash the browser. Four years ago not many web pages needed a lot of RAM but today it's a problem).

The battery is still good. It has 20 or 30 dents from when I dropped it on concrete or asphalt from a meter. Once it even fell off my motorbike and another time it got rained on in a storm.

- batteries not user replaceable, expensive to send in and replace
They are not user replaceable but they are technician replaceable. And when you have thousands of them, that is not a big deal. Anyway my iPad is 4 years old and still lasts 2 or 3 days on a charge.

- taking notes with a stylus sucks compared to pencil and paper
These are young kids. They don't take notes, they will mostly only be used to read books.

- Galaxy Note with S-pen is alright, but an S-pen is $30 and easily lost
A galaxy note is even more expensive than a low end iPad... and has all the same problems you're complaining about.

- defects and network congestion interrupt the curriculum
Hopefully Pearson's app stores everything on the device, it's got a dozen gigabytes of storage. Should be plenty.

- on-screen keyboard takes up too much screen real estate + not easy to type.
Again, they're not supposed to type much. If they are, then they should be using a laptop. Running Windows.

- schools go cheap on bluetooth keyboards that aren't reliable, don't connect
That is a problem for sure.

- teachers aren't apple technicians and can't always troubleshoot it
So they need to learn. How the **** are teachers supposed to teach kids if they can't even use a tablet that has been locked down to only be able to access software written specifically for the school?

- overall just a big, expensive, "politically correct" waste of money.
Big is good. expensive I disagree with —*providing a better education is cheaper long term as better education means a better economy once they grow up. I'm not even going to get started on politically correct - I prefer to keep politics out of the discussion.

Fact is, tech is just not there yet. Would need a $100 tablet with next generation battery (1 week per charge, 5000 cycles), superior stylus system (responsive and fine like paper and pen, stylus itself under $5 and sold everywhere in the pen aisle).
No we don't. What we have now is perfectly fine.
 
You do realize that the majority of parts of the iPhone benefit Japan and Germany more than any other company, right? The labor costs are very little, and the profit goes to a US company. Samsung does not manufacture all of its products, either.

A US company paying around 2% tax rate worldwide?
 
Agreed! I teach Kindergarten in LAUSD and this is the type of tech we have for my students to work with. I'm now on sites like donors choose trying to raise money to get them a better computer.

Keep that printer, though! Those HPs will last forever and are VERY easy to repair.
 
LAUSD at it's finest. Another reason why I am VERY careful with voting for (or against) specific propositions which aim at funding local education. It's all a scam. They should have invested every single penny that they used for these iPads and hire more teachers and adding more programs. C'mon LAUSD.
 
iPads will last much longer than almost any device out there. But I can see theft being a huge issue, part of the reason my school never upgraded their old style "tube" monitors.
 
The only daftness in this thread is the shortsightedness to not realize that this is a world economy, where every dollar invested in a foreign market ultimately ends up being reinvested back in this one.

Do you think it's 1950? AMURR'CA!

Actually, the U.S is heading back to the 1950s. We're already back to 1973 levels in oil imports. At the end of WWII, America imported only 1 out of every 6 barrels of oil and we're quickly becoming energy independent again, something Europe, Japan, and Korea will never be able to say. A world economy assumes the world is stable. Unfortunately, it's not, but the U.S. won't be held hostage to the Middle East for much longer, but Europe will.

And as for every foreign dollar invested comes back as a dollar. Well maybe in your Utopian dream world it does. HAHA!
 
This is another one of those, "sounds nice on paper" kinda things.

Did it even "sound" good on paper. This was an obvious boondoggle.

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Agreed! I teach Kindergarten in LAUSD and this is the type of tech we have for my students to work with. I'm now on sites like donors choose trying to raise money to get them a better computer.

why do kidergarteners need technology? How about crayons? clay? paint?
 
I don't get it. We all know iPads are the best. So why are grown ups trying to hurt the children by taking their iPads away and replacing them with something inferior that will cause sad energy.

Grown ups are dumb. They show how poor they did at school by these actions. iDiots
 
I don't get it. We all know iPads are the best. So why are grown ups trying to hurt the children by taking their iPads away and replacing them with something inferior that will cause sad energy.

Grown ups are dumb. They show how poor they did at school by these actions. iDiots
No, you assume they are the best.

Grown ups? Hurt the children? Dumbs?

I see, it was parody
 
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