What a total waste of money for a school. Schools shouldn't have any electronics in them. Keep it to a slide rule and number one pencil.
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Scotland Capital's Schools to Get 39,000 iPads in 'Edinburgh Learns for Life' Initiative
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I don’t really get your point. You’ve guessed the amount they’re going to be paying, and then said it’s not a good deal “considering how many they’re buying”. Either it’s a bad deal no matter the volume, or it’s not? Plus there will presumably be quite hefty educational and bulk discounts involved here.
When Private Enterprise meets Local (not National) Government, you can be sure the only 'winner' here is CGI. The iPads prob only account for c.£7-8m of the overall 'deal'.
So just before an election many families are given an iPad. I'm sure they'll all be used just for education and not become a general family device or sold on....
Pretty cheap way to buy a vote!
Pretty cheap way to buy a vote!
We don't have middle school. And a iPad is more than sufficient for most of the classes in secondary school outside of anything that requires coding.
It's Scotland, a tool for school isn't going to be sold on. The current devices given out to schools across the country don't have rampant issues with theft. This isn't new, it has been done time and time again. It is also Edinburgh, not Leven, even kid at these schools will already have multiple iPad's as is.
As regards to the election, that is all but pre determined. Labour and the conservatives will once again fight over a hand full of seats and remain irrelevant.
There are a plethora of MDM solutions that have been there since iOS 5 to manage both iOS and iPadOS units. If you're referring to specifics of app management - that I'm not sure yet I would think after so long the management needs are taken care of.
You have middle school which covers grades 7 through 8 but just named differently. I guess kids can get by with an iPad for non-STEM courses but the rest of the world is already introducing STEM courses like Arduino coding at the elementary grades 5 through 6 that requires at least a Chromebook. Any responsible parent would enroll their kids somewhere else.
Maybe. I just like seeing what others do, take notes of what works, what doesn't so we could learn from each other's experiences.
Nope there is primary 1-7 and secondary 1-6. There isn't a middle level. S1 you are 11, You can leave at S5 if you are 16, or 15 if you have are going to college or university and your birthday is close. There is no middle school nor concept of middle school.
As for Chromebook's, they don't fit in the curriculum. And the public schools also use iPad's.
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One of the kids in the family goes to a Glasgow based school and he has been given an iPad, prior to it being handed over to him his parents had to sign a form if it gets broken then its the parents responsibility on the costs front.
Also, the iPad is locked down in a sense you can not download apps, change settings or visit certain websites.
Also, the iPad is locked down in a sense you can not download apps, change settings or visit certain websites.
My school district has 1:1 Chromebooks for grades 6-8 (or ages 11-14 for those who don't have US-style grades), and many have broken quite easily. When you add in the pre-pubescent rambunctiousness of that age group, the IT department saw quite a few broken Chromebooks.
Different strokes for different folks. Some people find iPads very useful.
11-14 year olds shouldn't be rambunctiousness, they are young adults and really shouldn't be breaking things even Chromebooks. Though regardless, these projects aren't new and iPad's and Chromebooks are in school systems so it'll be well understood how many are needed and how often repairs and replacements are needed.
For folks worrying about coding and the like, please remember that these are in addition to computer labs. The curriculum still requires the students to learn Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and various degrees of programming. S3/S4 students will still be using AutoCAD on hefty workstations, but now they'll be able to view their designs on their iPad's too.
It's not something I have direct experience with, I just thought I'd share Speirs' observations as he seems pretty well qualified to comment. He has lots of positive things to say about iPads for education, and said that 'no touch deployment' worked really well for years. But he argued that over time it became apparent that the school MDM tools - i.e. Classkit/SchoolWork, and their predecessors - weren't as reliable or flexible as the Office 365 or - in his case - GSuite alternatives.
Again, not my experience, but thought it to be worth sharing.
I agree, they shouldn't be. Unfortunately, I live in a fairly affluent community with parents who might not always know the word "no". When I worked at one of the middle school, I saw so many laptops with keys switched around, if not off totally. Most of these laptops usually had only 2-3 keys missing, though I saw 2-3 laptops with 13 missing keys. I guess an 8th grader at the other middle school "accidentally" dropped a MacBook Air down an elevator shaft. I have no idea how they could "accidentally" do that considering the slit between the car & the hallway isn't even an inch wide. Even non-tech-wise, one summer, I saw a custodian patching up a hole in the drywall. I asked him why, and he said a kid punched it and said "We're getting a new school anyways, so who cares?" Obviously, I left the middle school and went to the elementary level where I don't see that kind of behavior nearly as much, if at all. Any damage I do see is definitely more accidental than intentional/negligent.
It's not a guess. The total cost and the number of iPads is specified in the article. So it's easy to work out that they're paying an average of ~£450 per iPad.
Presumably they're getting support contracts, multi-year warranty, etc with this deal, but considering the base 10" iPad starts at £329 retail, it still seems like they're paying an awful lot for them. You'd expect significant volume and educational discounts when placing an order for 39,000 iPads.
There's a girl in my building who multiple times has dropped her keys down the lift shaft. And one time the lift was out of service because the door wouldn't close. We found her (magnetic) vape charger jammed in the door mechanism. And we're talking about a grown adult here!
But who would want to give their kids to an IT system from an ad company or would want said ad company having any further grip on the education market?
There have been plenty iPad deployments in education scenarios. The sky will be falling another day.
