Why Some Schools Are Selling All Their iPads

You need a keyboard to do any serious writing. Students should write and they should never have gotten iPads in the first place. What are these teachers thinking?

Chromebooks are just much more useful than ipads in so many ways. I've recently finished getting our html5 web conferencing app working smoothly on chromebooks because pretty much all our educational customers are moving from laptops to chromebooks right now.

I was skeptical about chromebooks, but having owned one myself for the past few months I can now see the benefits, and I would recommend them over Windows laptops to anyone who is not a developer. For all intents and purposes chromebooks are essentially virus-proof and screwup-proof. (I'm sure you could get a virus or screw it up, but you would have to try damn hard!)

I have witnessed this taking place in the enterprise sector as well. Without naming names, I've seen one large company here in Australia in particular move away from using iPad's to laptops because iPad's are too limited in what you can do, they don't offer the freedom of choice when it comes to different software options and date very quickly. From a cost point-of-view, you can buy a decent laptop for the same price as an iPad which will last for years.

I believe Apple's closed-source nature of pigeon-holing you into using applications only on their tightly controlled moderated app store is actually coming back to bite them. The fear of knowing eventually your iPad will no longer be able to use the latest and greatest version of iOS forcing you to buy a new iPad to install the latest applications developed for later iOS versions your iPad doesn't support meaning more money is also another factor that works against Apple.

Don't get me wrong, the iPad is a pretty great device for simplistic Internet browsing, checking your email and updating your social media, but if you want to do anything serious with it, the iPad shows its shortcomings.

I knew where this article was going before it even mentioned Chromebooks. It had the distinct smell of submarine: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

iPads are really useful for kids in the K-3 or so age range, especially in the lower band. However, once the kids get to 4th and 5th grade they need to start writing more and that's where the full keyboard and ability to create content makes a Chromebook a better decision.

My company works on products that help kids increase cognitive skills and overcome issues such as auditory processing disorders and with the younger kids the touch aspect of tablets has made them superior to laptops either with mice or touchpads because touch is just a simpler motor skill for these younger kids. As they get older however this advantage starts to disappear.

Basically the trend I think that will play out is that you see a mix of devices with iPads predominantly at the lower grade bands and Chromebooks in the mid to upper grade bands. Chromebooks are nearly disposable at their price point, are incredibly easy to manage compared to Windows machines or iPads and do 95% or more of what kids need to use devices for at school.

Too bad the article does not really go in the insights as to why the IPads are being replaced by something else. It's just being hinted, but that's the main point they should have focused on the article.

So the schools are discovering that iPads are a toys rather than work devices? What a surprise!

Notice how all those teachers were "at first disappointed that they weren't getting an iPad". Really? If you choose the tool based only on its coolness factor, you'll hardly get the right one, especially for education.

I'm seeing this change in the workplace as well. I work in a large IT shop and have about 15-20 meetings a week with different departments. Until the past 6 months, everyone was sporting iPads with some sort of bluetooth keyboard case. Now it's ultrabooks or Airs. I used to carry a tablet/keyboard combo as well, but over time the ultrabook became more appealing because of several factors, namely, the keyboard, screen size, and Office suite. Battery life and portability are also now acceptable for all day mobile use on the ultrabook. I don't think there will ever be a tablet compelling enough to switch back. Even the Surface (to me) has too many compromises over a lightweight ultrabook with a usable keyboard.

While I was working in the Google Apps group a few years ago, we would bring in groups of teachers for focus groups and feedback on upcoming features for Apps.

My biggest takeway from those meetings was that educators have a really hard job, much harder than even what educated people assume. On top of actually being a useful educational tool, there are a ton of other boxes to check in order to get any kind of technology into the classroom:

* Compliance with the myriad of federal, state, and local laws surrounding education procurement, student data, what can and can't happen on government property and around children, and cash-strapped educational IT departments.

* Able to be simple enough for any educator to use and maintain, but also have enough features to add value as a educational tool.

* Bureaucracies and procurement policies that run the gamut: administrators, local government, state government, federal government, parents, the school board, the PTA, the teachers union, etc.

* Extreme price sensitivity.

* Long life: Even rich districts struggle to get budgets to upgrade technology regularly, and by regularly I mean every 2-4 years.

* The mechanics of running a classroom filled with children ... who would often rather spend a class period figuring out how to bypass a firewall to get to facebook, rather than half a class period writing.

Getting by all these requirements, and reaching educators at the end, requires a concerted, long running effort on the part of the company. We were lucky that Google had a running a edu program for Apps/Chrome and made it a priority. Consequently a lot of the core features of the offering are targeted specifically at educators:

* Strong central administrative control. In order to use your chromebook at all, you really need to log into your web account. It's only able to install things locally (and bypass administrative restrictions) if you really work hard to get around it. This helps get the tools approved by IT departments and administrators. Compare this to the fleets of windows machines or ipads that lots of IT departments have to maintain, where they basically solve the problem by re-imaging the machine regularly to wipe out locally installed apps.

* Price. Edu Google Apps accounts are essentially free. Compared to other computing solutions, Chromebooks are cheap and get the job done.

* Tools that both educators and students can use. The biggest selling point on apps is actually calendar. Gmail is great but most schools already have a email system in place. A calendar that syncs, has proper access control, is central to your school, and free, saves educators a lot of hassle. Once a teacher is hooked on calendar as a "gateway drug", it's not hard to take the leap. Docs, gmail, chrome, and chromebooks all have the same login, contact list, and access control. Being able to use these tools makes it easier to pass this knowledge onto the student.

* Maintenance: A student can work on one chromebook, drop it in water, and then immediately log onto another one and have all his work. Also for a educator in the classroom, it's easy to understand that refreshing the page will fix the problem 90% of the time.

* Shared home / school: A student can log onto his apps account at home, and get all his state as if he were still at school.

* Platform cross compatibility: Apps can work well on a Chromebook, but also will do a best-effort attempt on IE9 on windows. Apple's core philosophy has never tilted that way. This isn't just to adapt to varying levels of tech in classrooms, but also for taking the tools home.

* And finally, lots of bells and whistles that often get overlooked: ADA compliance, language support, student data compliance, etc.

All that being said, for young children, an iPad is an irreplaceable educational tool. I doubt any Google product has the kind of widespread appeal as iPads do among young children. Maybe YouTube, but even that is a stretch.

My high school spent thousands of dollars on 30-40 iPads which we "used" primarily in Spanish class in my senior year. Overall an enormous waste of money and time not limited to problems connecting to the spotty Wi-Fi. Our teacher was not aware of any good apps that she could tie into lessons so the iPads were used primarily as a web browser for a crappy textbook website.

Virtually nothing was accomplished for a semester with the iPads. The IT director at my school was right when he referred to the devices that were supposed to be a revolution in education as "toys".

When the deal comes to educational practices, a device mostly created for the consumer (as in content consumer) practices does seem to fit the bill at first glance, doesn't so in the long run.

I have used ipads, e-readers, laptops and desktop computers nearly all my life. I was one of the first students who were taking his notes with a palm tungsten e2 with a stowaway keyboard talking to it via IR.

The problem here is as same as the palm's however. I HAD to buy an external keyboard to take notes or write stuff. Even though palm had ingeniously offered a "handwriting method" to take fast notes. But lecture notetaking is a different beast.

"Students saw the iPad as a “fun” gaming environment, while the Chromebook was perceived as a place to “get to work.” And as much as students liked to annotate and read on the iPad, the Chromebook's keyboard was a greater perk — especially since the new Common Core online testing will require a keyboard"

Actually, come to think of it, a dream machine invented for the educational purposes should have three things as essential:

- a turnable (and good) cam to record the lecture with sound

- a comfy keyboard

- A 13' IPS screen. 13 inch is the maximal range. Although screen real estate is a brilliant thing, lugging it out in a huge backpack with charger apparatus does not make it worthwhile.

I think iPads could be great for K12 education, but only if they are used effectively. You can't just take the current curriculum and stuff it with technology hoping to make it better. You have to pair the content and methodology with the technology. It seems like they are just buying iPads/Chromebooks/Whatever, shoving them in classrooms, and hoping they make a difference.

It might be more effective to start with iPads outside the classroom, not inside. Inside the classroom they have access to a teacher. No current or near-future technology is going to be able to replace the benefits of a teacher.

But at home, many kids are stuck with boring paper homework assignments and static, old (sometimes 10+ yr) textbooks. If we replaced paper homework with interactive questions, and textbooks with engaging iBooks (or other iBooks like) textbook[1], that could make a real difference.

Apple had created great interactive textbook creation software, and it seems great paired with iTunes U. However, there don't seem to be great books coming from it. Apple probably should have made many demos (instead of just 1) to give educators and the public an idea of the potential interactive homework and textbooks could have on student engagement.

In terms of what has measurable effects in the classroom there is a very rigorous study by Hattie: "A synthesis of over 800 meta analyses relating to achievement" In it, things like computer assisted learning, simulation and games, testing etc have a very low effect. Primary is things like feedback and other things that come down to the teacher. A partial list is contained here: https://www.det.nsw.edu.au/proflearn/docs/pdf/qt_hattie.pdf That said, a big theme for what works seems to be personalization, custom feedback, custom progress, and computers should be great for this. It'll still be hard to beat a great teacher: in grade 1 alone there are close to 20 different reading levels that each student needs to be supervised through on their own pace

My startup makes PDF annotation software for chrome & chromebooks ( http://www.notablepdf.com ) and we've been getting a huge amount of interest from schools deploying large numbers of chromebooks. Dell even stopped selling their chromebook to individual purchasers since they are struggling to keep up with demand from the education sector [1]

It's a very interesting space at the moment especially with Google Classroom on the way.

[1] - http://www.pcworld.com/article/2453800/dell-halts-chromebook...

There is a saying in education that if something new comes in and threatens the education system - the system will co-opt and neutralize it so that it does not threaten the system.

For example, when computers first started being used in classrooms, they were usually used by progressive teachers in a single classroom (they could usually only afford one). The school 'neutralized' it by moving them to a dedicated classroom and teaching the students secondary skills like typing, rather than using it to create with/explore with as part of the curriculum. This continues to present day - with app literacy (Powerpoint) substituted for typing (usually).

iPads are an interesting case. They are not necessarily coming in from the grassroots (the teachers) but from the top-down. Teachers, in some cases, are the ones fighting the iPads. In fact, most of my educator friends, view the iPad 'magical device' moniker with disdain. It's not so much the walled garden as the hype.

This co-opting is also happening with the Maker Movement in schools. As soon as the Maker Movement moves beyond the single classroom, questions start getting asked. Why do you need a dedicated space? What is this Maker thing? How does making things align to Common Core (no joke).

One of the problems of using Khan Academy self-styled learning is that it is very hard to map Khan Academy lessons to traditional student learning objectives (as mapped out in 1.2.3.4 level detail by the school district or state). Without explicit mappings, it's a hard(er) sell.

It is important to realize that Apple products are accessible luxury products. They are used just as much for their functionality as for status signals. Do you know a person who bought one and is using it for reading email? Yeah I know a bunch.

The paradox in accessible luxury is that unlike other goods -- cars, homes, clothes. The wealthy don't necessarily get higher end devices. You'd have to be a multi-billionaire to have your own iPhone or iPad designed, built, tested. Otherwise chances are even if you are Warren Buffet the highest end smart phone you'll own will be an Apple one. And the paradoxical thing is that someone poor living on food stamps can also probably swing getting the same model with 2 year contract.

So people will shell extra money to own one to show off status. (Not saying everyone does this, it is just some do). This then extends to school districts as well. At some point it doesn't matter about features or functionality someone "up there" with a check-book decided "we are getting the best technology out there for the money. Hey Joe what is the highest end coolest technology out there? Hmm well my kids all got iPads for Christmas... -- Ok we are getting iPads for everyone.".

Yeah I think a laptop is much more useful. I still don't have a tablet. The biggest use of a tablet I can see is watching videos.

Maybe I got brainwashed by their video, but I indeed think that a laptop like the Dell Latitude 13 (http://youtu.be/rq5dqKWymP8) is much better than a tablet.

There is a keyboard, a network activity light on the back of the screen, removable battery, spill resistance, compatible with the Dell Mobile Computing Cart to store and charge them, the laptop can open flat and has a touchscreen so it can do all what a windows table can, 8H battery life, USB ports, they claim that it's sturdy. But most important, there is a keyboard! And with the new features of windows 8 where you can reset the computer with factory settings with or without keeping your data, that's good, but still not as good as not being able to have any software problem like on an iPad.

I really like the network indicator on the back so that the student is immediately spotted when going online, nice idea.

> since the new Common Core online testing will require a keyboard.

Is common core testing available on paper, or is it only computerized?

Our business is built around a Chrome Extension that provides interactive Google Apps Training. At Synergyse we have seen massive adoption of Chromebooks in the education market, which represents a majority of our valued clients. In fact we have grown the business to over 1 million subscribers in 1 year. https://medium.com/@majidmanzarpour/how-we-grew-our-b2b-star...

Hm, nobody is mentioning the Raspberry Pi. Isn't this their target audience? Is it too slow, Raspbian not good enough for what they want to teach, or what's the reason?

(I'm not a teacher nor have I tried to use a Pi (although I own one, haven't had the time to play with it yet); I'm just wondering.)

I fail to understand why any school would need iPads or similar devices. Use the classic blackboard and invest every $ in recruiting and training GOOD teachers.

Yes, a computer room or some sets of LEGO mindstorms kits can make good sense. But iPads or Chromebooks for every kid? Come on...

Single page link:

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/whats-t...

Why do schools have iPads, when they can't afford basic supplies: http://redditgifts.com/exchanges/redditgifts-teachers-2014/ ?

Apple probably knows and they probably don't think it's that significant for them. They didn't hire the CEO of Burberry and st Laurent to sell digital notebooks to grade schools

Is Chromebook that much cheaper? Why is it hard to replace an iPad compared to Chromebook?

To me, a lot of these issues have to do with software rather then hardware.

55 trackers according to ghostery. What the hell is wrong with theatlantic.com?

I never understood why an iPad - why waste money for the apple name? Nexus 7 devices are much cheaper and equal or better.