L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum
latimes.com
latimes.com
We have gone with Linux laptops for all of our students. Even more, we've given them root access.
We chose this because of exactly the points that many people are bringing up in these comments.
What does the iPad offer to the pedagogical process? Not really that much outside of the sanitary iOS enviroment. Are they teaching kids about programming or computer skills? Probably not.
However, with a laptop (and root access), students are able to, and encouraged to play around and experiment.
Yes, we have some students that don't care about it at all, but there are others that have created some genuinely interesting projects. We've actually modified and used one of their projects to help support the linux laptop deployment.
More info: http://www.pennmanor.net/techblog/?cat=69
My boss did an amazing TEDx talk regarding the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8Co37GO2Fc
We're setting up a student led and staffed tech support group so that they can help their classmates out with issues around BYOB, Chromebooks, etc.
I was an enterprise Linux admin in a former life, and I'm working on integrating it more. I've already got it in the hands of a few students on their own BYOD devices.
Great job out there.
Although I work in the district, I'm typically stationed at buildings other than where the current 1-to-1 deployment is happening; so I miss out on a lot of the day to day details.
That being said; the computers run stock-ish Ubuntu 14.04 with Unity. The students are able to install whatever accessibility tools they wish.
It's a great opportunity for learning that would be lost if they were simply provided with an Apple device with Apple approved assistive technology, and told to make the best of it since there's no way to customize anything.
From your link:
each laptop is equipped with a filter to block material deemed harmful to minors. Filters are enabled both on and off campus
I bet that won't be much of an obstacle... but I like how you're encouraging them to "hack" - it's great to give them full control over their computers and see what they can do.
After that, the HS admin will deal with it in the same way as if they brought a skin mag to school in their backpack. :)
http://www.pennmanor.net/techblog/1to1devices/#/5
I'm wondering what materials the students are working with. I'm hoping it isn't some kind of holistic purchased package as per the OA.
The project launched last year with the High School, and this coming school year we will be expanding to the Middle Schools.
It was genuinely exciting to see the students helping their peers.
It's almost all stock Ubuntu, Google Apps for Education, and a few other tools thrown in. We aim for Open Source where we can.
I'd imagine that Mrs Scroggins continues to use her trusty textbooks for routine skills development, perhaps with a few Khan academy resources, some mathpapa demos and, perhaps, a group exercise where students work together in Google Apps to document their steps in solving some bobbydazzlers.
I do not frequent the High School (I'm stationed at the Middle School levels), but from what I understand it's pretty much exactly as you've described.
The traditional books are used, but then supplemented with at-your-own-pace videos and online activities and projects.
When a vendor comes in and says, "We know how to solve your problems," there is reason to be doubtful.
I'm not saying that such efforts have no promise, but there typically needs to be a long growth period during which the tools have to be adapted, sometimes radically. In this complicated a sphere, bottom-up may well work better than top-down.
My friend's a teacher and the stories she tells me give me a glimpse into it. She's been in an intercity school for about 3 years now and so far, yearly:
* 3-4 of her students will be shot dead within a mile of their home or school * 10+ of her students will be in jail or in juvenile detention for a significant amount of time, usually on drug-related charged * 5+ of her students will have a child and miss a significant amount of time * 1-2 of her students will be pulled out of class and beaten by a rival gang
That doesn't even include the kids who work jobs, drug related or otherwise, outside of school to support their families.
Reforming education will be a side effect of working to improve society. Any attempt to reform education without looking at the environment the kids live in will fail.
I honestly don't understand how can the united states live with that level of violence, seeing by themselves that they are the exception in the first world.
Because the people on this forum and the US in general, I would venture to guess, don't live in poor, gang-riddled communities and hence don't see this level violence daily.
I live in the same city and I've never seen it happen, only hear on the news and through people's discussions, because I don't _live_ in the parts she teaches in.
What's doubly sad is our crime rate has been going down since the 80s and 90s and is fairly low among cities our size (Pittsburgh).
I'd invite you to visit America for some length of time before you make conclusions based on internet hype.
>I honestly don't understand how can the united states live with that level of violence,
The people causing the violence feel that it is the norm and most people in those communities do not help the police in any way or cannot (due to retaliation). You can only help someone if they want help, it cannot be forced.
It's a terrible situation that most people aren't motivated to do anything about because it, for the most part, only affects poor black people. The vast majority of Americans never experience any of this violence beyond seeing it in the news.
I'm just as surprised as you are with these anecdotal observations, but I agree- there is a lot to be done to fix the issues, not the symptoms.
By that I mean the murder rates are only high in poor inner city neighborhoods. The crime levels disproportionately fall on poor minorities.
If you can afford to not have to live in those areas, it isn't a problem. And society doesn't care because it's someone else's problem.
Ability/need isn't a scalar quantity and real students don't distribute themselves in a way that can be described by a couple of parameters.
I don't know what the answers are either but I think we need to be very explicit about any assumptions underpinning proposed models. I also agree with the 'bottom up' part of the gf comment.
Now, what discrete 'styles of instruction' are there do you think?
Is this no longer the case? This was 3rd-6th grade, I don't remember much before those grades.
Of course, there are more axes of student variation than schools can segregate on without having a single educator dedicated full time to each individual student, and there are other factors working against such segregation -- it imposes additional curriculum costs costs, and administrative costs which are politically unpopular, and it creates decision points which parents frequently disagree with, which leads to conflict and additional costs on top of those basically necessary to manage the segregation.
So, in my mind, your question is mainly asking if increased amounts of differentiated instruction could benefit elementary school students. I've definitely heard way more about the difficulty of dealing with poorly behaved students than the difficulty of dealing with well-behaved, but low achieving students. That suggests segregating not along ability lines but rather along behavior/self-control lines.
If you run with that idea, and keep class sizes the same for well-behaved children and poorly behaved children, the "good" kids would probably benefit, but the "bad" classrooms would be completely out of control; in effect you would be completely writing those kids off at a very early age. Depending on the capability of the teachers and the difficulty of the student population, I personally think that might actually be a socially optimal use of resources. However, that is a very controversial opinion, and there are a whole lot of people who would not agree with me on that (and most of my teacher friends are among them).
If you go to very large classes for "good" kids, and very small classes for "bad" kids (say ~50 kids vs ~10), you have a different set of problems. A class of 50 8 year olds can get pretty hard to control, even if they're well-behaved 8 year olds. Plus, most schools don't have the facilities to accommodate classes that size. You can bet parents aren't going to be that pleased to have their kids in huge classes. And even if more individual attention is what the "bad" kids need, you still have the problem that you've labeled the bad kids as bad; they'll figure it out and it will probably have adverse affects on those kids' development. That may offset any benefit you're getting from the smaller class size in the "bad" population.
So I don't think it's actually the slam dunk it might seem from a casual analysis.
Schools (and teachers) do account for this as much as they are able to, but having 30 children in the same classroom is more cost-effective than having real provision for individuals.
The reality of it is that we group kids by age and geolocation and put them under the same teacher. It works out mostly ok, improving that will be a hard problem.
Even defining an improvement is not trivial as well. While you ask if students can be grouped by ability, some schools prefer to split these students up, with the thinking that there is more to be gained by having children helping each other out in the same room.
Lower functioning students are provided with much more 'hands on' teaching situations.
I don't know how effective separating student more would be- one could argue that at a certain point it might harm the students because of the lack of socialization. A selection bias of social awkwardness, if you will.
What does the iPad offer to the pedagogical process? Are they teaching kids about programming or computer skills? Probably not.
Did they expect Pearson to produce an entire curriculum just for the iPad? Why not a website instead, which is so much more easily accessed and maintained? Did these schools want to be "technological" for the sake of it?
And for general student tasks, is the iPad really a good fit? As opposed to a conventional computer running Microsoft Office or a browser with Google Drive? And that computer could do other things too?
I had a friend tell me recently how her young child "loved computers and was really good with them," but clarified by saying he was "always playing with his iPad."
I'm not a professional programmer, but I did develop my strong interest in computers while playing around with (and often breaking) my parents' PC as a kid, and I've heard the same from many engineers. I wonder how a kid is supposed to develop that kind of curiosity if their only exposure to computers is the sandboxed, sterile environment of a iPhone/tablet?
Many of us learned the basics of our IT education because we had to fix our first computers to even be able to use them.
This is not the case any more, and we should adjust our perception of how kids learn about computers accordingly.
Prior to ubiquitous tablets and smartphones I had heard similar things you mention except the classifier was, "always spending time on Facebook."
As an interesting aside, I've heard people assert the computer industry is male-dominated because radio shack and others marketed computers as toys for males back in the 80's-90's. This carried over to first year comp sci where males had a leg-up and discouraged otherwise just as qualified females. They had a few anecdotes where young girls were more interested in the home computer than their brothers, but the computer was kept in their brother's room because of this stigma.
More or less, yes: "Under the contract, Pearson was to provide English and math curriculum."
> Why not a website instead
The article says "Deasy had said the technology effort was a civil rights imperative designed to provide low-income students with devices available to their wealthier peers." It's easy for you and me to assume that every man, woman, and child in America has easy access to the web, but it's not necessarily so. Giving a tablet to every single student does seem like a reasonable way to level the playing field. In theory, it would be more portable, simpler to use and maintain, and less abusable than, say, a laptop.
It's unfortunate that things broke down along the way. This could have been a really good idea, if it was implemented properly.
As an example, I have lived with at least one computer my entire life (that I can remember), starting with a Commodore 64. My parents encouraged me to explore, and my dad helped me learn BASIC when I was 9 or 10 (I may have given up without his assistance). The computer was important, but so were my parents. One without the other would have created a very different outcome for me.
Parents of disadvantaged children are less likely to have the time, knowledge, or energy to provide the motivation and assistance to help their children benefit from having a computer. So then, how much social value are we getting when we drop $500 or $1,000 (or more, with support costs) and hand a disadvantaged kid an iPad or a laptop?
In my view, having worked in academic technology, albeit at the college level, we would get better results by providing an excellent technology curriculum, taught by competent teachers, with a low-pressure, low-risk environment (AP Computer Science doesn't work here because disadvantaged kids don't take AP classes). The cost would be about the same, or even less, but in exchange for the money we could get both pieces of the puzzle, hardware (computer labs, imagine in-school hacker spaces), and the knowledge and direction to actually make something of it.
If you want to argue that there are better ways to do all these things, that's fine, but the "only good for consuming content" thing is awfully shallow.
I suppose it depends on what your goal is. If it is to give people a device to use for reading texts then I suppose it's fine. If you want people to reply, or to provide a level playing field outside of school then what I said still applies.
If I were given executive control and a budget, I would work on adding/improving computer labs. For the minority of students who would benefit from a home computer, I would offer a laptop leasing program.
The difference is that the inclusion of the iPad has nothing to do with the iPad. Kids aren't learning about iOS, mobile apps, or how the iPad works. The iPad is a coincidental delivery mechanism.
Contrast that to a computer lab, which is not merely a mechanism to deliver existing math and English content, but also potentially a classroom for computer lessons. It doesn't just provide access. It provides a potential for technology class. That's guided access beyond all the dumb distractions that computers might offer. The iPad is stuck as a coincidental delivery mechanism. You don't even want to do word processing on the iPad.
If at a later time people develop good interactive content that meaningfully surpasses the performance of obvious alternatives, it's not as though your desktop/laptop/computer lab would be any less capable in interactive content. In the meantime, I wonder if the iPad is actually competitive over math textbooks.
that and Apple's marketing moves were pushing pretty hard, they were doing their best to get some local counties to spend a thousand or more per student to give high school kids macbooks
Ego boosts and PR opportunities for board members.
The answer to that is folded and in the wallet of the schools accountant.
This was just a school district looking to waste money as far as I can tell. "Deasy had said the technology effort was a civil rights imperative designed to provide low-income students with devices available to their wealthier peers."
And what a civil rights effort. Slow clap.
If you want to do something to help equalize them with their wealthier peers, buy them all Learn Python the Hard Way. Which would satisfy their need to waste money, because that book is free online.
Sticking something like python onto the school curriculum would only be a good thing. The vast majority who do it won't become programmers, just as the vast majority who sit math don't become mathematicians, etc. but it would give kids a fun and interesting way to learn logic, create things on the computer for themselves, etc.
They have problems unique to them that they may be able to spin up little desktop apps or similar to solve, which could then go on to inspire them to become entrepreneurs, tech product creators, etc.
Regardless, there would be absolutely no harm in making it available to them.
I tend to believe we should scrap the idea of studying subjects, and go back to teaching how to think instead. In the information age, the subjects are easily accessible.
Focusing on the original Greek education of grammar, logic and rhetoric makes more sense to me today. I could see a limited subject study at the high school level, but overall I believe deciphering and processing information is far more important today than its ever been.
I'd love to have my kids focus on the trivium until high school, then move to a limited quadrivium of programming, math, history and biology at that point.
Although the threatened legal action applies to Apple and Pearson, the district also sent letters Tuesday to two other companies: Lenovo, a device maker, and Arey Jones, a computer distributor. These companies also have included the Pearson product on some devices purchased by L.A. Unified.
So, they had problems with non-Apple devices as well?
There's also this statement:
Pearson could offer only a partial curriculum during the first year of the license, which was permitted under the agreement. Teachers and principals never widely embraced the product.
Okay, so the product they bought wasn't embraced. And there aren't any real reasons given other than a vague: “Any given class typically experiences one problem or more daily."
What does that even mean?
It means there is a complex system that isn't reliable enough for its target usage and the end users have no way of pressuring for its improvement.
1) "Any given" really isn't the same as "every". It's vague and ambiguous, and generally means it happens often, but is not a useful measure of incidence. 2) A deployment of this number of devices + custom software will have problems, that has to be accepted. One problem, without knowing what it is, really isn't enough to say the thing is a failure. In fact, it's not even close. Is the problem that someone has to restart their iPad? That the content freezes? The content is inaccessible? The content is incomplete? The Wi-Fi goes down? The teacher's materials aren't working? We really have no idea, and that kind of comment in this kind of story is adversarial and unnecessary.
> “Only two schools of 69 in the Instructional Technology Initiative ... use Pearson regularly,” according to an internal March report from project director Bernadette Lucas. “Any given class typically experiences one problem or more daily. Teachers report that the students enjoy the interactive content — when it’s available. When it’s not, teachers and students try to roll with the interruptions to teaching and learning as best they can.”
So they bought hardware to run software that didn't exist.
Granted that technology in 2000 was not as advanced as today, but the pedagogy behind online/computer based courses was still in its infancy. It would take us 6 months to develop a basic Biology course, using programmers, SMEs, editors, and graphic artists. We turned out what was a pretty good course all things considered.
Where the real problem lay was the selling/marketing process. School districts are by nature conservative, and new ideas/technology that threaten established teaching methods are viewed with a gimlet eye.
Textbook publishers had a lock on the market and didn't want to give up any ground to an intruder. Teachers were afraid of being replaced by computers, leading to widespread skepticism of distance learning. And the technological competence of teachers and administrators at the time was bad; they had too much other things to worry about than to understand the difference between Java and Javascript.
So to me, it doesn't seem like a lot has changed in 15 years. The established vendors want to protect their market, the buyers, though pushed to embrace technology don't know how to use it well, and the students are left holding a bag of shit.
Just to play Devil's Advocate for a bit: assume 12 hours of material each week (Maths/English lessons plus some homework tasks), and a 36 week school year. I'm assuming something like ages 11 to 16, so something like 2160 hours total. That is a fair amount to author before you have a contract is it not?
(As a teacher myself, I would have suggested leading into the scheme with 10% of that with good quality interactive material broken into small enough topics so the teachers could integrate it with what they use already.)
The iPad's are a great way to prepare younger students for "real" computing. I would not recommend tablets as a primary computing device beyond 2nd grade as "creation" capabilities are limited; the iPad turns into a media consumption device at that age.
New? What's new about it? It's a computer with stuff on it.
In my view, Director Deasy's persecution is politically-motivated. The choice to go Apple was the result of successes in various Magnet and Lab Schools, conducted prior to the service agreement with Apple. Multiple vendors were evaluated during the Magnet / Lab development process. There was no opportunity in the process to put it out for three bids during the actual procurement process, because the other vendors were eliminated prior to procurement.
Our technology program is funded by our PTO, which is a becoming a common trend in many public schools. It's much easier for our PTO to raise $80K/yr for tech (we raise more than that, to fund other programs) than it is for LAUSD to indemnify the purchase or lease of tech on a district-wide basis. We will likely continue to choose Apple products, with the primary motivation for that decision coming from the instructors, and secondarily, the build quality being able to stand up to student use at school and home.
This is a company whose business model is being disrupted and whose life will be getting a lot worse if they don't recognize that students (particularly college students) will no longer be cash cows they can milk via textbook/curriculum sales.
In most schools I've seen, by the time the internet gets to the users device, the quality of service is astonishingly bad. Even in schools that purport to have a big pipe coming in.
Low bandwidth per user, bad access points, frequency clashing, broken switches, aggressive content filtering and firewalls all add up to making it really hard for a student to stream even one educational video from youtube.
5 students in the same class, forget it!
Aggressive filtering, unfortunately, is a necessary evil because students are kids who, en mass, are irresponsible and make dumb choices.
Consider LA has 600K+ students across the district, multiple facilities, and tens of thousands of staff I would say that is on the low end of infrastructure costs.
Our four site WAN runs > 30K/year, 100Mbps circuit is 24K, we're already at ~60K/y in operating costs.
It is easy to see how 800mil on infrastructure is probably not enough.
> Could technology help by improving education?
I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.
It's a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.
I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I've seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers - so it's not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.
If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, "Let's start a school." You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they'd start schools. And you'd have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.
They'd do it because they'd be able to set the curriculum. When you have kids you think, What exactly do I want them to learn? Most of the stuff they study in school is completely useless. But some incredibly valuable things you don't learn until you're older - yet you could learn them when you're younger. And you start to think, What would I do if I set a curriculum for a school?
God, how exciting that could be! But you can't do it today. You'd be crazy to work in a school today. You don't get to do what you want. You don't get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?
These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn't it. You're not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school - none of this is bad. It's bad only if it lulls us into thinking we're doing something to solve the problem with education.
Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.
It's not as simple as you think when you're in your 20s - that technology's going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won't.
Clever seems like the one breath of fresh air into the system. Maybe they will get into actual curriculum development in the future.
In its letters, the district said it wants to meet this month to arrange “the dissociation from Pearson and recoup the costs of Pearson licenses that we paid for but have been unable to use.”
Board member Monica Ratliff, who chaired a technology committee that raised serious questions about the effort, said the district has been patient with Pearson but that time has ended.
“I believe that it is time for Pearson to either deliver on its promises immediately or provide us with a refund so that we can purchase curriculum that actually works for our students,” she said in a statement.