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Shame on Me
October 3, 2013 Government Gone Wild

For sending my children to Catholic schools. No reason to comment on that. I just got a tingle when I compared that piece to this news: the LA Unified School District has a ONE BILLION dollar program to give tricked out iPads to kids instead of textbooks. Again, no need to even comment on that insanity.

"6" Comments
  1. My son’s all boys Catholic high school is in its second year of the students using ipads. There have been no problems.

    I see no reason that this effort can’t be generalized to the entire LAUSD.

    /sarc

    • I am willing to bet that your school did a lot of thoughtful analysis before purchasing the iPads. I’ll bet they talked to teachers, who in turn explained how they’d use them in the curriculum. I could be entirely wrong, but I’ll bet the LA schools pretty much got with Apple and foisted a billion dollar hardware purchase on teachers and schools, whether they wanted it or not.

    • This leads me to think I might be right about my guess that the LA school district didn’t exactly think much before spending other peoples’ money on iPads. (oops forgot the keyboards!) http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2013/09/03/lausd-may-need-to-spend-millions-on-keyboards-to-go-along-with-students-ipads/

      • jb, Please do note the sarcasm of my post.

        But you are correct. The effort was well planned. I believe the school also secured the funds for the ipads from a generous benefactor, as we have been charged not one penny for the device. (And if you have kids in private school you would understand that this is not the norm.) Most of the textbooks have gone electronic and our costs for these books has been reduced substantially. It hasn’t been perfect on that point, we had to buy, I think, the French book on dead trees. (But this isn’t a big deal as the French teacher uses a book that is readily available on the used market, there clearly isn’t a payola scheme in her selection of the required text.)

        Now my son goes off to school with an ipad and his French book in his backpack. This is a much lighter load than before the ipad program. Reduced weight and reduced cost. And given that it’s a Catholic school, the incidence of surfing porn, at least on campus, is likely far less than what you will find at an LAUSD high school.

        Also, if my son wants a keyboard to use with his ipad, I’m free to buy one. The school provided the ipad only.

        Upon graduation in 2015, we are free to turn in the ipad or purchase it at some yet to be determined price. We’ll make that decision when the time comes.

  2. If we forget that kids will break, steal, and hack these devices, if these programs are implemented well (unlikely), isn’t it plausible that there could be long term cost savings? Two of my Financial Accounting college textbooks cost the same as the previous generation’s iPad. Had I purchased an iPad/Kindle freshman year and exclusively rented e-textbooks, I would’ve saved hundreds. Depending on the size of the discount offered for e-textbooks, and how often these schools would buy new books anyway, it could make some financial sense. This of course assumes organization pricing is comparable to individual pricing and that students learn as well from digital books as they do from hard-covers, neither of which I know anything about.

  3. The fundamental problem in education today is that our children are not connected wiressly.

    At least the Catholic schools require children to be able to write sentences that are longer than tweets. I guess I am right about that, WC?

    Obama wants everyone connected, so when they get The Weather Channel on their phone, they can get a message about how he, The Mahdi, will reduce your mortgage payment. I am not making this up.

    Who in government is in charge of advertising for the Mahdi on The Weather Channel? Who buys the Obama Twitter ads? There is no fine print, which may be more costly and not fit into a Tweet?

    WC invites comments when he tells us to be silent.

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