iPAD for all students AHHHHHHHH

[Ex-MGSTech]

Q&A: the Scottish school that bought all its pupils iPads | Interviews | News | PC Pro

[zag]

Looks cool

 

I take his point about maintenance and sending things back through Indian call centers to Poland!!

 

Its the future, just a little too costly right now.

[tech_guy]

Hmmmm, we'd only need £74k to kit out our 6th form......

[elsiegee40]

Very interesting... but it didn't ask the questions I'd need answering about web filtering, connecting it to the school network, backups...

[localzuk]

We'd only need around £500k to give them to all our kids. Then an extra £15k to make our wireless LAN more dense to support them.

 

Seems like a bargain...

[Guest Guest]

We’re 106 pupils from ages five to 17

 

We had desktops and laptops, but we only had about 25 machines for the whole school

 

It is a fee-paying school

 

Well that was a pretty pointless article. I'd guess the average secondary school is around 800-900 place with 250+ desktops so you can't make any comparisons. Thanks PC Pro [for reminding me why I stopped buying your magazine when I was 16]

[Sean-OC04]

Rather than read the PC Pro article read the actual blog about it....

 

 

Fraser Speirs - Blog

[jsnetman]

My part time boss bought one a couple of weeks ago and promptly sent it back as it does not come with native printing ability. What's the point of anything that can't print.

[RobFuller]

iPad Printing Solved lol

[localzuk]

My part time boss bought one a couple of weeks ago and promptly sent it back as it does not come with native printing ability. What's the point of anything that can't print.

 

People don't print as much as you'd think...

[DrCheese]

iOS 4.1 will include native printing support, due out this November

[zag]

You have to think about personal security as well.

 

I'm not sure I would want all our boys walking down the street with very expensive piece of equipment in all their bags.

[localzuk]

You have to think about personal security as well.

 

I'm not sure I would want all our boys walking down the street with very expensive piece of equipment in all their bags.

 

You mean like their iPhones, iPods, designer shoes, etc...?

[Small_Pig_Dancing]

iPad Printing Solved lol

 

Lol, I clicked on that expecting a bona-fide printing solution for the iPad!

[dave.81]

I've just read through his blog and i can see the attraction on the idea. Our Headmaster keeps muttering about giving our 6th Form laptops/netbooks but i think the iPad could be a better option. Our lack of Mac knowledge is the only down side, just setting up our first Mac suite and it's not been without it's problems.

[RabbieBurns]

With a Dell netbook or something like that, it’s all done by courier service and making lots of phone calls and tracking it, and so on

 

Our dell support is engineer on site next day, so that point of his is moot.

[Guest Guest]

People don't print as much as you'd think...

 

Fancy coming to our school and doing a talk on why printing everything (1st draft, 2nd draft, 3rd draft, final draft... 1 line memos, newsletters which get imediately binned) is a bad idea?

 

iirc our printing and photocopying was in the region of 2million pages last year!!!

Edited September 13, 2010 by Guest

[localzuk]

Fancy coming to our school and doing a talk on why printing everything (1st draft, 2nd draft, 3rd draft, final draft... 1 line memos, newsletters which get imediately binned) is a bad idea?

 

iirc our printing and photocopying was in the region of 2million pages last year!!!

 

How big's your school?

[Robbocop]

Rather than read the PC Pro article read the actual blog about it....

 

 

Fraser Speirs - Blog

 

It's a really good blog, from someone who clearly knows what he's trying to achieve. No-one is going to win an argument in which they try to justify iPads for every school in every curriculum area, but you've got to hand it to the guy for giving it a try. For his situation it's a great idea. I particularly like his comment:

"I get a little testy with people who demand to know "What Will You Use This iPad Thing For?". I don't know what we'll use it for and that, my friends, is the beauty of the thing. When people are allowed to figure out what technology is good for the technology is used better, more often and more effectively than when you're told chapter and verse that This Computer Is For The CD-ROM" Fraser Speirs - Blog which totally turns one major objection on its head.

There is a lot of research going on around the iPad at the moment, so if it's not your bag, that's fine, but if you think it's interesting now, just wait and see where people are going with it

[Guest Guest]

How big's your school?

 

1150 place secondary with 100ish staff. 2,000,000 / 1250 = 1600 average pages per person!!!

 

We are also the lowest funded school in the borough, and are constantly moaning about not having any money.

[Sean-OC04]

It's a really good blog, from someone who clearly knows what he's trying to achieve. No-one is going to win an argument in which they try to justify iPads for every school in every curriculum area, but you've got to hand it to the guy for giving it a try. For his situation it's a great idea. I particularly like his comment:

"I get a little testy with people who demand to know "What Will You Use This iPad Thing For?". I don't know what we'll use it for and that, my friends, is the beauty of the thing. When people are allowed to figure out what technology is good for the technology is used better, more often and more effectively than when you're told chapter and verse that This Computer Is For The CD-ROM" Fraser Speirs - Blog which totally turns one major objection on its head.

There is a lot of research going on around the iPad at the moment, so if it's not your bag, that's fine, but if you think it's interesting now, just wait and see where people are going with it

 

I like this one.....

 

I worked with an older sysadmin in my first job and the first thing he taught me was "you have to drink coffee with the people who use your systems". In his mind, that was the true test of accountability to the users in an organisation where there is no actual economic pressure to be responsive. I think it's a quite brilliant observation.

 

So many schools don't have that same level of responsiveness. The madness is that, even when IT technicians live in the building, they often need permission from "central IT" to take even the most trivial action - and I really mean trivial action, like moving a piece of hardware from one room to another or unblocking a URL.

[localzuk]

1150 place secondary with 100ish staff. 2,000,000 / 1250 = 1600 average pages per person!!!

 

We are also the lowest funded school in the borough, and are constantly moaning about not having any money.

 

That doesn't seem too bad. We're about 600 kids here and we get through about 900k per year.

 

But then, the vast majority is through a single mono MFD which we get charged 0.33p per copy for.

[Robbocop]

re the paper usage debate. A colleague of mine just said that at university she found that writing things down helped her to remember them. I know what she means actually. I'm not sure that typing has the same effect. My 16 year old son floored me the other day by saying he thought that the ability to remember stuff wasn't relevant to schoolchildren any more. The ability to find, organise and spot relationships between pieces of information would be the main skill for future generations. I tried to argue with him but it's more difficult that you think

[Ex-MGSTech]

re the paper usage debate. A colleague of mine just said that at university she found that writing things down helped her to remember them. I know what she means actually. I'm not sure that typing has the same effect. My 16 year old son floored me the other day by saying he thought that the ability to remember stuff wasn't relevant to schoolchildren any more. The ability to find, organise and spot relationships between pieces of information would be the main skill for future generations. I tried to argue with him but it's more difficult that you think

 

That's odd, I had a similar conversation with my 18 year old stapson, he said they don't need to learn skills anymore as they can just Google everything???

I did say that a plumber trying to stop a leak might disagree or even a soldier in the field!

[Robbocop]

That's odd, I had a similar conversation with my 18 year old stapson, he said they don't need to learn skills anymore as they can just Google everything???

I did say that a plumber trying to stop a leak might disagree or even a soldier in the field!

 

Frightening, isn't it? As an employer, we like candidates to know how to work as a team, and be able to think freely around a problem. So whilst I agree with the young that intuition, communication skills and lateral thinking are more valuable to us than parrot-fashion learning, on the other hand not having any knowledge in your head just doesn't work. Coming back to the iPad, I agree with Apple's blurb that it's a fantastic tool for web browsing, reading, watching video and collaboration, so I can see some real benefits in the classroom. Saving paper might turn out to be a great side benefit too. I'm still hoping that some of the knowledge will "stick" and in that regard I can't see that they are any better or any worse than other computer technology.