[LINK] Apple iPads for Victorian School Students

[Richard Chirgwin]

Tom Worthington wrote:
> Premier John Brumby has announced 500 Apple iPads will be issued in a
> trial to students at eight Victorian government schools:
> <http://www.premier.vic.gov.au/component/content/article/10578.html>.
>
> At $AU629 each for the iPads, by the time support costs are added, I
> estimate the trail will cost $1M. It is not clear what such a trial
> would accomplish, or if there will also be an investment in educational
> content and training for teachers to be able to use the iPads.
>
> A few minutes trying an iPad was enough to tell me it was inferior to
> cheaper netbook for education. In contrast to Victoria, the NSW
> government is issuing 10,000 netbooks per week to schools, as well as
> employing support staff:
> <http://www.nsw.gov.au/news/2010-student-laptop-rollout>.
>
> The NSW Government has a superior strategy, more likely to deliver
> educational benefits than diverting resources to a trial of a few
> hundred tablet computers.
>
>   
Being familiar with the NSW netbooks, I'm more likely to say "a pox on 
both their houses".

They're quite appalling little bits of landfill that can't boot in any 
reasonable time. Setting them up for a home network - and I'm not a mug 
at this - is irritating. If they can't see the Dept of Ed login server, 
they're likely to object to being booted at all. At home, because of the 
way the machine is configured, it tries to poll the login server 
*before* it connects to the wireless LAN - so it gives the complaint 
about not being able to find its login server. If you try to work out 
what's going on, you just get into a game of recursive cursing.

Login after boot is also slow; so in a 40 minute school period, about 5 
minutes - one eighth the available time - would be lost before you start.

Because of the combination of processor and memory lameness and the 
inescapable bloat of office software suites - (any office software; OO 
is just as fat and unwell as MS Office), doing anything at all on the 
stinkpad makes me think the main educational benefit is one of teaching 
patience. Word can take ages to load and ditto to save files.

Let's see. The one delivered to my son had the head removed from the 
pointer toggle in the middle of the keyboard. I thought this meant it 
was broken, but no: it seems to be a work of genius designed to reduce 
the chance that the toggle (paddle? whatever) causes a warranty call. So 
you have to use the second-worst touch-sensitive pad I've ever seen  
(the worst is on my Acer). The machine has desperate trouble - long time 
with hourglass followed by nothing-happened type of trouble - 
recognising an external mouse (which we tried because the pad is so awful).

It's been impossible to teach the machine about the printer at home - 
any printer, as far as I can see - because it won't install the drivers 
without logging into the printer, and it can't do that because the 
printer is shared over a USB port and looks for a password, and it won't 
do *that* for reasons I just can't fathom; and I have the same printer 
successfully working with other Windows machines plus Mac and Linux.

Battery life is unpredictable and short; not adequate if the thing were 
to ever see a full day's use at school without the student carrying the 
charger as well.

And the software is little more than a rag-tag of office and 
productivity apps. If anyone wants to argue the Benefits of PowerPoint 
in an Educational Setting, please take it to an MS user conference, 
because students are already being taught to compete in the matter of 
slide aesthetics as much as in their research and quality of information.

That's not to say an iPad would be better. The whole "educational 
technology" debate, if ever it had genuine pedagogical value, has been 
hijacked by vendors and toys and which government can have the shiniest 
marker for the grave of its education system.

RC