No Child Left Untableted 214
theodp writes "Made possible by a $30 million grant from the Dept. of Education's Race to the Top program, the NY Times reports that every student and teacher in 18 of Guilford County's (NC) middle schools is receiving a tablet created and sold by Amplify, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The tablets — 15,450 in all — are to be used for class work, homework, educational games — just about everything. With a total annual per unit lease cost of $214, Amplify was the low bidder of those responding to Guilford's Race-to-the-Top RFP, including Apple. Touted by Amplify as one of the largest tablet deployments in K-12 education, the deal raised some eyebrows, since Guilford's School Superintendent once reported to an Amplify EVP when the latter was the superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, coincidentally a proving ground of the Gates Foundation. Amplify and the Gates Foundation are partners on a controversial national K-12 student tracking database that counts the Guilford County Schools among its guinea pigs. Getting back to the hardware, after putting their John Hancock on a Student Tablet Agreement and the Acceptable Use Guidelines for Tablet, students are provided with an ASUS-made tablet "similar to ASUS MeMO Pad ME301T" ($279 at Wal-Mart). The News & Record reports on some glitches encountered in the first week of the program, including Internet connectivity issues affecting about 5% of the tablets."
Could you have gotten any more links in there? (Score:2)
Maybe linked to the Race to the Top website, a link to the definition of "annual"?
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In other word, you visit a page using http, aka hyper text transport protocol, you got served some hypertext, AND YOU COMPLAIN???
If the author of the web were here, it would get mad. What was his name, Steve Jobs or something like that....
Re:Could you have gotten any more links in there? (Score:5, Insightful)
In other word, you visit a page using http, aka hyper text transport protocol, you got served some hypertext, AND YOU COMPLAIN???
Yes. Because [merriam-webster.com] too many [thefolderstore.com] links make the article [clipartof.com] hard to read [bubblews.com] and obscure [blogspot.com] the most relevant [relevantmagazine.com] links.
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Well done. [kategaffneylikesyou.com]
(Safe for work or home view.)
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The more links, the better the story. Just like more technology makes for better educational outcomes.
Yes, exactly what we need. More distractions. (Score:5, Insightful)
What we really need is well paid and highly motivated teachers with small class sizes. Not yet another way for students to play angry birds.
Of course the ones making decisions know this, but they're happy taking the tech sector money. And a class full of little kids with tablets make good press and website pictures.
Re:Yes, exactly what we need. More distractions. (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone once told me "the further you get from the classroom, the more money you make"
Re:Yes, exactly what we need. More distractions. (Score:4, Informative)
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What we really need is to get rid of standardized tests and realize that one-size-fits-all educations have their limit.
No Child Left Untableted (Score:4, Interesting)
That headline fills me with unease. Sounds vaguely improper.
Maybe I'm just getting old but in my days, children were simply never verbed. It isn't polite.
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The whole summary is a mass of vague insinuations trying to make you think something bad is going on. The deal "raised some eyebrows". The company selling the tablets is part of a "controversial" program using students as "guinea pigs". 5% of the students had "glitches" with internet connectivity during the first week. Gasp! Clearly this whole program is evil and corrupt!
In short, this is someone trying to push their own opinion about something while disguising it as news
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I popped in to call you an idiot, but it's actually even more trollish than you made it sound.
Thank you. ;)
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> Now kiddies, Ritalin yourselves!
Fixed that for you.
Newspeak, here we come! UNTABLETED!!!!!
3.3 million down the drain (Score:5, Insightful)
per year out of tax payer pockets. Please stop doing it for the children because everything you do sets them back even further. Smaller class sizes? Boon for teachers union, bane for tax payers. Students? Show me the improved test scores. New math? Fail. "Smart" classrooms? Fail.
It remains fact that students pre WWII were better educated in every discipline. The US has sunk hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, over the decades to "fix" education with absolutely no positive results. Perhaps it was not broken in the first place.
Re:3.3 million down the drain (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:3.3 million down the drain (Score:4, Interesting)
No, your average US high school student lacks basic principles to do math, let alone make algorithms to automate the doing of math. You imagine an average student could automate the finding of a square root with just addition and subtraction and multiplication and branch after compare being the only operations allowed? The average student has no idea how to find a square root by any means other than pushing a button on a calculator, but even then could not give any situation where a need for a square root would be useful.
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The average student has no idea how to find a square root by any means other than pushing a button on a calculator, but even then could not give any situation where a need for a square root would be useful.
You touch on a topic that has come up in our own home more than once. I learned how to calculate a square root to arbitrary precision at school some decades ago. It was part of the curriculum for 5th or 6th grade then. Our kids do not learn it at school, even though one is presently doing her matriculation (final exams). It's apparently not in the curriculum any more, and I doubt whether many of the teachers could handle it. I taught our kids how to extract a square root [wikipedia.org] myself. They know how to do it in d
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I learned how to calculate a square root to arbitrary precision at school some decades ago. It was part of the curriculum for 5th or 6th grade then.
And when i went to school we "learned" how to do trig functions from angles to 3 to decimals by looking them up in tables in the back of the book. Some things are obsolete. That's been replaced by calculators, and so has square roots.
Square roots are one of them, the masses have a calculator to do that for them. And the subject of finding roots manually is now
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You're avoiding the core issue, most of today's students have absolutely no idea what for what purposes in the real world the square root is useful. We won't even talk about ignorance of basic trignometric function uses. A person who can only look up any answer to a single fact can't connect facts in their head to understand an issue or solve a problem, because there is nothing there.
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You're avoiding the core issue, most of today's students have absolutely no idea what for what purposes in the real world the square root is useful.
Not at all, my daughter's in grade 6. The year has just started but square roots and trig in are in the curriculum -- she wont' be calculating them manually, a scientific calculator was on her school supplies list. She'll be answering problems like "what is the length of a square field 5184 m^2, what is the length of a cube shaped box with a volume of 225 cm^3.
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square roots and trig are not in most United States public school curriculum, your daughter is going to private school?
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yes, but was replying to a person about seeing that in 6th grade. It's not there in public school, I'd know.
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applications of squares and roots are part of the public school curriculum here (via calculator for calculation)... i overspoke when i mentioned trig... it won't be the periodic functions, just geometry (180 degrees in a triangle, finding the other angles from 2 or 1 in a right triangle; sin/cosine/tangent are apparently junior high, although tangent lines to a circle are covered in geometry.)
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Being able to perform the manual process of finding a square root using the method the OP suggested is little more than magical incantation for a 6th grader. My daughter can do long division manually, but even that, she doesn't -really- understand WHY it works. And I don't recall knowing either when i was in elementary school either. Its just the ritual we were taught.
I have a (crappy two-year) college degree, and I don't understand why it works either. If a student gets out of public school with mathematics ability, it's not because the school gives a crap.
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If I we're on a desert island and was going to find roots (any root, not just square roots) manually today, I'd probably use newtons method if i needed precision, or an intuition guided "binary search" if I was trying to do it in my head and just needed to be in the ball park.
I think you'd be better off using a shovel.
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It would be more accurate to say useless knowledge for mostly useless people.
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Amplify was the low bidder of those responding to Guilford's Race-to-the-Top RFP,
So being the low bidder is all that matters?
That's easy... put Linux on it; or make it out of paper [funnyordie.com]
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Second, I would strongly argue that pre WWII people were better ed
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Or perhaps the answer's not (as the teachers' unions have asserted) simply to keep pouring more cash into the system - particularly when they're going to waste it on ipads.
Personally, I'd rather see more arts and humanities programs in schools than another class equipped with ipads.
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Re:3.3 million down the drain (Score:4, Interesting)
see my post:
My kids were sent to school in China for a few years.
While China may have the largest primary class size (37.1 per class) the kids found it much much easier when they came back to Canada.
Class size wasn't the issue, the work was challenging and the environment was strict.
Do you have any empirical evidence smaller class sizes pays off? Here (Ontario) they state 90.1% of classes have 20 or fewer students.
When the kids came back to school here they found it a joke. What they were teaching in Ontario was at least one year behind what they were studying when they were in China.
Here you go (Score:3)
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My kids were sent to school in China for a few years.
While China may have the largest primary class size (37.1 per class) the kids found it much much easier when they came back to Canada.
Class size wasn't the issue, the work was challenging and the environment was strict.
Put a Chinese student up against any other and measure the results
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It remains fact that students pre WWII were better educated in every discipline.
It remains a *fact* that in the 1930s 1 in 20 adults were completely illiterate [ed.gov]. By 2000, that number was closer to 1 in 1000, and concentrated among people who are over 65 years old. In the 1930s, well over half of all teenagers dropped out of school, in 2013 that number was down to 22%.
The US has sunk billions of dollars over the decades to fix education, and as a result the population is much better educated today than it was 75 years ago. That's part of why the US has the most productive workforce on th
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Testing proves it. Inability of average student to perform basic functions proves it, such as finding New York on a global map.
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An average student today would browse to Google Maps, search for "new york", and be presented with the information they need.
Rote memorization is really a useless skill these days, especially for facts that are retrieved infrequently.
It's a lot like the situation with those Indian Java "programmers" who can quote you namespace-qualified class names and method signatures, yet they can't write even simple loops or conditionals correctly. Yeah, maybe they can regurgitate API facts better than an American or Eu
Re:3.3 million down the drain (Score:4, Interesting)
Wrong, lack of basic information between the ears, not being on readily "on tap", means a person can't form a proper mental model to understanding any issue where geographical configuration is key. They won't understand why Russia, for example, would be much more interested in not having external forces involved in a civil war in the nearby trading partner. They wouldn't understand why a hurricane making landfall from state A to state D would also involve states B and C.
You are deluded that education in prior decades was solely focused on rote memorization, as writing, speech making and speech, and solving problems from principles was also taught.
Today's java programmer, to use your example against you, relies on frameworks instead of understanding the basic construction and implementation of the basic objects of the language, and so fails to recognize bad code in an interview. This is what I see at work with interviewees. Yes, they *could* "google it", but they won't when sitting and writing code.
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You are deluded that education in prior decades was solely focused on rote memorization, as writing, speech making and speech, and solving problems from principles was also taught.
Yes, and to prove it, look up the Apology of Socrates or Euclid's Geometry on Project Gutenberg (I'm fine with online resources when they make sense).
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Integrate geoguessr into the curriculum. Problem solved.
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When George W. Bush visited England, one of the British tabloids printed a map on the front page with a big arrow pointing to London, and the headline, "WE'RE HERE!"
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We need an education major who knows all those statistics -- oops! We sent them all off to study hotel management instead.
Anecdotally, there was an article in I think Slate that looked up old prewar high school exams, and I couldn't pass them today. Some people got a very impressive education before WWII, other people didn't. I found my father's old prewar college math textbooks down the cellar, and his freshman math course was covering stuff I had done in high school, like basic algebra.
The best data I kno
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So you're honestly expecting us to believe that little Johnny and little Jenny knew how to use modern PCs, laptops, mobile phones and tablets back in 1925? Blah blah blah
No, they didn't know about it while in school. They invented it.
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How is the education in such communities now? Have you heard a black teacher from the south side of Chicago speak on TV? They only use one vowel (a schwa?) and horrible grammar. Throwing money at the problem has not solved anything.
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Jesus fucking Christ! Do you think there is one black person in America duplicated 10 million times? Black people are different. I had a black science teacher in high school, the best teacher I had, and she taught me stuff I use every day. I had another black teacher who was worthless. Some black people are really smart and some black people are really stupid. If you knew more than one black person, you'd know that.
Now let's have your 1930s-era stereotypes of Jews, Italians, Chinese and Irishmen.
(BTW, it's
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How was education in black and minority communities pre-WWII?
The first thought that occurred to me was that education in pre-WW2 segregated schools might actually have been better than education in today's "integrated" inner-city schools.
That's not an argument that segregation was good. It's an argument that today's system is that bad. It's de facto segregated due to White flight. It's also part of a system that cares more about the Democratic Party machine and re-electing politicians than it does educ
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How was education in black and minority communities pre-WWII?
The first thought that occurred to me was that education in pre-WW2 segregated schools might actually have been better than education in today's "integrated" inner-city schools.
No, there's data on that, and it was submitted in the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education. The southerners claimed that their schools were "separate but equal," so the lawyers proved they weren't. The schools got far less money, the teachers were less qualified, and the textbooks were hand-me-downs from white schools (30-year-old science and history textbooks).
If you look up the NAEP data, you'll see that there's been a steady increase in test scores in math and English for black students fro
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No, there's data on that, and it was submitted in the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education. The southerners claimed that their schools were "separate but equal," so the lawyers proved they weren't
Re-read what I wrote. I didn't say that Black and White schools were equal during segregation. I said it was possible that Blacks attending segregated schools before WW2 were getting a better education than Blacks attending dysfunctinoal inner-city schools today.
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The "chiners", as you call them, value education and hard work, like white people used to do. And as blacks should do. Go ahead and call me racist, for wanting people to have a good education and and opportunity to use it.
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It's not race, it's culture, and it can be changed. First, people need to stop thinking it's about race and understand that some cultures have very damaging elements to them.
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call it anything you want, point is throwing money at that issue has not solved anytihng
Re:3.3 million down the drain (Score:4)
OK, you're a racist.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/wp-content/blogs.dir/470/files/2012/04/i-56483a6e9716d73ba0369eb27a275548-sci_racism.jpg [scienceblogs.com]
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funny, another group of people went through something worse than that for much more than 100 years, and do much better than most. their culture and mindset made a difference
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your cartoon is trying to make an incorrect point. those remaining people in africa, in general, also score low on IQ tests. the problem has a different source having nothing to do with the experience of african-americans.
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I read Charles Murray's articles when The Bell Curve came out. I used to read the Wall Street Journal editorial page and also Science, Scientific American and New Scientist, so I got both sides of the argument. I don't remember the details any more but I do remember that not many psychologists agreed with Murray.
The basic problem was this: If you want to compare the IQ of two "races," you have to get a group from each race that was brought up in the same environment and test them. (You also have to get a va
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The main concern we had was your point about bullying. She was somewhat of an "outcast" in the mainstream program and it made going to school difficult (she was only 10 at the time). Once she was tested and transferred to the gifted program her life changed dramatically (both socially and acade
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Re:No Correlation (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how politicians think a tablet/laptop/computer/ebook reader will make students better.
Manufacturers have lobbyists.
Students do not.
Whose lives do you think politicians are really trying to make better?
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"We need to change this perception and reward students who try really hard and/or do well in school..."
That won't be successful as long as the rewards "we" offer are not the ones students want. Education is a cultural issue and our culture is one of lives getting easier and lazier. It will never be "cool" to pursue what your peers don't want.
Good education requires the expectation of achievement that children take as a given. Instead, we publicly value ignorance over education and today's parents were spo
Wow! (Score:3)
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That's ok, nobody's going to click on them anyway.
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(15!)
15! is roughly a trillion.
Rupert Murdoch? (Score:3)
Will they only be allowed to visit the Fox News site for current event assignments?
Hopeless (Score:2)
I've stopped even trying to address the absurdity of these initiatives. There will always be administrators looking to get attention with big splashy purchases for no particular reason. I don't see any way to stop it.
proper e-books maybe? (Score:2)
A tablet per child sounds like a ridiculous way to spend money, but a valid point brought up in a previous article [slashdot.org] suggests that perhaps a donation is/was made that cannot be spent on any other budgetary concerns. So....kids get tablets.
Perhaps this can be a good thing though. If we can get a gadget in to every child's hand maybe we can force the hand of major textbook publishers and get them to put out electronic copies of their books that are actually usable. I dont mean "Here is the foreword for the boo
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Student remember best by writing notes (Score:2)
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Funny I got tested years ago as a child and retain much less while taking notes.Some kids learn that way they really need to stop pushing the one "true" method as there is none.
Wait a sec... LEASING?! (Score:5, Funny)
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Thinking (only) of the children again (Score:2)
No Child Left Untableted
Right, and to hell with the homeless and other chronically underutilized who have already endured so many years of frustration and unhappiness? Too late for those fuckers so screw 'em, right?
It's ageism again.
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Many of the homeless and "underutilized" are thus not because they made a litany of bad choices but because they were simply dealt a raw deal by circumstances beyond their practical control. After enough years of raw deal, many people are mentally ill at least by circumstance. They may not be as technically helpless as a cute five year old, but their need for help is no less real. It really IS ageism behind these decisions where to focus remedial resources, just as it's an ageism choice to focus primaril
County Ed Budget Too High (Score:5, Insightful)
For their "total annual per unit lease cost of $214" they could buy 5 Raspberry Pis at Adafruit, and OWN THEM OUTRIGHT instead of the devices still being on lease so they have to pay $214 every year till the supplier is fat and happy.
Edison promoted phonograph as teaching aid (Score:4, Insightful)
Every new media invention in the past 140 years has been promoted as an education aid with varying success.
P.S. Edison originally invented the phonograph as a means of cramming more information onto a telegraph. You'd record message on a phonograph, send them at high speed across the wire, record them at the other end, and play back at human readable speeds. Wires were a precious resource in those days.
The no-privacy policy. (Score:2)
The "Tablet privacy policy [gcsnc.com]:
No Right of Privacy
tablet technology users have no right of privacy in their use of tablet technology or the content they access using tablet technology
Review and Monitoring of Usage all tablet technology use may be reviewed and monitored without notice by GCS administrative staff for any reason, even use that occurs on personal time or off school property.
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All your soul are belong to us.
First they laugh at you: (Score:2)
Remember when Newt Gingrich was so roundly ridiculed for wanting to buy laptops for schoolkids?
Now school districts worry about the price and fairness of the contract, rather than whether we should or not.
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Remember when Newt Gingrich was so roundly ridiculed for wanting to buy laptops for schoolkids?
I think he earned greater ridicule for his plan to have children earn their free lunch by sweeping and mopping the schools.
Update: Guilford Has Pulled Out of InBloom (Score:2)
INBLOOM OFF THE ROSE? [politico.com]: "Another state has pulled out of using the Gates Foundation's $100 million technology service project, inBloom. The withdrawal further shrinks the project after other states pulled out in part because of concern about protecting studentsâ(TM) privacy. Guilford County, N.C. told POLITICO on Wednesday that the state decided to stop using the service, which is designed to hold information about students including names, socioeconomic status, test scores, disabilities, discipline rec
Why why why? (Score:2)
You know, we love our tech. I love mine. But back in the day, there was a reason they didn't allow students to use calculators in math class. Basic skills mastery are needed. How to use your hands to write is necessary. How to count and do basic math is necessary. How to spell is necessary. These basic skills most of the 40+ here take for granted is in serious trouble for those younger. When you see actual business reports contain "RU" instead are "are you" you have to face-palm at the very least.
We
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Re:OLPC (Score:5, Insightful)
One basic education in reading, writing, arithmetic, speaking and science per child, using paper and pencil and no computers, would be a superior solution. That's all the education I had as child. I've had no difficulties putting computers to work on engineering, financial, and scientific problems since then. What a fallacy, to think children need "computer skills"; they need thinking skills.
HR-ification (Score:2)
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Now, at $214 a pop, that is orders of magnitude less expensive than textbooks.
Per year. It isn't orders of magnitude less expensive than textbooks, even if one leases the textbooks like one is leasing the tablets.
Re:annual of $214! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Now, at $214 a pop, that is orders of magnitude less expensive than textbooks."
You don't know what an "order of magnitude" is. Textbooks do not cost $20,000+ per year per student in K12 or anywhere else.
$200 could buy a tablet outright rather than lease for a year. eBook software won't change that equation and other educational software is value-add a book can't offer.
And, of course, the horrors of exposing children to display screens. We couldn't possibly know the effect of that by now!!!
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You don't know what an "order of magnitude" is. Textbooks do not cost $20,000+ per year per student in K12 or anywhere else.
... We couldn't possibly know the effect of that by now!!!
Sure we do, we can watch them on the installed video camera, watch what they type on the installed key-logger, listen to what they say on the installed microphone, and when necessary, alter the text material ala 1984.
Re:annual of $214! (Score:5, Informative)
My daughter's school just purchased a few classrooms full of iPads, and received a gift from the parent teacher association for electronic whiteboards with projectors.
Yet on the opening day of school I was sent home a list of art supplies (markers, crayons, glue sticks, construction paper) that the school couldn't afford to buy, and they wanted each parent to buy and contribute supplies to the classroom.
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It's called "The Wisdom of Crowds".
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Read "Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow ...
Please don't post these sorts of things anonymously, Cory.