The Los Angeles Board of Education announced on Tuesday that it will continue on with its plan to equip all students, teachers, and administrators in the district with a computer, distributing iPads to 38 additional campuses ahead of state tests in the spring, reports The Los Angeles Times. The school district will also purchase laptops for seven high schools.
The newly approved $115-million proposal does not cap the number of iPads the district is able to purchase for students during testing, but the L.A. Board of Education expects the number to be under 67,500. The iPads will be shared by different classes over the course of six weeks of testing.
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Each iPad typically costs the L.A. Unified School District $768, which includes curriculum, but the district is aiming to negotiate a fee of $200 to $300 less for iPads used exclusively for testing. Initially, the school district's contract locked it into purchasing older iPads, but Apple has now agreed to provide newer models at no additional cost.
Back in June, the Los Angeles Unified School District voted to spend a total of $30 million on Apple's iPads, equipping every student in 47 of the district's schools with a tablet preloaded with digital textbooks. The initiative, which saw approximately 35,000 iPads handed out to students in the district, is part of a larger effort to equip all 640,000 students in the district with iPads by the end of 2014.
Though the L.A. School District has seen success with the iPads, it did encounter some difficulties with students bypassing the content restrictions on the devices. As a result, home use of the tablets has been halted.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)But, this doesn't mean we should revert to slate chalkboards and quill pens and ink. Computer and technology skills are needed, and students need to be exposed to technology to be comfortable with it. There are also compelling reasons for using tablets if they can replace paper textbooks and eliminate the costs required to purchase, store, and update them.
The technology just can't be used as a crutch, is all.
A common technology platform must also be developed, one that is not OS-dependent. If a student's family has to move from an iOS-committed district to a Windows Tablet-committed one, the student's performance impact involved in catching up to the new students (or waiting for them to catch up) could be amplified by having to learn a whole new workflow.
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Scroll down to "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.
A few (mostly private) schools have been spectacularly successful because they put a huge amount of effort, not just money, behind it.
Unfortunately the majority (mostly public) have not really shown much benefit, and a few (Fort Bend, Tx) have totally failed.
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This isn't an argument about iOS/Windows/Chrome. The OS should be immaterial. The important thing is to take advantage of technology to further the education of our children.
Yeup.
Major studies should have nothing to do with the OS, as it is simply the delivery method to the subject taught.
Heck, one should be able to learn MS Office on an iPad. :D
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