SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Robert Pogson reports:
Recent news about the popularity of Chromebooks with schools may seem puzzling.
Schools in Hillsborough, New Jersey decided to make an experiment out of its own program. Beginning in 2012, 200 students were given iPads and 200 students were given Chromebooks. After receiving feedback from both students and teachers, the schools sold off their iPads and bought 4,600 Chromebooks.
After all, a keyboard is a great input device and writing is one of the three "Rs" but why not just [buy] a notebook PC? The answer is that the high cost of maintaining the legacy PC is too great. Keeping content on the server makes the job easier and with Chromebooks, schools don't even need to own the server.
...then there's the malware, the slowing down, the re-re-rebooting with that other OS.
That makes the ChromeBook a winner in education and probably a lot of organizations large and small, even consumers. Of course, they could get those benefits with GNU/Linux but it would take more technical knowledge. Again Chromebooks win.
See iPad vs. Chromebook For Students
(Score: 3, Insightful) by choose another one on Wednesday August 13 2014, @04:05PM
Depends what _type_ of content creation you are trying to do, which depends on what you are trying to do with the device and how you are trying to teach. My kids' school went with iPads. I remain somewhat sceptical, but it is early days yet, and seeing how they are trying to use them, the choice of a tablet form factor actually makes sense.
A keyboard is (at least for the next few years IMO) always going to be better for creating _text_ content - but you _can_ usually add a bluetooth keyboard to a tablet, and I know IT Pros who have worked with that combination as a laptop replacement for several years. Text isn't the only content form though, and it may be becoming less important.
A laptop is definitely less useful than a tablet for many other types of content creation. You can't take a picture of the diagram on the board, or your science experiment, and annotate it, using a laptop (you can with a laptop _and_ a phone - and I do at work - but the kids are banned from using phones in school, something which I agree with). You can't use a laptop to get video feedback in sports coaching - in my kids' school, the tablets have replaced separate video cameras that the PE classes used to fight over, now every student has a device that can do that. Trackpads are also hopeless for image editing, whilst there are some very good tablet-touchscreen apps and impressive artists using them - on a real laptop that isn't a problem, plug in your favourite digitizer and use that, but can you plug an Intuos into a chromebook and run e.g. photoshop, somehow I doubt it ? I don't know about video and audio editing - haven't done enough to know if touchscreen or trackpad is better, or what is available on each platform in the way of software, though I suspect a chromebook will have less available than a real laptop and possibly less than on iOS. My kids' school iPads are also in ruggedized cases and I suspect will be used for off site fieldwork as well as PE - not sure the chromebook is even functional offline, let alone rugged ?
What they _should_ be doing hasn't changed:
- know what you are trying to achieve, know your tools
- select the right tool for the job
- don't blame a functional tool for your own inability to use it
Maybe they are trying to replace paper and pen for all content and say bye bye to handing-your-book-in for marking, etc. - my kids' school is not doing that (I guess they may eventually, but it is last on the list), they are using tablets to supplement and enhance the pen-and-paper - in which case the decision to use a keyboarded device may make sense. But, you can always add keyboard to tablet later if you need it.
Other parts of TFA make me think the administrators (or maybe TFA) actually _don't_ have a clue - for a start they seem to think that remote backup (to "cloud") and remote administration / app-deployment are exclusive chromebook features. Since my kids' school just rolled out an iPad programme including both of those, I have to grudgingly admit that maybe they knew what they were doing, at least more than the admins in TFA.
On another note, any admin who thinks that putting everything in "the cloud" with a single service provider (or a single network connection to it) constitutes a resilient or redundant solution, needs to get a different job. I also hope they do have a proper backup plan for working without a connection to their cloud applications, but I suspect the plan might involve "school's closed". Me and my mates never managed to get snow-cloud-making-machine working to get school shut, but I reckon some of today's kids will be quite capable of disrupting their school's internet connection if they had sufficient incentive...
(Score: 2) by cykros on Wednesday August 13 2014, @04:33PM
You definitely raise some worthwhile points about the tablet form factor. Personally, the idea of sending kids running around with laptops seems like an idea that was always doomed to failure anyway. When I was in school, people were already going nuts about how heavy the backpacks were kids were walking around with...care to throw in a laptop with that stack of textbooks? And compared with tablets, they're not exactly known for being particularly rugged.
I'm not sure I agree with text being any less important now than ever (we as a species seem to only be churning it out faster and faster, with the only trend in the other direction perhaps being Twitterization). Doubly in schools, where afaik, nobody has yet suggested that we do away with essays. Keyboards are vital, and should be for some time to come. Perhaps at some point they can be replaced by a futuristic input device, but it won't be voice to text, or likely anything we've yet seen other than perhaps the sub-vocal microphone tattooed on input device that I believe it was Motorola who prototyped. Even that seems a bit of a stretch. Bluetooth keyboards should be adequate, but it is absolutely crucial that these be supplied along with the tablets to keep the playing field level. Expecting the kid with the luddite parents to keep up on his touch screen while his classmates are typing away on a keyboard would be pretty cruel to say the least.
Personally, as much as it might be a bit unpopular to say here (I swear I'm typing this only my Slackware 14.1 computer with Firefox), I'd like to see Microsoft bring some competition to Google and Apple with the Surface tablets. Being able to run Office natively certainly wouldn't hurt, and in a school, the minimal app (read: distraction) support is closer to being a feature than a bug. The form factor seems to meet all the pluses of both tablets and notebook/chromebooks, without the drawbacks that come with either option. While I've got plenty of issues with the rest of the way Microsoft does things, it hardly seems worth being willing to sacrifice educational value over (especially for the likes of either Apple or Google). Of course it'd be nice to see a more open system in place with the form factor, but given what we have to pick from these days, it seems at least as good as the other options. Except on price, where it, along with the iPad fail pretty miserably compared to the mid-range Chromebooks. But any of these companies sitting around charging schools full price despite it being fantastic advertising would be foolish, and indeed, that's usually not the case anyway. If nothing else, it'd give Microsoft somewhere to empty the stagnant warehouses full of computers nobody wants to pay for anyway.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 13 2014, @05:28PM
heavy[...]backpacks[...]throw in a laptop with that stack of textbooks
Properly done, the dead tree stuff will be gone and the texts will be digitized.
Perfectly done, the texts will also be Open Knowledge content, [google.com] developed by a non-profit org.
.
Being able to run Office natively
...is completely unnecessary--unless your intent is to indoctrinate the kids in the fine points of the payware upgrade treadmill.
M$ file formats are purposely fragile and don't even survive from 1 version of M$'s junk to another.
The standard remedy is to open a non-compatible file with LibreOffice and do a Save As.
(The smart people will save as OpenDocument Format; the incompatibility problem goes away permanently--especially if you continue to stick with the $0 FOSS app.)
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by cykros on Tuesday August 26 2014, @05:52PM
While I'd love to see open standards more, I'm not sure that it's worth gambling with the education of schoolchildren to bring them about, when not having a background in industry standard software as universal as MS Office can sometimes be enough to lose an edge in an interview.
I'm definitely not against educating children on open standards, but it may be best to at least offer both side by side (and let them compare and make their own decisions about the matter, seeing the issues that arise from proprietary software firsthand, as well as the difficulties with keeping community driven software feature-complete), effectively giving MORE of an edge to students this way, rather than withholding the industry standard proprietary software as a sort of ideological crusade (even if I do agree with the ideology).
Though it all does sound a little bit silly, especially when MS does things like entirely overhaul the UI, so that despite growing up using MS Office, I was only one year out of college before opening up a new version of Office left me spending a good 15 minutes on finding so much as a menu to click on... When it comes to the basics, Libre/Open-Office are probably more than good enough, and easier to mandate kids use at home than MS Office, but if you're going to get into the use of macros or other MS Office specific tasks, it's probably best to at least expose them to the systems they're more likely to encounter professionally. As a bonus, teaching multiple suites alongside helps abstract the method of learning to use software, as opposed to just knowing how to use a particular program. A skill far more useful than any program-specific expertise. Only downside here is that at least in this day in age, it's probably a lot harder to find teachers for this method, due to their all being brought up the old way...