Alabama’s Cahaba Heights students and teachers get Apple iBooks

“Cahaba Heights Community School distributed laptop computers to its sixth-graders Thursday in the launch of a pilot program called the first of its kind in Alabama,” Dawn Kent reports for The Birmingham News. “The students took the laptops home with them and will continue to carry them back and forth to class, as Vestavia Hills school officials evaluate this approach to teaching a technology-driven generation.”

“While students described their new school supply as ‘cool’ and ‘neat,’ their parents seemed equally captivated. ‘It will give the kids an additional tool they can use to help with their schoolwork and get them integrated in the technology they’ll see down the road,’ said Jacob Couch as he helped his son, J.B., log in to his laptop,” Kent reports. “Through an agreement with Apple Inc., the school system is paying about $127,000 over the next three years to lease 75 iBook laptops in a program called Apple 1 to 1 Learning. The agreement covers laptops for about 40 Cahaba Heights sixth-graders, as well as their teachers, who received their laptops about two weeks ago.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: In related news, one parent, an MCSE, complained about using Apple’s Mac OS X as the school’s platform of choice, on the grounds that students will be completely ignorant of all aspects of anti-virus software, will not know how to clean their systems of adware, spyware, and assorted malware, and the children will be put at risk of developing high expectations for computer systems and software. “What happens when the kids get into the real world and have to run Windows? Mac OS X just works and it makes intuitive sense, so they’ll expect that of Windows, too. Most of our students are going to be mighty unhappy when they get their first ‘real’ job.”

[The above MDN Take did not really happen, but it could have easily occurred. It is intended for illustrative purposes only.]