“Between 6,000 and 7,000 Palatine-Schaumburg High School District 211 students will get their own fourth-generation Apple iPad to use next school year, paid for by the district at a cost of between $1.25 and $1.43 million for a three-year lease,” Jessica Cilella reports for The Daily Herald.
“Officials decided this week to expand the district’s experimental one-on-one program, which put iPad 2s in the hands of 1,500 students last fall, after reviewing the positive impacts iPads are having on instructors and students,” Cilella reports. “The use of iPads by District 211 students this school year has resulted in better organization, instant feedback, savings in paper and class time and more engaged classrooms, according to teachers leading the program.”
Cilella reports, “District 211 officials are considering expanding the program to include every student by the 2014-15 school year. That trend seems to be growing among the more affluent school districts. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire also is considering distributing iPads to all students by 2015. Every incoming freshman could get one starting with the 2013-14 school year. The school already leases hundreds of iPads for students and staff members participating in a test program… Gurnee Elementary District 56’s 2,250 students will start using iPads by late February. Meanwhile, Carol Stream Elementary District 93 plans to have its 4,000 students using personal iPad or MacBook Air laptop computers by 2015.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Smart schools. No wonder Dell et al. are sucking fumes: Finally, the jig is up.
I attended Palatine Schools as a kid in the 60s.
The Jetsons have finally arrived.
Man, this will be great!
What, you want kids to have access to factual science?
Watch the video. Wish it had been like this when I was at school. Almost makes you want to go back.
Illinois is broke. Spend more get less out of these kids. Higher taxes to fund bankrupt teachers and state workers pension. Hope this helps the children learn. Don’t bet on it. Someone must have got a Illinois kickback.
Maybe the kids will be able to use Numbers toncalculate how much debt they will owe the state of Illinois once they graduate.
Ding! Ding! Ding! +100
Read the article. If you then do internet searches for many of the benefits the teachers reported to the school board you will find that just like Palatine, the same benefits are being experienced at most one-to-one deployments. You may even find the meta studies where university researchers have been studying the effects of personal devices on student progress. It might just burn through your cynicism.
Many school districts fund these initiatives through reallocation of text book money. When the iPad first came out the app “The Elements” was a poster child for the benefits of spending for iPads and apps versus text books: Shortly after “The Elements” was released on the App Store a new element was discovered. Had the money been spent on text books it would have been easily seven years before customers of that text book publisher would have had text books discussing the then-old element. iPad/The Elements users got a free update the week following the discovery.
I’ll bet in some of your classrooms there were dictionaries and encyclopedias. Did you ever decide to get up out of your seat and for fun go look up a word? And since most dictionary entries reference other words you might not know, how likely is it that you followed the thread to the those other words? On an iPad the procedure involves tapping. And it’s private, so no classmate needs be aware that you don’t know the meaning of a particular word.
So you may think they are spending more and getting less out of the kids, but your opinion is poorly informed. The good news is you can do something about it through a little bit of reading on the Internet.
The iPads are more effective and save time and money and the kids learn more ……
So tell me “Twinkle Toes” how does that translate …..
“Spend more get less out of these kids.” Tell me, how?
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for his skepticism if he’s from Illinois. Between the former Governor who is in Jail for trying to sell a US Senate seat and the well known history of Chicago politics, he’s seen an awful lot, probably enough to be skeptical of even hearing some one say “have a nice day”.
Whoever wrote the title to this post, I wonder if they were a graduate of a school from the Illinois school district.
Whole new generations of Apple users in one stroke. Brilliant.
Wish my school district was forward looking (North Allegheny in PA). Ours is Microsoft centric, one of first users of “Vista” in the country. They tossed out all Mac’s in favor of Microshaft’s “open” systems.
It’s even worse than that, this school district just sent the parents a new web site to go to for school information. Yup, the whole thing is flash based. Who commissions new web sites using flash in 2013????????