“Inside Hoboken’s combined junior-senior high school is a storage closet. Behind the locked door, mothballed laptop computers are strewn among brown cardboard boxes. Others are stacked one atop another amid other computer detritus. Dozens more are stored on mobile computer carts, many of them on their last legs,” Jill Barshay reports for The Hechinger Report. “That’s all that remains from a failed experiment to assign every student a laptop in this northern New Jersey suburb of New York City. It began five years ago with an unexpected windfall of stimulus money from Washington, D.C., and good intentions to help the districts’ students, the majority of whom are under or near the poverty line, keep up with their wealthier peers. But Hoboken faced problem after problem and is abandoning the laptops entirely this summer.”
“‘We had the money to buy them, but maybe not the best implementation,” said Mark Toback, the current superintendent of Hoboken School District. “It became unsustainable,'” Barshay reports. “None of the school administrators who initiated Hoboken’s one-to-one laptop program still work there, but Toback agreed to share Hoboken’s experiences so that other schools can learn from it.”
“By the time Jerry Crocamo, a computer network engineer, arrived in Hoboken’s school system in 2011, every seventh, eighth and ninth grader had a laptop. Each year a new crop of seventh graders were outfitted. Crocamo’s small tech staff was quickly overwhelmed with repairs,” Barshay reports. “We had ‘half a dozen kids in a day, on a regular basis, bringing laptops down, going ‘my books fell on top of it, somebody sat on it, I dropped it,” said Crocamo. Screens cracked. Batteries died. Keys popped off. Viruses attacked.”
“Hoboken school officials were also worried they couldn’t control which websites students would visit. Crocamo installed software called Net Nanny to block pornography, gaming sites and Facebook. He disabled the built-in web cameras. He even installed software to block students from undoing these controls. But Crocamo says students found forums on the Internet that showed them how to access everything,” Barshay reports. “All this security software also bogged down the computers. Teachers complained it took 20 minutes for them to boot up, only to crash afterwards. Often, there was too little memory left on the small netbooks to run the educational software.”
“Superintendent Toback inherited the laptop program when he arrived in 2011. At first, he tried to keep it going,” Barshay reports. “But he faced skyrocketing costs, which hadn’t been budgeted for. The $500 laptops lasted only two years and then needed to be replaced. Toback said new laptops with more capacity for running educational software would cost $1,000 each. Licenses for the security software alone were running more than $100,000 and needed to be renewed every two years.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Nowhere in the article is a rather important fact, the type of laptop, mentioned. So, we did some research.
On October 27, 2010, Katie Colaneri reported for The Jersey Journal, “Seventh and eighth graders in Hoboken will teach their parents a thing or two tonight at a special information session about the school district’s new laptop program. Two weeks ago, 91 eighth graders, 124 seventh graders and some teachers were given Dell Latitude 2100 netbooks for use in and out of the classroom for web-based learning and assignment sharing through e-mail.”
That’s right, as expected, the idiots bought exactly the wrong computers. Dell netbooks. Retch! Crappy Windows PCs waste taxpayer’s money and everybody’s time. What a fiasco!
Note to school systems that are interested in success: You want Apple iPads. If you have good reasons for notebooks instead, you want Apple MacBook Air/Pro units. DO NOT SKIMP ON PREPARATION. BE READY FOR DEPLOYMENT. IF YOU CAN’T AFFORD PRE-DEPLOYMENT PREPARATION, DO NOT EMBARK ON MAJOR TECHNOLOGY PROGRAMS.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dogadoga” for the heads up.]
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Price sells cars.
and computers.
Government only buys on first cost?
You mean our schools haven’t had enough experience with this to know by now?
It is amazing what staunch allegience to Microsoft many of these school districts exhibit. Especially those that began with and Apple program and changed to Widows. Those districts especially will not allow any Apple products in. The walls are high and school boards don’t want to be shown to have blown millions changing to windows from mac’s.
The number of people in the world who can’t admit mistakes far outnumber those intelligent folks who do and can learn from them. So is the sad state of humanity.
But you have to think deeper – to the why. Why buy these M$ solutions when everyone knows that they are expensive to maintain in the long run. Sure – the have a low barrier to enter (lower initial cost) – but they are much more expensive to maintain. So why do they continue to do it? The teams that are making the recommendations – are the teams that have to support the computers. The answer is obvious – job security. Why get something that only requires a repair once in a while – when you insure your job for the next 3 years? I know of one school that has 500 iPads. The have 1 person that comes in for 8 hours a week. All of the management of the devices is done remotely. Compare that with 500 Netbooks – you’ll probably have 2 engineers full time on the account. If you are the guy making the recommendation – what would you do? I don’t think it’s right – but sadly this appears to be the reality of the situation.
Current laptop technology isn’t ready for distribution to children. Windows is too malware prone and hackable to be the proper OS, spinning hard drives too fragile, SSDs too expensive and glass screens also too fragile. Kids obviously can’t be trusted to care for expensive technology unless they or their parents are held responsible for repairs.
Even with Applecare+ the smaller screened iPad minis would be a risk, but MDM would be easier, but how appropriate would iPads be for the majority of classes?
School systems need to study the problem from every angle, MDM to teaching materials to mishandling by students before making any costly decisions.
The Hoboken school system jumped into this without much forethought and suffered the consequences, and who suffers the most? The students.
Makes you wonder what of note they are teaching the kids then doesn’t it.
This time frame was the darkness before the dawn of the ipad launch. Everyone WIndows pc maker was tauting the savior called netbooks.
The fact that they gave a POS pc to under-served kids did not help. These kids know enough to know that netbooks were the lowest form of pc, so they treated them as such.
“The $500 laptops lasted only two years”
Duuuuuuuuhhhhhh!
Careful, MDN: All the same problems befell laptop programs that involved Apple laptops. Don’t dump on me: I was a part of many of them. We had a saying: “The kids outnumber the adults.” We had posters of the kids receiving their laptops over which the words had been printed: “These are the enemy.” It was a venting of steam from having to fight — with technology — what should have been enforced through policy. Many of the not-so-insignificant improvements in OS X (and laptops) came about because of the experience gained in these schools. But against technology you are pitting the will of community members with their agendas, school district officials with their agendas, inappropriate budgetary expectations, and the FUD spread by competitors. Perhaps not too surprising to this audience, the schools where laptops are successful are ones where real leadership exists, teachers are given plenty of training to feel competent in using the laptops instructionally, and IT *monitors* policy compliance rather than trying to enforce it through technology measures. Reading the Hoboken experience reminds me of a question we used with administrators: “Yes, we can lock the computer down so tight the only thing they can do with it is use the D key, but what’s the point then?”
All the same problems befell laptop programs that involved Apple laptops.
Except the malware. AND all Apple devices come with client and parental control software. AND iOS devices can be customized by Apple’s Configurator software, designed for enterprise use. All of the above cuts down on background processes and memory use, leaving the devices simply ready to work as required. AND expect about a 10x drop in OS and hardware failure repairs, the perennially great reputation of Apple gear. Also, when they go bad, Apple will take them back for recycling.
As for sitting on, smashing, dropping, flinging, drowning, stealing, selling and hacking devices: Those are indeed universal problems. No hardware or software are perfect, no matter who made or wrote them.
I agree that there are “universal problems” with certain types of computers when making a volume purchase. In 2008 our school bought 60 plus iMac computers for 2 computer labs. Six years later most of those desktop computers still run well . . . However, in 2008 we bought a cart of white MacBooks, and those are pretty much useless now. Laptop batteries do not last forever, so unless you budget for buying new batteries and repairs, you have issues.
Batteries: We’re still in the stone age. But slow progress continues:
Stable lithium anode may triple battery efficiency
How many 1:1 deployments have you helped architect, deploy and support?
I don’t even know what 1:1 deployments are. But I’ve written manuals, papers, essays, summaries, blog entries… out the ears.
I don’t mind our discourse and I’m learning from it, so I’ll continue on:
My experience taught me:
1) You identify a need.
2) You propose a solution and analyze it.
3) You enact the solution.
4) You verify the solution actually solved the need.
5) You THEN let the solution out into the world and NOT before.
6) You support the solution as required.
– Then start the cycle again.
This is entirely the process of writing any published work, or any software, both of which are within my realm of experience.
What Apple is consistently and annoyingly doing:
A) Publishing pages on the Internet with URLs that 404 because the associated document hasn’t been published yet. I’ve seen this go on as long as 4 days. Specifically, I watch Apple security documents. Their record of publishing linked security documents along side releases of security updates is appalling. Not acceptable.
B) As seen in the subject of this article and thread, Apple has been publishing documents that are NOT supposed to appear in public. In this case, two unannounced devices appeared in a public document. That’s not acceptable.
C) Apple has been publishing incomplete documents, leaving customers to wonder if Apple actually knows its own products. I ran into this earlier in the week when my net friend Topher Kesler wrote an article about undocumented OS X key commands. Because he made an error in one of those he published, I provided him with a correction after I went fishing around at Apple to verify they really had NOT documented the command. Nope! Apple had not. It literally was a key command you had to fall over in order to discover it, AND it’s a very useful command when using Spotlight: Control-Command-F to immediately search by name.
Conclusion: A repeated pattern of mess from Apple’s documentation team.
And you’d rather simply be relational about the situation and let it all slide? That’s why people like me are in the world, bless us. And please do bless us. We’re the ones who get things done and thankfully are NOT deterred by fears of offending some relationship or other. It’s a critical role in any endeavor, and obviously entirely thankless, except from in this case THE CUSTOMERS. I constantly get thanks from people who benefit from the things I correct and repair in the world. You’re welcome.
This 6 step process is specifically why Apple succeeds. VERY few other companies comprehend.
WHY I think Apple is failing at documentation so often: I am going to cast and educated guess that it’s the same thing you and I are doing right here right now: It’s the relational people versus the productive people. The enmity between them can be severe, with the relational people being outrageously vicious toward the productive people. That enmity cannot become part of the work culture and must be resolve every single day with no one expecting it to roadblock anything. (Wait, am I talking about #MyStupidGovernment?)
Any good organization uses all its diverse skills to the best effect possible. But that means bulldozers like me have to take time to explain why their bulldozer job is critical. (I’ve certainly done that around here!). The relational people have to point out when people are needlessly being plowed under by the bulldozer, but also deal with the fact that schoozing and studying accomplishes nothing at all except emotional needs. Organizations are NOT going to accomplish anything at all if the only run on emotion. They must go through the 6 steps while being both:
Rational
and
Emotional
I don’t know why we aren’t raised as kids focused on this balance and why it’s consistently at the core of both intrapersonal and interpersonal contention.
Hopefully this is has been a useful expression of my current POV as a growing, developing human. Good day sir. 😀
Fuck you
What a joy to see the intellectual level of MDN is on the rise again.
Profanity is the preferred weapon of a person not armed with intelligence or wit.
We’re all growing and learning, hopefully. So why allow it in yourself but not in others?
Why respond to other people on MDN with things like “Didn’t even read all your blather” and then post something like this?
And you might repost it over on the correct article. See, we all make mistakes.
‘…but not in others’ ? ? ?’
Who are you responding to? Or are you responding to the wrong article? If you’re responding to me, you clearly are not reading my ‘blather’ (which is a word I never use BTW).
Derek, you posted a 666 word reply to the wrong article! — This article is about the IT problems with a laptop initiative at Hoboken schools, and your reply appears to be regarding the documentation failure within Apple’s support organization: http://macdailynews.com/2014/07/30/apple-support-page-also-listed-unannounced-imac-27-inch-mid-2014/
My point is that you seem completely intolerant of people making mistakes and yet you yourself have made a mistake here. And then, you could say, compounded that mistake with your subsequent replies.
Ever feel stalked? Please do toddle off to misinterpret someone else’s posts.
No, I have a better reply:
At this point jt016, if you were working inside my organization, you’d be fired for attempting to justify and stop the repair of unacceptable behavior. I regret bothering to discuss anything with you. You are unacceptable.
Ho-BOken!?!
OOOooohhh! I’m dyin’ again!!!
That’s all folks!
You should have taken a left turn at
You should have taken a left turn at Albuquerque. 😉
This is more a story of IT incompetence than anything else. It doesn’t matter what hardware was involved. The IT people know zero about mass deploying computers to students. No lock downs, no whitelists, no dual authentication. Oh, and it’s New Jersey.
As a lifelong Jerseyite I have a couple comments. Hoboken isn’t a poor town.Charge a large deposit on the laptops and make the students responsible for repair costs. Issue highly protective cases and mandate their use.
Kids won’t respect equipment unless their (or their parents’) money is at risk.
Hire a consultant. this is 2014 not 1980. Computers have been used in schools for decades and there are people who’s business it is to know how to handle the logistics.
better idea: throw away Hoboken instead.
“Hoboken is throwing away all of its students’ Dell laptops” The why is unnecessary.
If your laptop smells of cat urine then it’s probably a Dell.
Those weren’t even real laptops but netbooks. Hardly the power to boot by themselves let alone run other software. That’s why they only cost $500. Winblows isn’t secure so naturally the students could get around the security because there is no security!
The problem here is very common. It is not limited to schools, but runs rampant in business as well. The type of computer isn’t the problem; the software isn’t the problem; and IT support isn’t the primary problem either. The problem is believing “technology will solve all of our issues.”
What is the technology supposed to do? Putting a computer in a kid’s hands isn’t going give him a better career. You have to have a plan for what he is going to do with the computer that will improve his chances over not having it. You need to have teachers that will use the technology right. You have to have teachers willing to LEARN how to teach WITH the technology.
Don’t get me wrong: there are some GREAT teachers out there. There are some that will give 300% for their students. Unfortunately, there are HORRIBLE teachers out there, and probably worst of all, both groups are vastly outnumbered by the MEDIOCRE teachers. They do their jobs, and they hope they’re making a difference. But, they are just part of the status quo.
Overall, the point of this book I’ve written is that you need to have a tangible, reachable goal, and you need to have planned steps to get there. That plan may include technology or not, but unless that plan is mapped, understood and adhered to by all, introducing technology into the mix will be a FAILURE.
Exactly! Apple tried to switch the conversation from talking about “laptop initiative” to “learning initiative” to put the focus back where it should be. And to sustain a learning initiative that involves laptops (and teacher training, and community involvement and, and, and) your goal isn’t a fixed goal post, it’s one that must change each year as things progress. Success breeds success and the plan changes, failures have to be addressed and the plan has to change. Which is the weak link: Administrators and school boards change too, and then so does the “goal.”
When authority at school make/take decisions like a third world country’s government, you are going to get huge losses to accomplish small task
Wasn’t the whole point of the “netbook” that it was cheap? How in the heck did they end up spending $500 a pop on them?