“When Los Angeles schools began handing out iPads in the fall of 2013, it looked like one of the country’s most ambitious rollouts of technology in the classroom,” Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired. “The city’s school district planned to spend $1.3 billion putting iPads, preloaded with the Pearson curriculum, in the hands of every student in every school.”
“Less than two years later, that ambitious plan now looks like a spectacularly foolish one. In August, the Los Angeles Unified School District halted its contract with Apple, as rumors swirled that Apple and Pearson may have received preferential treatment in the district’s procurement process, something the FBI is investigating,” Lapowsky reports. “Then, this spring, the district sent a letter to Apple seeking a refund, citing crippling technical issues with the Pearson platform and incomplete curriculum that made it nearly impossible for teachers to teach. If a deal can’t be reached, the district could take legal action. Pearson, whose stock tumbled following the news, has publicly defended the curriculum, which LAUSD’s director of the so-called Instructional Technology Initiative denounced as utterly unusable in a memo earlier this year.”
“But while the the parties involved continue pointing the finger and picking up the pieces, the important question to ask now is what this fiasco means for the future of technology in the classroom,” Lapowsky reports. “According to Michael Horn, executive director of the education program at the Clay Christensen Institute, who also is author of Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools, Los Angeles is a classic case of a school district getting caught up in the ed tech frenzy without fully thinking through why technology is important in the first place.”
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