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http://www.macnn.com/articles/03/03/05/nyt:.maine/

NYT: Maine iBook program has helped learning

updated 09:35 am EST, Wed March 5, 2003

 
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The New York Times reports on the , which offers a free iBook to every seventh and eigth grader in Maine (for a total of $33,000): "Attendance is up. Detentions are down. Just six months after Maine began a controversial program to provide laptop computers to every seventh grader in the state, educators are impressed by how quickly students and teachers have adapted to laptop technology." [free registration required]


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  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    03/05, 09:46am | report spam | Reply |

    Not many students

    > which offers a free iBook to every seventh and eigth grader in Maine (for a total of $33,000):

    Wow, they only have 33 7th and 8th graders in Maine??? I knew there were education cuts in most states, but geez.

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    03/05, 09:50am | report spam | Reply |

    oops

    Try $37.5 million. :)
    Mb get that proof reader some coffee.

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    03/05, 09:53am | report spam | Reply |

    No Mention of Apple/Mac!

    While the term "iBook" is mentioned twice in the NYT article, nowhere does "Apple" or "Macintosh" appear. The article notes that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation helped pay for teacher training. I'm not cynical, so I'm putting this down to altruism. If I were cynical, I would note that these kids will be Windoze users soon enough when they get out of school.

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    03/05, 10:26am | report spam | Reply |

    weaning kids off ibook

    The great bit of the story is that the school is worried that pupils will be distressed when they have to give up their ibooks upon graduating. The best way I can think of is to give them powerbooks instead!

    No danger of losing them to the PC world as this would feel like "degrading" versus "graduating".

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    03/05, 10:59am | report spam | Reply |

    maine

    ....And now from a Student

    Yes I am a studen in a school with the iBook initiative,ect ect. although I am not in Maine I am in Virginia, now i bet you are wondering how i am posting so early on a school day...well im on my iBook bored in the middle of project presentations. Now on to comments

    A breif history of p***: Yes that did happen at a wide spread effect in the first year of the initiative(last year) students were filling up thier astounding 8 gb Hdd with massive movies and pictures of p***. and you guessed it they intended to beat off in the middle of class while thier teacher explained why x = y^2 . This I see as completely a waste, because i enjoy my masterbation in the privacy of my own house ;)

    A Breif History of Security: The school board did not know what they were takeing on when they put laptops in the hands of teenagers, especialy my school. I remember last year at the very begining, Grades, attendance, and teacher share folders were available freely on the school's great new WiFi-network. You wouldnt even need to bee at 'l33t h4xor' to find it, being as it is readily available in a un-passworded appleshare network. It was also freely available to make your own filesharing network, and trade that p*** you downloaded last period through an un-filtered webserver. Now though after a bit of experience they have filtered most all in-appropriate matterial, of cource changing your proxy settings to an older proxy dns name yeilds p*** games and email(a major issue at my school). When Students moaned about slow speeds and inability to connect, they boosted the power of the AirPorts(apples answer to a WiFi terminal) and upped the bandwidth ... now its real fun to go download that 200 meg file by standing on the sidewalk outside the school. Another breif point on this I want to make is that of the new iBook 'image' the supposedly secure desktop shell to make sure we do not modify the system and install games ect., every new installment of this image is broken within an hour of re-issuing.

    A Breif History of H4x0ring: where there is a will there is a way, what better way to do that then to hand computers to teenagers and tell them not to do anything bad with them. Last year a student introduced a virus onto the network which infected the entire county, by traveling through the unsecured filesharing networks. With this he crashed entire schools, forcing our fledgeling tech support to re install OS9.1 on every book in the county. how fun.

    These thing Break...Alot...Apple being the sweet-hearts that they are allowed some of us to return thier defective chargers. Accept for the ones that werent broken at the time which are now SOL as it were. Screens coming off. keyboards, airport cards, hd's, power circutry. Ive seen them all fried shattered and just plain busted.

    Sure it makes it easyer for us to do school work and use web resources otherwise not acc

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    03/05, 11:00am | report spam | Reply |

    ll

    I'm a lifelong Mainer. These articles touting the success of the Maine laptop program are only slightly substantive than an Apple press release.
    The laptop program might be working in pockets in Maine, but it's akin to putting a new paint job on a delapitated vehicle that doesn't run. Maine's educational system is broken, and has been for quite some time; test scores are low, there isn't a standardized method of assesing performance of students throughout the state (don't tell me about the Maine Educational Assesment exams - they're fundamentally broken), and teacher pay and morale is low in almost all schools. Angus King, the previous governer, left the state holding the bag for the $37 mil proce tag, not to mention training for teachers, and a new curriculum to support the laptops. The state's education program is in dire need of funds for basics, such as books, buildings that aren't falling down around the students, competent teachers, etc. The news here in Maine for a while now has been how to get out of this laptop contract as cheap as possible. I'll give credit to Seymor Papert, and folks who would like to implement similar ideas, but until the most basic needs of students are met, laptops shouldn't be integrated into the curriculum.

    I've spoken with a few teachers who deal with the laptops on a daily basis, and it's clear to them that the support network for the hardware itself is severly lacking. The issue of what to actually *use* the systems for seems to have been overlooked.

    Bottom line: the money could have been better spent elsewhere. It's a valiant and forward-thinking idea, but not very pragmatic at the moment.

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    03/05, 11:22am | report spam | Reply |

    Re:and now from a Student

    1. Yea ok...you are a student. Nice try.
    2. Exactly what virus was this that took over your networks?
    3. Funny how you seem to have iBooks breaking all over the place. Our school hasn't had one iBook in need of ANY repair in 2 years of constant use.
    4. The best learning comes from on the job training. If your teachers are worth a damn, they will adapt their curriculum to embrace the technology that they have LUCKILY been given. Or they might cry , whine or b**** and maybe hide behind their inabilities or teacher's union while crying about a lack of training. Negativity breeds negativity.

    Macimmortal

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    03/05, 11:24am | report spam | Reply |

    Re:and now from a Student

    1. Yea ok...you are a student. Nice try.
    2. Exactly what virus was this that took over your networks?
    3. Funny how you seem to have iBooks breaking all over the place. Our school hasn't had one iBook in need of ANY repair in 2 years of constant use.
    4. The best learning comes from on the job training. If your teachers are worth a damn, they will adapt their curriculum to embrace the technology that they have LUCKILY been given. Or they might cry , whine or b**** and maybe hide behind their inabilities or teacher's union while crying about a lack of training. Negativity breeds negativity.

    Macimmortal

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    03/05, 11:45am | report spam | Reply |

    Re: II

    As another Maine resident I must respectfully disagree with your assesment of this forward thinking program. Maine is one of the poorest states in the country. By giving laptops to "every" 7th grader, many, many students who may never have had access to a computer in their home much less their school is allowed access to a cutting edge computer with interent access. I have spoken with educators, parents and students from all over my county and not one of them has had negative comments.
    Just because some teachers sit around and say "well I just don't know what to do with this thing" does not mean the money was not well spent. Those teachers need to have the drive to learn and grow even more than the student and if they're bogged down in their current old school way of teaching and can't "figure out" how to teach using a computer then that is what is wrong with our schools.

    Also I believe that blaming Angus King for holding the bag is misguided. Just to remind you, the state legislature "approved" going forward with the laptop program. Angus didn't just walk over to Steve Jobs house and write a $37 million check. The state as a whole agreed that the laptop program was a worthwhile investment. If it didn't then our democratic process would have thwarted it during the endlless debate that occurred around this program in the state legislature.

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    03/05, 12:32pm | report spam | Reply |

    Yeah!!!

    Apples in schools ROCK!!!!
















































    I couldn't imagine being forced to using a PC. I would be ditching classes left and right.





    Apples rule!

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