I think the key reason tablets were chosen wasn't that it was the best learning tool, but it was the best learning tool that won't cause a maintenance nightmare for school IT when kids go crazy with viruses and bricking their laptops whenever they were late for a homework assignment. Ipads are relatively hard to fuck up fron a software side, and if they do you just do a reset.
This does match my usual experience of IT philosophy in educational institutions that says that the easiest way to maintain infrastructure is to not let people use it. That it defeats the whole raison d'être of that infrastructure is apparently beyond their care.
It's like a city would give a company a long-term contract for repairs to a stretch of important road, and the company started by locking it down and deciding that they'll profit more and work less if the road is not used and thus won't require so much repairs.
Educational institutions ? I currently work for one of the biggest resource companies in the world. It generates many billions of dollars of revenue each year. It spends millions on infrastructure and then refuses to allow anyone to actually use it.
A thousand chinese state hackers on adderall can not disable a network so thoroughly as "Infrastructure Security" can, I don't even...
At a company where I used to work, we jokingly referred to our Networking Support office as "Notworking Support", since the policies they had to implement pretty much all involved making sure we could not do our work.
Back in my day (this was like 10-15 years ago), the Windows machines at an elementary school I worked at for a bit had a piece of software installed that undid any changes done to the computer after a reboot. IIRC that was more effective than locking the system down with all kinds of hacks.
(we famously circumvented a block on using the browser in a very locked down windows machine by opening up Notepad or whatever, opening a file, right-clicking and managing to open an Explorer screen, which changes to IE when entering an URL)
I'm going to guess that was Faronics Deepfreeze. I was a big fan of it as a student and later as a part-time admin, simply because it seemed a better relationship between administrator and user.
I suppose the utility of this depends on your definition of learning.
No one I know "produces" content on an ipad but it's fine for HN comments or management emails. So maybe that's what we want to teach, not sure.
In theory I suppose the lesson is that if you are a "regular" user, IT is brutally unhelpful, and put your content on removable media or cloud storage.
This is not such a bad lesson, and the kids who care about owning their data will eventually figure the other side our for themselves.
I still think using general purpose computing devices in general education has value, mainly because then the kids who don't see that at home will get a chance. When you do it's like the whole world changes if you're made like that.
"No one I know "produces" content on an ipad but it's fine for HN comments or management emails. So maybe that's what we want to teach, not sure."
Yet there are thousands of content creation apps on the app store, many of which are very successful. An iPad Pro with keyboard and pencil is extremely capable at content creation. On mine I regularly use mine to write long form fiction, do web development, do iOS prototyping in swift playgrounds, draw and sketch art (pixel and comic book style), sign and annotate pdf's, and sometimes produce electronic music. I'm a software engineer by day and a indie game dev at night. For many of the content creation tasks I need the iPad Pro is among the best tools available.
iPads with Apple’s stylus are amazing tools for illustration, hand-drawing diagrams, sketching out ideas, proofreading PDF files, taking technical notes, doing mathematical scratch work, and so on.
Think of it like a notebook/scrapbook with pens/markers that doesn’t take any consumables, takes up less space in a bag, allows undo/redo, and makes sharing the products digitally a snap.
Works best when used alongside a laptop, rather than as a replacement, at least for me. I certainly wouldn’t want to write code on it full time.
Agree, it's wonderful except for thinking clearly about things and clearly expressing them in other terms than a diagram. And in the iPaid view of the world, if you write a responsive comment, only paid subscribers will see it. Because that's "premium content".
I have no idea what you’re getting at with “iPaid”, “responsive comment”, “only paid subscribers”, etc. Seems like a weird off topic rant that has nothing to do with my comment or the thread in general.
For pen input, the iPad (display, stylus/digitizer, software) is better than anything you could buy for 50x the price a decade ago. For me, it’s not as good a general-purpose computer as a 10-year-old laptop, but it’s also not really supposed to be. There’s room in the world for more than one vision of computing to exist side by side.
Yep, this is exactly what I do with my Surface - except then I do code on it, which is why I picked it instead of an iPad pro. This one device has replaced my MacBook pro while still letting me sketch and draw and annotate.
I tried a few versions of Surface, but I found the Apple stylus to have about half the latency (or maybe less), with better precision/accuracy, and the signal processing done by the software I tried to convert pen inputs to strokes/lines seemed more polished/effective.
I’m sure there are some customers / use cases where those differences aren’t a deal-breaker. Personally I really appreciate it. I have been very impressed with the iPad pen input. It’s clear their hardware and software engineers collaborated closely to make a really impressive device and experience. (Again, as long as you mainly are using pen input.)
It’s possible there’s other software out there that does a better job than Microsoft’s first party stuff or the couple of third-party apps I tried.
It's not very enterprisey, but Tiny Core Linux works great for this -- runs completely in memory, doesn't even mount the partition with the OS on it. Real Linux, but also pretty hard to do permanent damage by mistake. (Easy to make the system not bootable on purpose, but just as easy to restore.)
