This past week my attention was drawn to how decisions are made to bring technology into the learning environment; namely our schools. The state of Maine decided to end their 11 year contract with Apple and award the bid to Hewlett Packard. For $13 less per student, every Maine child in the public school system will have an HP laptop running Windows 8 instead of an Apple MacBook Air. Part of Apple's bid was a 4 year support program called AppleCare. Always the most highly rated such program in personal computers and 1 year longer than the normal retail program. I won't go into all the reasons Maine made a bad decision. That has already been covered. If you read about it, be sure to pay attention to the comments. They are the best part.Today I was at an open house for the private high school my children attend. I listened to the business teacher present the plans for upgrading the technology. Last year the school (and really the community that supports it) won $50,000.00 from US Cellular in a contest. They plan to use the money to upgrade their technology. Now mind you, $50,000.00 will not go far, but as I listened to the presentation today I was impressed with their wise decisions. First, and I believe most important, they will be installing a school wide wireless network that is state of the art with the best security. Everything will be wireless. So, step one is visionary... The future is wireless. Second, they are buying several iPads and plan to use the wireless network and the iPad mirroring functionality along with digital projectors to interact in class on a screen. Not only the teacher and her or his iPad, but the students may bring their iOS devices to class and join in on the prophetic imagination. They chose to do this instead of Smart Boards, because Smart Boards cost $2500.00. iPads will cost $400.00 (not to mention there are hundreds of thousands of apps in the iOS app store for the iPad, iPhone and iPod). Do you see the difference between David and Goliath yet?
Iowa Mennonite School (IMS) also plans to buy a few laptops. Several of them will be the Samsung ChromeBooks. The link has a quick review I did at Best Buy near the end of this video. I'm not impressed with these, because of the limiting nature of Google's Chrome operating system (OS), but I think this is not a bad decision since these laptops are only $250.00, and IMS plans to have all students use the Google Drive ecosystem of storage and collaboration of documents and web apps. Most of this is free and works great together. Again, they are leveraging free and being visionary about wireless and cloud technology. Any piece of hardware you buy will be obsolete as soon as you walk out of the store.
IMS also plans to get a few Asus and HP laptops for the computer lab and teachers. These are cheaper than Apple laptops in the short run, but as you remember from reading the article about Maine, research shows in the long run, Apple pays for itself with less problems and superior support. Not to mention losing out on GarageBand, iMovie, iPhoto and iTunes. The creativity of the iLife suite that comes on every Apple computer is hard to beat. These fit so well with iPads too. The art, music and drama departments are some of the bigger losers here.
I am not as worried about this last item. Students will still be able to use Apple devices of their own, and these play well with Google too. The important decisions are wireless and cloud. And I say well done IMS!
