Reply to APS parents -- are you happy about the MacBooks and iPads? Unhappy?

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Reply to "APS parents -- are you happy about the MacBooks and iPads? Unhappy?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There are lots of reasons to want to limit your children's use of electronics, from dagnabbit-ness to familiarity with scientific literature on child development to granolatude. That's one debate.

But even if you want your kid to have a device and have it as early as possible, Murphy was told to put the brakes on 1:1 last spring. Then he got an early contract extension from the school board in early July, and he took his job security and bought the MacBooks and iPads.

Not only is that sleazy, but it was a terrible way to implement the program. You cannot just dump a load of devices on the teachers and pretend that you've got any sort of coherent technology program. The teachers should have been consulted about what would be helpful to them. The parents should have been included in discussions about what was coming (the FAQ still isn't available to us). And taxpayers should have some say in how high-end the devices purchased with their tax dollars are. All the apps the high school students will be using are in the cloud, and they're Google and Microsoft. No way do students need Macs for that. [/quote]

All of this.  The rushed and secret way this was implemented, against the earlier vote of the school board, does not instill trust.

Plus the fact that I believe the teachers had APS-provided Microsoft laptops up until now, so they're all going to have to learn to use Macs before they can be helpful to the kids using them.  (With the iPads it may not be as much of an issue as many people are familiar with them, but with the Apple laptops it definitely will be an issue.)

And many families have laptops for their 9th graders already, and/or had planned to get them one for HS.  And since many families can afford laptops for their kids, why should the county spend money buying them for those kids?  If the issue is that all kids in HS should have a laptop, the county could have provided them to families that couldn't afford them, for a fraction of the cost of getting them for all kids.  (And since this was done secretly, many parents may now have wasted money on a laptop for their 9th grader - we almost bought ours one in August, but the model we wanted happened to be out of stock or we would be in that boat.)

And parents of 2nd graders may have very valid reasons for not wanting the kids to have their own iPads - that's not "antiquated", it doesn't mean the kids don't know how to use technology, as parents may just have wanted to limit the amount of screen time for their young children.[/quote]

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