On Mon, 19 Nov 2012, Roger <arelem@bigpond.com> wrote:
Apparently one of the problems for schools that I know of, quite apart from the high cost of purchase of the ipad, are the apps. It's never just one app, losts are needed.
Students have to have wads of money to install all the apps on top of every other school cost. There will never be a final list of apps and that's it, it will be ongoing, as will the purchase of the next ipad, through the 6-10 years of school.
http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/03/14/effective-computers-schools/ You are making many assumtions that I don't think are correct. You assume that the apps are commercial and expensive, they can be FOSS and commercial apps can have site licenses. You assume that many apps are needed but even if you just had a good eBook reader and some free text books that could make a real difference, I've written about some of these issues at the above URL. As for purchasing another iPad, they should last at least 3 years and that will drop the price down to something less than $150 per annum. A sensible use of electronic text books could easily save more than that. Parents could probably save $50 on year 11 and 12 expenses by just getting electronic versions of Shakespeare alone!
From what I understand so far, there may be 20 -30 apps as a minimum needed per student,
Why?
or the school has to provide the apps which for say 3000 students works out at $6000 minimum per app. One school of that size has baulked at spending tens of thousands of dollars on apps and savvy students do not seem to like the ipad for school work.
If there's a real need for an app then there's nothing stopping the government from getting a license for all schools and saving money in the process. Also the education department could just hire programmers to write the apps.
Does an ipad run all day without recharging? Schools cannot provide charging or power leads to each desk or recharge facilities for massive numbers of ipads at lunchtimes.
A new iPad will last all day, older ones might not but probably few students will be using one all the time anyway. A typical classroom will have at least 3 double power points. If it became common for students to have older iPads that don't last then it would just be a matter of having the students who need their iPad charged sitting near the power points, it seems unlikely that there would be a need to have more than 6 iPads being charged at once. If one of the cheaper Android tablets was chosen then battery life would be shorter. But it wouldn't be difficult to just install more power points in classrooms and arrange desks so that there's no OH&S issue of charging cables going across open floor. These are all problems that can be solved. Solving them will be reasonably cheap when compared to the costs of paper text books. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/