The Los Angeles school district has abandoned the iPad and now wants their money back
The Los Angeles school district has abandoned the iPad curriculum entirely now and will ask Apple for refunds on their massive purchase:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ipad-curriculum-refund-20150415-story.html
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Gosh. . .
Apple should tell them to take a hike.
[VIDEO]
http://www.scpr.org/news/2015/04/15/51027/lausd-ipad-program-ditching-pearson-software-reque/
"Holmquist said the district is "extremely dissatisfied" with the work of Pearson on its technology initiative to get computers into the hands of each of the district's 650,000 students.
"As we approach the end of the school year, the vast majority of students are still unable to access the Pearson curriculum on iPads," he wrote.
District officials purchased Pearson's software even though it was unfinished, and teachers complained the material seemed rushed: lessons were missing math problems and reading material and included errors. The software also lacked many interactive elements that were promised, teachers said.
“[Pearson] missed the whole point of technology — individualized instruction, all the material in the palm of your hand," said Ben Way, a math teacher at Alliance Cindy & Bill Simon Technology Academy, a charter school that also purchased Pearson's iPad app.
Pearson and Apple executives could not be immediately reached for comment, but Pearson representatives maintain they have held up their end of the deal.
"The course content has been complete for over a year," wrote then-Pearson spokesman Brandon Pinette in an email to KPCC in September. "Yes, there are important enhancements to add as there always will be. We will add twice a year. No digital product should ever be considered complete.""
http://www.scpr.org/blogs/education/2014/10/27/17461/with-deasy-out-is-la-schools-ipad-program-dead/
"Ninth grade math teacher Ben Way has been trying hard to make the Pearson program work, but he's struggling. He said the application includes lively videos - like cells dividing - but doesn't provide the basics kids would need for lessons, like sample formulas.
“You need to make up your own problems that are similar. That kind of defeats the purpose of buying a curriculum,” said Way, who teaches at Alliance Cindy & Bill Simon Technology Academy High School in South Los Angeles, a charter school that also invested in Pearson’s iPad’s Package.
“[Pearson] missed the whole point of technology," he added, "individualized instruction, all the material in the palm of your hand."
Officials at Pearson would not discuss the absence of math problems, but said they are continuing to improve the product.
Problems with the technology program weren't limited to the Pearson software.
Last fall, students quickly bypassed security and logged on to Twitter. Devices went missing, and no one was sure if the students’ families or the district should be held responsible. Students struggled with small screens and the wifi often didn’t work.
District officials said the first year was a short pilot - a learning opportunity before a full rollout.
Officials would still have to buy another 600,000 iPads to outfit every student and teacher, as Deasy envisioned. The district only got around to buying 90,841 of them before the contract was canceled.
Many of those were put in storage over the summer and have yet to be delivered to schools, according to Lucas. District officials said they'll all be available to students before they leave for winter break in December."
The question is, what do they consider to be a superior replacement? If it's Chromebooks then surely they don't have tailor-made software either and where was the bidding process to decide the replacement?
There's a couple of articles here:
http://blogs.scholastic.com/education_pulse/2015/03/here-come-the-chromebooks.html
http://laschoolreport.com/with-choice-of-testing-devices-one-lausd-school-chooses-old-reliable/
It sounds like a mixture of resisting new technology vs standard laptops and realising that there was a cheaper option. They mentioned the $220 price of Chromebooks vs $369 iPads was a very important factor but they said they had to pay $30 per device on custom management software for the Chromebooks and there were privacy concerns. Google didn't want to sign the student privacy bill but eventually relented and there's heavy reliance on the cloud with Chromebooks.
Financially, the deal is pretty low-end for Apple. If they'd hooked up with IBM sooner and Pearson had delivered a better product, maybe they wouldn't have back-tracked but the other issues of price and resistance to new tech would likely still have been factors.
Calling in the FBI over unfinished software seems a bit excessive, why would the FBI even take on a case like this? Maybe the people in bed with Google didn't like that the people in bed with Apple got their way and called their friends in from the FBI to sort it out. Apple knows the president though, they can get an executive order on all their asses. I don't know why nobody's thinking of the children though, they're having to go through courses with all this hardware and software switchover. They lose the creative software and tablet form factor on the iPad and move to completely different software and a standard laptop form factor. They'd be best to have a hardware mix and put pressure on getting the Pearson software up to the level they need.