or they waiting for Windows 8 - regardless, the untalented usually have no need for a computer, nice to be able to tell them apart from the rest of us by just looking around the room.
I can understand not everyone can afford a MAC - but at the minimum get an i3 cheap PC and challenge yourself to make something with your time. Whatever its problems, it has a full feature OS.
I always said that iOS was the dumbing down of Apple... now seems it is also the dumbing down of even Window users.
But hey the iPAD is easy to use - just like HotDogs are easy to make.
All Jobs had to do was make a bigger iPod Touch, and he'd rule the world.
Done. And it's so simple, like all genius.
“When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.
If price is the issue, keep the iPad 2 around for still another year and lower the price still further. It's a perfectly viable device in no need of a major upgrade as a budget option.
And bingo was his name-o.
Originally Posted by juandl
The Retina Display will not be necessary.
Except that's the opposite of what Apple wants to do, and there's no reason that the textbook crowd (I've explained this already) should have to make their books in TWO formats.
Originally Posted by jragosta
If the iPad 2 is successful in education at $399 because of the price, what makes you so certain that the iPad Min at $299 wouldn't be successful.
Because the iPad 2 will be $299 in just a few months. Then the iPad 3 a year later. Then the iPad 4. Or schools can buy a more modern iPad if they choose for $399 or $499.
Originally Posted by agramonte
I always said that iOS was the dumbing down of Apple...
And you were always wrong.
Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum
“When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.
-- Alan Kay at 2007 iPhone introduction
I love that quote so much. You can tell that the megalomaniac in Steve took it to heart. I don't understand why he'd ever be open to a smaller device, given it.
If the iPad 2 is successful in education at $399 because of the price, what makes you so certain that the iPad Min at $299 wouldn't be successful.
And the "just wait long enough and the iPad 2 will be cheap enough to put into cereal boxes" argument is just plain silly. Yes, the price of the iPad 2 will drop over time, but it becomes more obsolete over time. At any given point in time, a 7" iPad Mini will be less expensive than a 10" iPad with comparable technology. Or, if you want to set a price point, a 7" iPad Mini will be more technologically advanced than a 10" iPad at any given price point.
Simply waiting for the iPad 2's price to drop doesn't cut it.
Yes, the iPad has the potential to change education. In particular, it has the potential to eliminate the "let's use 30 year old science books because it's too expensive to replace them" problem. It also eliminates the "I can't do my homework because I left my books at school due to their weight" problem. But that change requires Education departments who are intelligent enough to figure out that the world is changing.
Someone needs to look up the definitions for 'certainty' and 'definitive'. Unless they can prove that those schools would have bought more PCs if they hadn't bought iPads, it's not certain or definitive.
It's suggestive, but that's all.
I can tell you with "definitive certainty" that given the current public school budgets, they are not buying both pc's and tablets.
or they waiting for Windows 8 - regardless, the untalented usually have no need for a computer, nice to be able to tell them apart from the rest of us by just looking around the room.
I can understand not everyone can afford a MAC - but at the minimum get an i3 cheap PC and challenge yourself to make something with your time. Whatever its problems, it has a full feature OS.
I always said that iOS was the dumbing down of Apple... now seems it is also the dumbing down of even Window users.
But hey the iPAD is easy to use - just like HotDogs are easy to make.
Yes, the iPad is easy to use, because you don't have to think about it.
Watch this amazing video:
And pay particular attention to Alan Kay's comments at the end @8:11 in.
As Alan says learning has to do with "focus" and "removing interference" -- that's exactly what iOS does... it gets out of the way and "removes distraction" so that the user can "focus" on the task at hand learning math, music, language...
If you are an instructor trying to teach, say, math or painting... or a student trying to learn those subjects -- why would you want to waste time on the distraction of a "computer" or a "full feature OS"? Instead, you both focus on the task at hand.
Properly used, the iPad (and iOS) can be merely a user-friendly conduit to a more comprehensive application running on a personal computer or a server.
Fraser discusses teaching computer programming on the iPad and outsourcing all the non-iPad infrastructure from the classroom and even from the school, itself.
I suspect that, over time, many of these capabilities will migrate to the iPad device, itself... And those complex apps remaining on the server will evolve too -- to more-easily be exploited by a remote iPad and all that it offers.
someone needs to start developing apps that correspond to the school curriculum, complete with an app that 'writes' on your iPad, what the teacher is writing on his special blackboard.
And pay particular attention to Alan Kay's comments at the end @8:11 in.
As Alan says learning has to do with "focus" and "removing interference" -- that's exactly what iOS does... it gets out of the way and "removes distraction" so that the user can "focus" on the task at hand learning math, music, language...
If you are an instructor trying to teach, say, math or painting... or a student trying to learn those subjects -- why would you want to waste time on the distraction of a "computer" or a "full feature OS"? Instead, you both focus on the task at hand.
Properly used, the iPad (and iOS) can be merely a user-friendly conduit to a more comprehensive application running on a personal computer or a server.
Fraser discusses teaching computer programming on the iPad and outsourcing all the non-iPad infrastructure from the classroom and even from the school, itself.
I suspect that, over time, many of these capabilities will migrate to the iPad device, itself... And those complex apps remaining on the server will evolve too -- to more-easily be exploited by a remote iPad and all that it offers.
If the iPad 2 is successful in education at $399 because of the price, what makes you so certain that the iPad Min at $299 wouldn't be successful.
And the "just wait long enough and the iPad 2 will be cheap enough to put into cereal boxes" argument is just plain silly. Yes, the price of the iPad 2 will drop over time, but it becomes more obsolete over time. At any given point in time, a 7" iPad Mini will be less expensive than a 10" iPad with comparable technology. Or, if you want to set a price point, a 7" iPad Mini will be more technologically advanced than a 10" iPad at any given price point.
Simply waiting for the iPad 2's price to drop doesn't cut it.
Yes, the iPad has the potential to change education. In particular, it has the potential to eliminate the "let's use 30 year old science books because it's too expensive to replace them" problem. It also eliminates the "I can't do my homework because I left my books at school due to their weight" problem. But that change requires Education departments who are intelligent enough to figure out that the world is changing.
Someone needs to look up the definitions for 'certainty' and 'definitive'. Unless they can prove that those schools would have bought more PCs if they hadn't bought iPads, it's not certain or definitive.
It's suggestive, but that's all.
Schools are limited by budget. Taking that into consideration it is remarkable just how quickly the iPad has been embraced in a scholastic setting. Even if Apple had priced its tablets even more aggressively, I doubt schools would have acquired them any quicker. After all, being a different approach, you would expect there to be some experimentation preceding a full-scale adoption of the technology.
Truth is, forcing childen to work with smaller screens would diminish the effectiveness of a tablet in a school setting. The answer isn't a smaller device better suited to commuters but to make the iPad more accessible in terms of price.
If there are commuters who want a smaller iPad, fine, but let's not pretend the Mini's reason for being would be to serve the needs of school-age children in a classroom setting.
Children don't want the iPad Mini. Haven't asked for it, don't need it. They think it's perfect just as it is already. It's their parents riding transit who wish there was an iPad Mini.
someone needs to start developing apps that correspond to the school curriculum, complete with an app that 'writes' on your iPad, what the teacher is writing on his special blackboard.
I seriously doubt the nomenclature but I have been saying since iPad launch I see a really big, really powerful 'iPad', intended for desk use coming one day. Specialist apps for music, design etc. could make such a beast the 'son of MacPro'. (used with it at 15° or there a-bouts, not upright like a monitor I should add)
Anybody know of any independent reports on if iPads in school are helping improve grades or decrease school costs over time? I can't seem to find any good results while searching, I can only find a bazillion articles about how schools are buying up a ton of iPads (in the town next to us, each freshman is given an iPad that they will use for four years).
I think it's great that schools are using iPads, but I can't find any studies that say if they impact positively or negatively.
There have been several - and they were brought up in one of the recent iPad threads. I remember one in particular that showed significant gains in math performance, but there were others.
I can tell you with "definitive certainty" that given the current public school budgets, they are not buying both pc's and tablets.
Some schools are. But even if you were correct, that doesn't mean that they would have bought PCs even if they hadn't bought tablets. They might have chosen to buy neither.
To show definitively that the iPad was scavenging PC sales, you'd have to show that someone would have bought PCs if they hadn't bought iPads. That hasn't been shown yet.
someone needs to start developing apps that correspond to the school curriculum, complete with an app that 'writes' on your iPad, what the teacher is writing on his special blackboard.
I seriously doubt the nomenclature but I have been saying since iPad launch I see a really big, really powerful 'iPad', intended for desk use coming one day. Specialist apps for music, design etc. could make such a beast the 'son of MacPro'. (used with it at 15° or there a-bouts, not upright like a monitor I should add)
As to the "special blackboard" used by the teacher... We have that already -- The teacher uses his iPad to "mirrored AirPlay" to the ATV HDTV. And any student can present his silution or difficulties by "mirrored AirPlay" from his iPad.
As to the larger iPad display. I agree... much larger than 11". Something the size of a drafting table (slightly tilted) or flat for collaboration. Any of the apps involving sensory I/O would benefit from this... Apps like Composing or playing music, CAD, Painting, Drafting, 3D Modeling, Video Editing...
... or, maybe, the light table used to compare camera shots for the SI Swimsuit Edition...
Someone, on one of the forums i follow, said that he belived that Apple's Video Editing program, FCP X, was designed to be used with a touch interface. On examination and reflection, i agree with this.
Here's an interesting observation by Michael Cioni, a pioneer in video editing. He makes the point in the first 4:30 minutes -- but I bet you'll watch the whole thing:
What Michael describes is the "fun" and "productivity" of getting your fingers dirty by interfacing a task through the iPad -- where nothing gets in between you and your stuff.
As a publicly funded school, maybe they're more interested in interoperability with all relevant platforms than being a showroom for just one.
The only problem with that argument is that Macs are more interoperable than any other platform.
You can run Windows and Windows apps on the Mac. You can read and write FAT32 disks natively. You can read NTFS disks natively.
Windows, OTOH is truly a 'showroom for just one' {platform} which you're complaining about.
So anyone truly interested in interoperability would be buying Macs.
Fraser Spiers pioneered use of iPads in the classroom. His latest efforts are to teach subjects like programming on the iPad. Traditionally these subjects required a classroom full of computers, and a backroom full of servers, HDDs... and all the IT level support requirements that goes with it. And, he couldn't assign homework because the students didn't have the required infrastructure in their homes.
Today, his backroom, is inexpensive virtual web servers on Amazon AWS, and his classroom is an iPad for each student that the student takes home with him. Homework is feasible because the students have the same access to the AWS servers from home as they do in the classroom.
It is better, more current, and costs a lot less in hardware, software and support.
One of the astonishing results of our iPad 1:1 deployment has been the dramatic decline in the use of the Mac. Within less than two years, I am the only teacher still using the Mac on a regular basis. This was never part of the plan and I didn't expect that it would happen so soon. I thought it might happen eventually - perhaps in 3-4 years, certainly after one more refresh of our Mac setup.
Today, it quite seriously looks like we won't buy more than a handful of Macs again. We’re not cutting our teaching to fit what the iPad can do either - we have never done more with ICT, with better outcomes and deeper learning than we are doing now with iPads in everyone's hands.
AWS Basics
In case you're not all that familiar with virtualised cloud computing, here's a basic run-down.
Amazon EC2 allows you to spin up a virtual Linux or Windows sever running on Amazon's computing infrastructure. You can start and stop an instance as you need it, and you only pay for the time the instance is running. Instances can run in one of several geographic areas and prices vary slightly from region to region. For my deployment, I used the EU (Ireland) region because we are going to be working interactively and want the lowest latency possible.
The per-hour prices vary by the capability of the virtual machine but, for our purposes, we don't need massive power. The per-hour costs for the smaller instances are incredibly low. An on-demand "Micro" instance costs $0.02/hour. Two cents per hour. So you fire up one of these EC2 instances in August and shut it down the next June, you're going to pay about £80. If you only run it during the school day, it's about £20 per year.
Given that we're deploying iPad anyway for all the other parts of the school, you can see how provisioning a lab just for a programming class isn't an easy conversation to have. By my calculations, my subject now costs the school £10.80 per pupil per year to run. If I had to keep buying Macs just for Computing, the per-head cost would be over £160/year.
Benefits
I'm a huge fan of strategic outsourcing. We are rapidly moving towards a situation at Cedars where we will have essentially no infrastructure in the school except for WiFi (and possibly not even that). This is deliberate: I am the only technician, systems administrator and network manager in the school. I simply don't have time to deal with deploying and looking after servers on the premises. Neither do I want to. I would much rather spend my expensive and valuable time working on things educational rather than things technical.
In order to run my class with computing resources on-site, I would have to manage a suite of laptops or desktop computers, with some kind of file server and directory infrastructure. Alternatively, I can pay Amazon a penny an hour and I don't have to care about hardware at all.
The benefits go beyond the infrastructure and finance, though. It's never been possible for me to set actual programming homework before because few families have development tools installed on their home computers. Now, though, because I know the device that's gone home and I know that the server environment is available from anywhere, I can start to set programming exercises to do at home
As a current college student I would prefer my text books be in a more open format so I'm not locked into/forced to buy an iPad. For most of the stuff I do at school there's no way I could do it with an iPad. I won't want to have to buy and iPad just to read my text books.
Most colleges still need to have all the IT infrastructure for research, etc. Often times it's the same equipment needed for the class rooms. As long as you have VPN software isn't not that hard to log in from home. Also there's no way I'm going to type out code a few thousand lines long on an iPad. Especially if there's not an equivalent to visual studio or eclipse.
I think he meant more that text books shouldn't be in an Apple only format. They should be some sort of open format that every computer could use. Mac/iOs, Windows, and Linux.
I think he meant more that text books shouldn't be in an Apple only format. They should be some sort of open format that every computer could use. Mac/iOs, Windows, and Linux.
They are. It's on everyone else to support the new ePub format.
Comments
or they waiting for Windows 8 - regardless, the untalented usually have no need for a computer, nice to be able to tell them apart from the rest of us by just looking around the room.
I can understand not everyone can afford a MAC - but at the minimum get an i3 cheap PC and challenge yourself to make something with your time. Whatever its problems, it has a full feature OS.
I always said that iOS was the dumbing down of Apple... now seems it is also the dumbing down of even Window users.
But hey the iPAD is easy to use - just like HotDogs are easy to make.
“When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.
-- Alan Kay at 2007 iPhone introduction
Originally Posted by Carmissimo
If price is the issue, keep the iPad 2 around for still another year and lower the price still further. It's a perfectly viable device in no need of a major upgrade as a budget option.
And bingo was his name-o.
Originally Posted by juandl
The Retina Display will not be necessary.
Except that's the opposite of what Apple wants to do, and there's no reason that the textbook crowd (I've explained this already) should have to make their books in TWO formats.
Originally Posted by jragosta
If the iPad 2 is successful in education at $399 because of the price, what makes you so certain that the iPad Min at $299 wouldn't be successful.
Because the iPad 2 will be $299 in just a few months. Then the iPad 3 a year later. Then the iPad 4. Or schools can buy a more modern iPad if they choose for $399 or $499.
Originally Posted by agramonte
I always said that iOS was the dumbing down of Apple...
And you were always wrong.
Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum
“When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.
-- Alan Kay at 2007 iPhone introduction
I love that quote so much. You can tell that the megalomaniac in Steve took it to heart. I don't understand why he'd ever be open to a smaller device, given it.
I can tell you with "definitive certainty" that given the current public school budgets, they are not buying both pc's and tablets.
Quote:
Originally Posted by agramonte
or they waiting for Windows 8 - regardless, the untalented usually have no need for a computer, nice to be able to tell them apart from the rest of us by just looking around the room.
I can understand not everyone can afford a MAC - but at the minimum get an i3 cheap PC and challenge yourself to make something with your time. Whatever its problems, it has a full feature OS.
I always said that iOS was the dumbing down of Apple... now seems it is also the dumbing down of even Window users.
But hey the iPAD is easy to use - just like HotDogs are easy to make.
Yes, the iPad is easy to use, because you don't have to think about it.
Watch this amazing video:
And pay particular attention to Alan Kay's comments at the end @8:11 in.
As Alan says learning has to do with "focus" and "removing interference" -- that's exactly what iOS does... it gets out of the way and "removes distraction" so that the user can "focus" on the task at hand learning math, music, language...
If you are an instructor trying to teach, say, math or painting... or a student trying to learn those subjects -- why would you want to waste time on the distraction of a "computer" or a "full feature OS"? Instead, you both focus on the task at hand.
Properly used, the iPad (and iOS) can be merely a user-friendly conduit to a more comprehensive application running on a personal computer or a server.
http://speirs.org
Fraser discusses teaching computer programming on the iPad and outsourcing all the non-iPad infrastructure from the classroom and even from the school, itself.
I suspect that, over time, many of these capabilities will migrate to the iPad device, itself... And those complex apps remaining on the server will evolve too -- to more-easily be exploited by a remote iPad and all that it offers.
I can see it coming....
iPad mini this year
iPad maxi next year
7", 9", 11"
game, set, match
someone needs to start developing apps that correspond to the school curriculum, complete with an app that 'writes' on your iPad, what the teacher is writing on his special blackboard.
A very insightful and enjoyable post. Thank you.
Schools are limited by budget. Taking that into consideration it is remarkable just how quickly the iPad has been embraced in a scholastic setting. Even if Apple had priced its tablets even more aggressively, I doubt schools would have acquired them any quicker. After all, being a different approach, you would expect there to be some experimentation preceding a full-scale adoption of the technology.
Truth is, forcing childen to work with smaller screens would diminish the effectiveness of a tablet in a school setting. The answer isn't a smaller device better suited to commuters but to make the iPad more accessible in terms of price.
If there are commuters who want a smaller iPad, fine, but let's not pretend the Mini's reason for being would be to serve the needs of school-age children in a classroom setting.
Children don't want the iPad Mini. Haven't asked for it, don't need it. They think it's perfect just as it is already. It's their parents riding transit who wish there was an iPad Mini.
I seriously doubt the nomenclature but I have been saying since iPad launch I see a really big, really powerful 'iPad', intended for desk use coming one day. Specialist apps for music, design etc. could make such a beast the 'son of MacPro'. (used with it at 15° or there a-bouts, not upright like a monitor I should add)
There have been several - and they were brought up in one of the recent iPad threads. I remember one in particular that showed significant gains in math performance, but there were others.
That's what search engines are for. For example:
http://www.tuaw.com/2011/09/18/ipad-enabled-students-get-performance-boost-says-acu-study/
http://www.eclassroomnews.com/2011/05/10/schools-see-rising-scores-with-ipads/
http://www.ubergizmo.com/2012/08/could-the-ipad-improve-math-scores-in-the-classroom/
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/09/ipod-pilot-program-boosts-thir.html
There's lots more if you bother to look for it.
Some schools are. But even if you were correct, that doesn't mean that they would have bought PCs even if they hadn't bought tablets. They might have chosen to buy neither.
To show definitively that the iPad was scavenging PC sales, you'd have to show that someone would have bought PCs if they hadn't bought iPads. That hasn't been shown yet.
Quote:
Originally Posted by digitalclips
Quote:
Originally Posted by Robbox
I can see it coming....
iPad mini this year
iPad maxi next year
7", 9", 11"
game, set, match
someone needs to start developing apps that correspond to the school curriculum, complete with an app that 'writes' on your iPad, what the teacher is writing on his special blackboard.
I seriously doubt the nomenclature but I have been saying since iPad launch I see a really big, really powerful 'iPad', intended for desk use coming one day. Specialist apps for music, design etc. could make such a beast the 'son of MacPro'. (used with it at 15° or there a-bouts, not upright like a monitor I should add)
As to the "special blackboard" used by the teacher... We have that already -- The teacher uses his iPad to "mirrored AirPlay" to the ATV HDTV. And any student can present his silution or difficulties by "mirrored AirPlay" from his iPad.
As to the larger iPad display. I agree... much larger than 11". Something the size of a drafting table (slightly tilted) or flat for collaboration. Any of the apps involving sensory I/O would benefit from this... Apps like Composing or playing music, CAD, Painting, Drafting, 3D Modeling, Video Editing...
... or, maybe, the light table used to compare camera shots for the SI Swimsuit Edition...
Someone, on one of the forums i follow, said that he belived that Apple's Video Editing program, FCP X, was designed to be used with a touch interface. On examination and reflection, i agree with this.
Here's an interesting observation by Michael Cioni, a pioneer in video editing. He makes the point in the first 4:30 minutes -- but I bet you'll watch the whole thing:
What Michael describes is the "fun" and "productivity" of getting your fingers dirty by interfacing a task through the iPad -- where nothing gets in between you and your stuff.
deleted
The only problem with that argument is that Macs are more interoperable than any other platform.
You can run Windows and Windows apps on the Mac. You can read and write FAT32 disks natively. You can read NTFS disks natively.
Windows, OTOH is truly a 'showroom for just one' {platform} which you're complaining about.
So anyone truly interested in interoperability would be buying Macs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jragosta
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacRulez
As a publicly funded school, maybe they're more interested in interoperability with all relevant platforms than being a showroom for just one.
The only problem with that argument is that Macs are more interoperable than any other platform.
You can run Windows and Windows apps on the Mac. You can read and write FAT32 disks natively. You can read NTFS disks natively.
Windows, OTOH is truly a 'showroom for just one' {platform} which you're complaining about.
So anyone truly interested in interoperability would be buying Macs.
Fraser Spiers pioneered use of iPads in the classroom. His latest efforts are to teach subjects like programming on the iPad. Traditionally these subjects required a classroom full of computers, and a backroom full of servers, HDDs... and all the IT level support requirements that goes with it. And, he couldn't assign homework because the students didn't have the required infrastructure in their homes.
Today, his backroom, is inexpensive virtual web servers on Amazon AWS, and his classroom is an iPad for each student that the student takes home with him. Homework is feasible because the students have the same access to the AWS servers from home as they do in the classroom.
It is better, more current, and costs a lot less in hardware, software and support.
http://speirs.org
Enter iPad
One of the astonishing results of our iPad 1:1 deployment has been the dramatic decline in the use of the Mac. Within less than two years, I am the only teacher still using the Mac on a regular basis. This was never part of the plan and I didn't expect that it would happen so soon. I thought it might happen eventually - perhaps in 3-4 years, certainly after one more refresh of our Mac setup.
Today, it quite seriously looks like we won't buy more than a handful of Macs again. We’re not cutting our teaching to fit what the iPad can do either - we have never done more with ICT, with better outcomes and deeper learning than we are doing now with iPads in everyone's hands.
AWS Basics
In case you're not all that familiar with virtualised cloud computing, here's a basic run-down.
Amazon EC2 allows you to spin up a virtual Linux or Windows sever running on Amazon's computing infrastructure. You can start and stop an instance as you need it, and you only pay for the time the instance is running. Instances can run in one of several geographic areas and prices vary slightly from region to region. For my deployment, I used the EU (Ireland) region because we are going to be working interactively and want the lowest latency possible.
The per-hour prices vary by the capability of the virtual machine but, for our purposes, we don't need massive power. The per-hour costs for the smaller instances are incredibly low. An on-demand "Micro" instance costs $0.02/hour. Two cents per hour. So you fire up one of these EC2 instances in August and shut it down the next June, you're going to pay about £80. If you only run it during the school day, it's about £20 per year.
Given that we're deploying iPad anyway for all the other parts of the school, you can see how provisioning a lab just for a programming class isn't an easy conversation to have. By my calculations, my subject now costs the school £10.80 per pupil per year to run. If I had to keep buying Macs just for Computing, the per-head cost would be over £160/year.
Benefits
I'm a huge fan of strategic outsourcing. We are rapidly moving towards a situation at Cedars where we will have essentially no infrastructure in the school except for WiFi (and possibly not even that). This is deliberate: I am the only technician, systems administrator and network manager in the school. I simply don't have time to deal with deploying and looking after servers on the premises. Neither do I want to. I would much rather spend my expensive and valuable time working on things educational rather than things technical.
In order to run my class with computing resources on-site, I would have to manage a suite of laptops or desktop computers, with some kind of file server and directory infrastructure. Alternatively, I can pay Amazon a penny an hour and I don't have to care about hardware at all.
The benefits go beyond the infrastructure and finance, though. It's never been possible for me to set actual programming homework before because few families have development tools installed on their home computers. Now, though, because I know the device that's gone home and I know that the server environment is available from anywhere, I can start to set programming exercises to do at home
Originally Posted by Sam Wagner
I think he meant more that text books shouldn't be in an Apple only format. They should be some sort of open format that every computer could use. Mac/iOs, Windows, and Linux.
They are. It's on everyone else to support the new ePub format.