jdoc

mcdave said:

Fraser Speirs’ comments seemed to illustrate how education has followed business in putting provider convenience before customer experience. He seems to be really bitter about the demise of iTunesU whilst ignoring other benefits.

A few confusing points for me as Apple has been pushing;
- document persistence  since before Google got into Apps and most Apps don’t have ‘Save’ buttons.
- non-file-based sharing, just push the content from the App.
- cloud persistence with iCloud (and were even lambasted for not presenting it as a ‘drive’). Did Fraser forget to turn iCloud on?
- did they not use Jamf for device/content config/deployment? Or Classroom Apps for management?

I am with him on Apple dropping content/courseware production tools. And not turning macOS cloud-first as iOS has been since iCloud (even if he fails to acknowledge it).  They deserve to lose the classroom which is a shame because iOS Apps win over Chrome/Web Apps any day.

Sort it out Apple.

I agree with everything said here. For sure, Apple dropped the ball in the education market. But Google is providing 2 very big incentives to the education market that Apple has yet to match: 1. Much lower cost; 2. Simplicity for the admins and IT folks. Neither of which address the gaping holes in effective teaching methods for our children. My issues with Googles platform are many. The biggest pet peeves, however, surround lack of pedagogical innovation (flipped classroom, spaced learning, creative content production, gamification, etc) and privacy issues. Fraser glossed over the pedagogical issue by dismissing its importance- he’s giving them the tools they’ll be using in the ‘real world’. We’ve heard this excuse before, when Microsoft pushed their Office suite on all of our youth, so in that sense, welcome back to the 1990’s. My kids use Chromebooks for school- they’re terrible for creating anything except documents and presentations. Heck, why not use Office for that? Aren’t they still king of the hill in the business world? And it really is sad (maybe comical) watching people twist themselves into pretzels trying to explain away the real privacy issues that have plagued and will continue to plague Google. The latest: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/459854-google-youtube-fined-170-million-for-violating-childrens-privacy Time and time again, Google ‘promises’ to maintain some semblance of privacy restrictions- Fraser mentions a ‘different set of privacy rules’ for children. I won’t hold my breath.