Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

I&#x27;m a HS teacher. I was so happy when my school finally phased out iPads as the designated device for our year 7 students. It&#x27;s such a rubbish device for content creation. The touchscreen is a POS for anything other than web browsing and casual games. Teaching coding, image manipulation, file manipulation was utterly painful or impossible.<p>Typing on them is beyond painful and of the hundreds of students I taught, fewer than a dozen actually bought a physical keyboard. This meant that every task took 3x longer than necessary.<p>On top of this they are expensive. To anyone even remotely IT savvy it was clear from the get-go that this was going to be a failed experiment. Unfortunately education, like most other things follows the fashion of the time and everyone had to learn the hard way that a traditional computer is superior in every conceivable way.<p>Chromebooks are rubbish too, so I don&#x27;t really see the move to them as a positive either.

I remember the huge push when the iPad came out and all the talk about how it would replace textbooks and exercise books.<p>It could only be because school administrators were won-over by the engaging user-experience - completely overlooking practicalities - back in 2010 even into 2014 iOS lacked decent enterprise-management tools that would enable staff to lock devices down as they&#x27;re obvious distraction devices - things are made worse by Apple&#x27;s decision to not have multiple user-profiles on the iPad and confusion with how Apple IDs work. I understand they&#x27;ve gone some way to address those issues - but other concerns still apply, such as the vision of a wide range of high-quality (and interactive, no-less!) iBooks to replace textbooks - simply hasn&#x27;t happened due to massive cost of authoring even a single iBook. But the main blocker I feel is that staff (both teachers and school district IT folks) just don&#x27;t want to have to manage them. I know an IT contractor who resigned his job at a private school after having to deal with setting up hundreds of iPad Mini devices for every student - he just simply hated the work involved.<p>As Apple is neglecting the desktop market, they&#x27;re just as well neglecting the education market: remember when Apple had massive education market penetration in the late-1980s? Now there&#x27;s not even an equivalent of the old eMac unless you count the now 3-years-old Mac Mini models.

I replaced my kids&#x27; iPads because of the awful hunched posture it precipitates (as shown in the 2nd picture in the article). Also, after an initial enthusiasm for iMovie and Swift Playgrounds wore off, they gravitated towards the more distracting apps and games, youtube and netflix, etc.<p>Having them sit upright, with good posture, at a desktop computer puts them in a different frame of mind when it comes to what they do on the device. I also have more input on directing their attention to being interested in computing, playing different types of games, and programming (dabbling in python mostly). My hope is they get a broader picture of computing, which won&#x27;t be inhibited by the handicaps of iOS.

Finally. It was always so hard to see schools spend millions on expensive Apple tech when there was equivalent equipment available for half the price that met their needs equivalently well. We really don&#x27;t need to be spending $400-500 per tablet to outfit a classroom with 1 device for every 3 kids, when each kid really needs their own.

When I used to see all schools turning to iPads I was one of the naysayers. I saw my nephew working(playing) on his school iPad and I thought this was the worst decision the school system ever took.<p>But now looking back, I am glad they went through it, call it a phase if you must. The American school system (or government) is always last to adopt any tech. You can still find outdated technology barely holding together in some schools. But this time they did something different. They took a risk. They adopted something that hadn&#x27;t been tested yet. Well now they tested it. We thought iPads were inferior to laptops or desktop, but now we know that they are, at least in the classroom.<p>Money was wasted, time was wasted, but at least now we know through experience.<p>I&#x27;m glad that they took the risk of trying something untested. And I hope that in the future they will do so again with whatever tech that looks promising in improving education.

I was the Director of Technology at a school overseas when the hype first began -- and over there the pull was even stronger because in addition to all of the reasons American schools were swooning over the iPad, the fact that this was an &quot;American&quot; thing was yet another factor over there.<p>I was lucky to be at a place where my principals listened when I suggested that we pass -- for many of the reasons stated here. What I think most people don&#x27;t appreciate, though, is how much of a marketing tool these iPads became in this space. There wasn&#x27;t a parent who would come in for a visit who didn&#x27;t want to see that the school was &quot;innovative,&quot; and the surest way to (pretend) show that was to point to your iPad initiative. We held our with laser focus on our educational mission, but I saw many of our peers spend a ton of time, money, and effort, to try to use iPads in one way or another. Marketing was -- and often still is -- the real driving force behind the adoption of these devices.

&gt; “At the end of the day, I can get three Chromebooks for each of the Mac devices I would have purchased,” said Steve Splichal, the superintendent of Eudora Public Schools.<p><i>Not</i> choosing a Mac for school students should have always been a no brainer because, as mentioned a) cost, b)what benefit do Macs provide over say Windows laptops or chromebooks <i>for high school students</i>?<p>Apple did a real good job marketing their products to schools all over the country though.<p>I imagine high school students require a device to do basic coding, assignments, office applications (presentation, word), browsing and maybe basic image editing. Sure, in professional settings I can understand people choosing Macs, but but for high school students it just seems overkill for their use case.<p>Anyway I&#x27;m glad to see schools coming to their senses and move away from apple devices...into another (cheaper) walled garden.

&gt; “At the end of the day, I can get three Chromebooks for each of the Mac devices I would have purchased,”<p>No brainer, really. A device&#x27;s cost and what value you&#x27;re getting from it are very important, especially in a classroom environment.

I worked in Education IT as my college job, and Apple provided zero value added with regard towards educational software. For every piece of software that instructors requested such as stat analyses, whiteboards with note-saving capability, standardized test-prep materials, and math visualization it was often non-existent, cost-prohibitive, or a available as a free web app. Campus labs virtualized Windows 7 on iMacs to run side-by-side in order to allow compatibility with 90% of the tools educators need.<p>While I think that we&#x27;re doing an excellent job at preparing tomorrow&#x27;s teachers on how to educate kids; technology largely remains a point of friction in keeping kids focused because of the lack of good tools in the ecosystem. My high school district always received the short end of state funding and we never had any good tools available for physics simulations, art &amp; design, CAD, or personal finance to name a few. Anything we did end up using was available as a web app with no OS dependence; and I see school districts pay extra for mac systems without any competitive advantages to the platform. It&#x27;s largely a market mismatch that Apple&#x27;s failed to address, and were largely being phased out because of this.

I don&#x27;t quite understand why people thought iPads were good for content creation in the first place.<p>Also, I think Apple really missed a trick by not going after the education market with a more suitable device. With Windows, you never know what havoc the next update around the corner is going to wreak. And Chromebooks are still quite limited in many different things. By merely having a serious presence in this market, Apple would by now have had a best in class device because this is turning out to be the classic case of the one eyed man being the king of the land of the blind.

My county in Virginia was one of the first national pilots for computers in high schools. Every student was given an iBook. I also worked on the help desk, so I saw the administration side as well.<p>The school system experienced all the challenges you&#x27;d expect from giving several thousand 14-18 year-olds expensive tech kit. Broken screens, porn, integrating technology into the curriculum, etc. (But, oh, those heady days when we knew more than the admins and played multiplayer Quake 3 or CroMag Rally—the latter came <i>pre-loaded</i> on the first images!—in the back of classrooms over school wi-fi.)<p>They switched from Apple to PCs in 2007 or thereabouts, but it was generally regarded as &quot;worse&quot; (more issues, more hardware problems, etc.).<p>I suspect Apple&#x27;s strategy changed. They used to <i>own</i> primary school, but I think in the mid 2000&#x27;s they started to back off that. Macs were becoming popular, including the rise of the iPhone, and the kiddie image wasn&#x27;t in line with Apple&#x27;s brand. Not to mention the hardware expense as schools a) bought more volume and b) went with lowest-cost options (like Chromebooks).

My wife&#x27;s school used the iPad 2 in classrooms, and my wife generally disliked them. They don&#x27;t do a whole lot for content creation as others have noted, and they went obsolete <i>fast</i>. It&#x27;s a nice box to check (particularly for a private school) - &quot;We have iPads&quot; sounds nice. But the reality wasn&#x27;t so great. This point might be a little more moot now that iPads have matured a lot and Apple has started to push for better content creation, but that stuff is still on the higher-priced end of the platform.<p>I&#x27;d have to think that the lack of repairability is a problem for some schools as well. My school district was one of the first to distribute laptops to junior high students (this was around 1999...and pre-WiFi I guess, since we all pointed the tops of our laptops to the infrared caps in the ceiling! [0]), and I remember seeing the IT guy with a stack of computers in the tech room, replacing screen after screen.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;ne&#x2F;pre&#x2F;Pcnews&#x2F;12_97&#x2F;kidntbk.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;ne&#x2F;pre&#x2F;Pcnews&#x2F;12_97&#x2F;kidntbk.jpg</a>

The passing of Steve has affected the iPad product line the most. iPads have pretty much stagnated since his demise and Apple has alienated the education market with their laptops too. I mean look at the Pro features of the iPad - split screen multi-tasking and 100$ pencils. Its a joke.

Tablets are great for media consumption. I don&#x27;t understand how anyone can use them for creation, though. On my desk is the biggest screen I can afford, and a full size keyboard, and I use it all when doing work.<p>As for helping kids learn, I just cannot see how a tablet will help in the classroom.

The sad thing is that in practice, iPads are mostly used as substitutes for books. That&#x27;s completely backwards. It reminds me how &quot;multimedia CDs&quot; were supposed to revolutionize teaching in the 90s. They ended up being picture books on a computer, with silly animations and sound effects on mouse hover added on top.<p>Computers and tablets could be a great pedagogic tool for many things, like exploring maths concepts interactively, spaced-repetition for rote learning foreign language words, and other things where the computer as an interactive, programmable medium shines. Sadly, I don&#x27;t see these opportunities being exploited at all in the classroom.<p>On the bright side, at least kids have equal access to modern tools, and learn the same basics of searching for stuff online.

My HS rolled out iPads to all students my Sophmore year of HS 4 years ago.<p>It was well known the average GPA dropped by a sizable amount (mine personally by nearly .5). There wasn&#x27;t a good way for the school to lock down games, and it was really hard to self regulate. The technology side of Canvas worked pretty well once teachers knew how to use it, but the fact that so many games could be played just distracted the hell out of everyone, and the teachers knew this. Without a way to lock down device gaming, I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re a good idea in a school environment unless you antipate and actively try to curb gaming, but this can be hard and will make the teacher seem like the bad guy, which is never a good thing.

I&#x27;m curious how much of a boon Chromebooks&#x2F;low cost laptops were for schools in low-income areas. I can imagine they made quite a significant impact!

It&#x27;s sad, but Apple has completely lost it at the low end. The value proposition just isn&#x27;t there any more. This goes for iOS as well as Macs.

This might be a little unrelated, but here in The Netherlands a research showed that 60% of the children have some form of pain caused by device usage.<p>As you can see in the statistics of this article, more and more devices are used at school. And looking at the pictures my first reaction was: let&#x27;s also teach those children to have a good posture.

I don&#x27;t know how you can teach kids anything without a keyboard and only having access to &quot;apps&quot;.

Schools should start using Linux more.

I&#x27;ve been teaching at Stanford for the past few years and 95% of the students I&#x27;ve had are all on Macbook laptops. Still have to adjust&#x2F;manage the 1 or 2 students on PCs. That said, I&#x27;m glad to hear that iPads are being phased out in the primary&#x2F;HS grades. Other than games, I haven&#x27;t seen many made-for-iPad software that show parity with desktop counterparts when it comes to word processing, spreadsheets, photo&#x2F;video editing&#x2F;management, etc. I&#x27;m going to assume that the state of the art in interactive books is much further behind.

When it is the school buying the equipment, I can very well believe that they could decide to make the switch to PCs or Chromebooks. But Macs still have mindshare of the actual kids.<p>My daughter wasn&#x27;t allowed to use a computer for homework and such until she got to 8th grade (it is a private school and it is their policy -- they should be playing outside with friends and not spending hours shooting monsters and watching TV). When they get to 8th grade, the policy then says the kids needed to have a computer. They get classes on keyboarding, creating web pages, binary math, programming with Scratch, and they start doing homework on their computers.<p>They were told they could use either Macs or PCs, no preference. We got our daughter a decent Lenovo PC; it is better than my own computer. After a year, she would have none of it, as nearly all of her classmates have Macs. It simply has caché that PCs don&#x27;t. My daughter was willing to go through a second learning curve and convert her 16th birthday present in order to get a Mac, just to be like her friends at school.

Apple is focused on consumer apps and barely provides any support to edtech developers. There is no focus on education strategy or business model. We built an iOS educational platform but because of all these issues, transitioned to cloud with our classk12.com platform with Google and Microsoft integrations.

I&#x27;ll be the guy who points out that this story is about what school districts are purchasing in bulk, not necessarily which computers students are buying with their own (i.e. their parents&#x27;) money.

TLDR; 12M devices shipped to schools in 2016, Chromebooks accounted for 58%, up from 50% in 1 year. The iPads and Mac laptops fell to 19%, from 25% while Windows remained relatively stable at about 22%.

I read through this entire thread. Interesting range of comments.<p>I had the experience of being consulted by the principal of our local elementary school on this a few years back. They had received a donation and could make their own localized purchasing decision with that money.<p>Based on what we learned at home with our kids and various iOS devices my advice was to avoid them and opt for inexpensive PC laptops running Windows. We, in fact bought 100 HP laptops, 17 inch screens, brand new, in original packaging, for $200 each.<p>The machines have been absolutely fantastic. They have allowed the kids to explore things that would be absolutely impossible to approach with an iPad. For example, using a USB port to save their work and bring it home. Or read and write CD&#x27;s and DVD&#x27;s. Yeah, that&#x27;s how bad iPads are.<p>Oh, yes, and they are all multi-user, of course.<p>They run applications like GIMP, Lego Mindstorms and a myriad of really excellent programs out there. And, of course, access the web under supervision to do even more. This year, if I can find the time, I&#x27;d like to get the school started teaching a very basic Python programming class.<p>One of the big problems we recognized early on with iPads was that the lack of multi-user capabilities made them impossible to use. For example, in the Special Ed class (For non-use readers: developmentally disabled kids) the spectrum of disabilities was such that you would have to have a highly customized iPad for each kid in order to configure it to fit their needs. PC&#x27;s dealt this this very easily. In some cases we had to cover the keyboard give them a small Wacom tablet.<p>Tablets are great for such things as reading books and what I am going to call limited web browsing. Even today, with the push for mobile-first, the browsing experience on tablets can range from OK to frustrating and down-right impossible.<p>Tablets will, of course, survive. It&#x27;ll be interesting to see what use-cases they end-up satisfying in the end.<p>EDIT:<p>Forgot to add that in our own case we took away our kid&#x27;s iPads and iPods. Both my wife and I concluded they were not doing anything useful with them. The devices became an addiction and achieving balance between beneficial play (educational apps) and mindless addictive crap was a constant battle. The last straw was when one of them started to lie about usage and would play Clash of Clans hidden under his blanket in bed instead of sleeping. They exhibited the behavior of alcoholics or drug addicts who deny their reality. That&#x27;s when the iOS devices evaporated.<p>They have nice PC&#x27;s in our family room. They can have fun and they can also learn but the addictive element is completely gone. And rules are easier to enforce. For example, on Saturday&#x27;s they can play as much as they want. In practice they play about a couple of hours and then go play with real toys, the dogs, lego&#x27;s etc. Better balance and better outcomes.

All public schools should be forced by law to use free systems on free hardware, anything else seems insane.

Can&#x27;t stop giggle.<p>Android is Linux on mobile and ChromeOS is linux on desktop

Alright Google, that sweet holiday gift charity is paying off!