The Los Angeles iPad program has become a national lesson in what NOT to do.
Other districts, watching the slow-motion disaster in L.A., are taking heed and planning their purchases and implementation of technology with greater care than was exercised in the nation’s second largest district.
L.A. committed to spend $1 billion on iPads, pre-loaded with Pearson content.
The controversies about cost, use, lack of training, theft, loss, misuse of construction bond funds, etc. became an object lesson for other districts, as this post by Education Week reporter Benjamin Herold shows.
Houston is the exemplar district in Herold’s article.
It is starting with 18,000 laptops–not iPads–for its high school students. Eventually all high school teachers and principals will receive training, as will students.
The Houston initiative, known as PowerUp, aims to distribute roughly 65,000 laptops—enough for every high school student and high school teacher in the district—by the 2015-16 school year. Eventually, the initiative is expected to cost about $18 million annually; this year, the Houston ISD is dishing out $6 million, all of it existing funds that were reallocated from other sources. The 2013-14 school year is being devoted to a step-by-step pilot program, and Schad—who previously oversaw implementation of a successful “bring your own device” initiative in Texas’ 66,000-student Katy Independent School District—said the district is entering the 1-to-1 computing fray with eyes wide open.
“We’re really focused on changing instruction,” Schad said, “but it’s important to appreciate how much of a cultural shift this really is.”
Last fall, the 641,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District became the symbol for 1-to-1 initiatives gone awry; almost from its inception, the effort was plagued by security issues, confusion about who is responsible for the tens of thousands of iPads being distributed, criticisms around cost and how the initiative is being financed, and concerns about the readiness and quality of the pre-loaded curriculum meant to become the primary instructional materials for the nation’s second-largest district. Following a series of skirmishes with the district’s board and teachers’ union, Superintendent John Deasy has been forced to slow his ambitious rollout plans.
Houston chose laptops because that is the technology students are most likely to use in college.
Both students and staff will have advance training:
Students at most of the 11 high schools involved in this year’s Houston ISD pilot are just receiving their laptops this month, but Schad said the principals and teachers at those schools received their computers in August and have been receiving consistent professional development ever since. As a baby step to test the district’s deployment plans, laptops were distributed to students at three schools in October, and all students have been required to take a digital citizenship class before receiving a computer. And in November, a group of Houston principals and district administrators took an extended field trip to Mooresville, N.C., to observe first hand one of the most acclaimed 1-to-1 initiatives in the country.
This nifty interactive timeline from Houston ISD details the district’s cautious step-by-step approach. It stands in sharp contrast to L.A., where a contract with Apple was signed in July, teachers received three days of training in August, and distribution of an initial batch of 37,000 iPads to students began later that month.
Another difference from L.A. is that Houston is not buying pre-loaded (and unfinished) Pearson content:
Whereas L.A. Unified elected to purchase a soup-to-nuts digital curriculum from education publishing giant Pearson—one that is still being developed even as it’s rolled out, comes at undetermined cost, and to which access will expire at the end of three years—Schad said Houston ISD is focused on providing students and teachers with a suite of “Web 2.0” tools that can foster content creation, collaboration among students, and project-based learning.
“We want to create that space inside a classroom where kids are answering questions inside the same document, posting their own opinions, and creating videos,” Schad said. “It’s about changing the culture.”
And also unlike L.A., Houston will not take money from bond funds, but is looking for savings in other areas.
It is refreshing to see that districts can learn from the mistakes of other districts. Maybe Houston will get it right and show how technology can “change the culture.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hmph. Actually, HISD teachers got their iPads in January 2012. They’re still in use…
I wonder how this laptop initiative will compare with the 2002 initiative, in which the teachers were issued prior-generation hardware remaindered from Compaq for a tax deduction. Minimal training and a site-visit firmware upgrade program followed, to resolve battery issues. After 4-5 years, HISD officially remaindered the hardware title to the individual teachers, and charged us a $10 paperwork fee for the privilege.
The Mooresville NC initiative is all Apple Macs, I think. For the records.
“We want to create that space inside a classroom where kids are answering questions inside the same document, posting their own opinions, and creating videos,” Schad said. “It’s about changing the culture.”
Wait – posting their own opinions? What would David “don’t give a s**t what you think” Coleman say about that?? Is that even allowed in CCSS?
And creating videos? That sounds like too much fun and creativity for “other people’s children”. Will this help them when they are taking the NAEP or state assessments?? You know, the only things that matter in life?
I hope everyone can recognize snark.
Yeah, making videos can be fun but will the kids learn anything. My youngest spent a great swodge of time making a claymation video. It was supposed to teach the kids something about Australian history as well. They learned near to nothing and what they did learn was often wrong.
As it’s Australia I’m not talking about teaching to NAEP tests. Just not getting seduced into thinking that playing with toys and having a cool time will guarantee learning. It often doesn’t.
What my daughter learned, because they worked in groups on their claymation, was that Elisa is a **** and a lazy *** at that and she never wants to work with her again. She tells me it was a total waste of time.
What other people’s kids often need is the back ground knolwedge to help them make sense of the world and particiapte in it. Wasting their time with ill-considered, technology-supported twaddle is criminal negligence.
It’s a cargo cult ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult )
I am old enough to remember that people started saying that computers would revolutionise education in the early 1970s Still waiting. My father who had been a teacher and went on to run a very successful computer software country remarked that all that machine boosting was pushed by people who knew little of either teaching or computers.
And now it’s joined the venerable tradiiton of milking education dry. Schools must have gadgets! Gimme your money and I’ll sell you some.
We did ‘hand out computers’ stuff here in Victoria, Australia. My 16 year old spends all her time with her school laptop on facebook and looking at cat videos. Highly educaitonal.
Not.
It’s hard to prepare students for our new digital information, economic, and learning landscapes without digital tools…
If you’re not seeing desired results, perhaps it has nothing to do with the tools and everything to do with the systems in which they’re embedded?
More on this here: http://bit.ly/mV5uI6
I want technology in my life and classroom.
But people who push technology into schools, like superintendents, rarely use technology very deeply.
Then they wonder why educators can’t suddenly start doing amazing things with it.
This is the real lesson of LAUSD. When Steve Jobs said the iPad was magic and revolutionary, he forgot to say that people had to actually use it, not just rub it and wish,
It’s a cargo cult.
I am old enough to remember that people started saying that computers would revolutionise education in the early 1970s Still waiting. My father who had been a teacher and went on run a very successful computer software country said that all that was said by people who knew little of teaching or computers.
Well, I thought it sounded very positive:^)
Too bad today’s article in the LA Times came out after the Ed Week one.
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-lausd-computers-20140128,0,5974079.story#axzz2rja7Ac2b
LAUSD is no where near ready to give the tests this spring on computers. Plenty of people realized that this would happen, but Deasy decided to ignore all the warnings. He was finally forced to have a survey conducted on technology presently in schools. But, according to the article, he didn’t ask for an inventory of computers in carts. After all, the more there are of them, the less he would be able to claim are needed for immediate purchase.
The evidence just keeps piling up. When will the LAUSD Board of Ed wake up and admit they made a terrible mistake approving this plan in its present form? The Bond Oversight Committee is stepping up to the plate, but the board members seem to be paralyzed and are allowing this train wreck to continue.
Here’s what NOT to do with technology:
For millennia, people have dreamed of a universal encyclopedia, of ready access, by all, to the knowledge of the world. This was the dream of the Ptolemies who created the Library of Alexandria, of various ancient Persian and Arabian encyclopedists, of Diderot. In 1903, H. G. Wells wrote of a future in which all of the world’s knowledge would be available “instantaneously, via wires.” President Truman’s science advisor Vannevar Bush dreamed of a Memorex–a device that would store all of the world’s knowledge on magnetic cards for immediate access. Richard Feynman speculated about the possibility of storing all that knowledge on a device the size of a sugar cube.
Well, today, that dream has been realized. Want to find Euler’s equation relating the number of faces, edges, and vertices? Want to know how to do macrame? Want a score for Tarrega’s Capricio Arabe? Interested in tips for dirigible driving or growing hydroponic radishes? Interested in exploring how Mary Shelley was related to William Godwin and what she learned from him? Want to practice your Swahili conjugations? Want to learn the meter of the ghazal? Interested in exploring the economic theory known as Georgism? Wondering what the people of the ancient Anatolian settlement of Çatalhöyük ate? Want to read some ancient Greek gnostic texts in translation? Want to know the weight of the moon in ounces? Wondering what the etymology of “porcelain” is? Like to learn a little Game Theory, Swedish, Quantum Mechanics? How to play Go?
You name it. It’s at your fingertips.
The ancient dream has been realized.
And now educators want to take from students this astonishing resource, this realization of the dreams of countless generations of teachers and scholars. They want to turn the PULL MEDIUM by which one can access the world’s knowledge into a pathetic PUSH MEDIUM for a narrow range of proprietary, dumbed-down, computer-adaptive curricula.
Where some of us see students, these people see $TUDENT$. The CC$$ was paid for for the very purpose of allowing for the creation of national computer-adaptive curricula. That’s the purpose of the entire fiasco. As Arne Duncan’s chief of staff put it, the purpose of the new standards is “to create national markets for products that can be brought to scale.”
Think of the Walmartization, the Microsofting, of education. Think iPADS preloaded with proprietary curricula and hooked up to the inBloom database but without free access to the Internet.
It’s sickening. But that is what is happening. The ancient dream is being sabotaged for profit by people who couldn’t give a rat’s tushy about humane scholarship and research, about the realization of that ancient dream, about teachers and kids.
“Schad said Houston ISD is focused on providing students and teachers with a suite of “Web 2.0″ tools that can foster content creation, collaboration among students, and project-based learning.”
Google Apps for education is FREE!!!
This puts the power of an entire suite of software tools into the hands of any kids with a computer and an internet connection.
One of the motivating forces behind the creation of the CC$$ was that the big ed-book publishers recognized that the Internet presented a potentially game-changing challenge to their traditional publishing model. Pixels are cheap. If any publisher can compete for a portion of the market without having to pay enormous printing costs, the monopoly held by the big ed-book publishers can be broken. There are currently hundreds of complete courses and textbooks available online FOR FREE.
But here’s how to ensure that the monopolies continue to have a stranglehold on the ed materials market: Create a single set of national standards so that any curricula sold has to be correlated to those standards. Doing so creates enormous economies of scale that large publishers can exploit. And a national database of student responses and test scores based on tests of those standards becomes a monopolistic gateway to which any publisher must be connected if the materials from that publisher are to be adaptive to those student responses.
Since the beginning of the Internet, there have been powerful forces attempting to turn it into a push medium as opposed to a democratic pull medium. Selling otherwise locked laptops with proprietary, subscription-based software on them is one way to go about that.
It should be of interest that many people who work in tech actually send their kids to tech-free schools: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html
When lawsuits are occurring that question the tenure and senority rights of teachers, its good to know that the management of LAUSD, superintendent and BOE are poster people for how not to run a public school district. Amazing how many errors and bad decisions have been made yet our board of Deasy renews his contract. As we all know, its the teachers fault that bad teachers are never fired but I say management doesn’t do its job in unified. Basically, it sucks big time and everyone all over American knows it. Kudos to those districts that use LAUSD as an example of how not to run a public school district.
Reblogged this on Nathan Merz's PLN and commented:
News the directly pertains to us. It’s good to see the district doing something right, or at least trying to.
I have seen the students in a classroom write their ‘Do Now’ answers on their tablets instead of in their notebooks. Great! How many of them will be able to access the work by the end of the year, or even find it? That was the only thing the tech was used for that day. Now we have the worlds most expensive looseleaf books.
The Districts brag about how tech savvy their programs are.
Frankly, I don’t care if they write with a quill. I just want kids to learn something other than how to manipulate more technology which will be obsolete by the time they are graduated.
Reminds me of a graduation at U Mich where I saw the UMich. president and the US President ‘kvelling’ over the 4 foot lower stadium field that had just been remade to give the fans a minutely better view.
Now that’s education!