With budget constraints I don’t see how the iPad can compete with cheaper alternatives. The only real advantage I see for the iPad over Chromebook in the education market is that one can digitally markup documents on the iPad and take handwritten notes on it.
I use an iPad Pro to grade math homework for my online students. I wish they all had iPad Pros (or Surface Pros) but I can’t force them to buy an iPad for one class. It would be nice if the college required their usage but there aren’t enough compelling reasons to do so at this time. I’m skeptical that there will be enough after Tuesday’s event.
I would but mostly because of the pen support. Apparently Chromebooks can support pens so I don’t have a preference. The cost factor makes me think Chromebooks are a better fit for the education market.
You can do digital pen markup on any number of stylus equipped Chromebooks using any of the excellent Android or Chrome apps for note taking and markup. Check out Keep, Squid, Google Classroom for Android, MyScript. There's even a handwiring mode on the soft keyboard that comes up if you flip them around to tablet mode.
The feature is not just on the Pixel book. It's also in the $400 Samsung Chromebook Plus or Asus Chromebook Flip.
I did not know this. Thank you for pointing this out. When my current iPad Pro dies I’ll look into a Chromebook option. I had considered the Surface Pro but I hate the Windows operating system.
> The only real advantage I see for the iPad over Chromebook in the education market is that one can digitally markup documents on the iPad and take handwritten notes on it. I use an iPad Pro...
The 'regular' iPad (and presumably this cheaper iPad) do not support the Apple Pencil. There are Chromebooks with wacom pen support e.g. Samsung's Chromebook Plus/Pro [1]. Those Chromebooks start at $499. The iPad Pro starts at $649 (+$100 for the Apple Pencil).
I know only the Pro model of the iPad supports the pencil. I'm assuming - hoping! - these new iPads do as well. I did not know about Chromebooks having pen support. Given this I don’t see how Apple can make a compelling case for the iPad.
When the iBooks development software came out I was excited. I create my own materials for my college math courses and I wanted to write a book. But iBooks is only on Apple devices so why would I spend time creating materials for iBook? Apple needs to open up some of their stuff if they want a wider adoption in education.
My kids have now had both iPads and Chromebooks, and the Chromebooks were obvious winners in every single way. The teachers and kids both like them, they're clearly better for actual school work and learning, everything is just better. It's just a nice bonus that they're way cheaper.
I think if I were in high school today, I would today feel exactly the same as I did in 7th grade about Apple products. John Dvorak wrote an article that Apple machines were basically Cuisinarts and I thought the class was to teach me about computers. Everything was a captive garden and in 20-some years, all that has changed is that the garden is pretty.
At least with a Chromebook, there is a gate that you can open if you want. The Crouton project allows anyone to install a full OS. The best part is that if it gets broken, there is no danger or punishment. Just reset and everything is back to default and your files come back. Get good at it and then it is probably time for a real computer...
How much cheaper are Chromebooks? Education iPads are $300, to my naive self it doesn’t seem like there is a lot of room for a decent laptop to be much cheaper.
My kids have both iPads and school issued Chromebooks. They hate the chromebooks, only using them for homework. They call them "CrummyBooks." The build quality is terrible, battery life is terrible, and to my kids, they're locked down way too much (some of this might simply be the wifi restrictions/filtering at school).
Initially our school district planned iPads, but backtracked over cost. We were initially excited for them, so that our kids wouldn't have to carry so many heavy textbooks. But the quality of the textbooks on the Chromebook are terrible. It's as if the publishers simply took galley proofs and dumped them into a pdf.
No, I just expected them to be better, more like an ebook than a crappy PDF. If I could move the textbooks to my daughter's iPad I would, but they're licensed and I haven't tried to work around the DRM.
Textbooks that cannot be read on a different device due to DRM? That's some really ugly distopian stuff. Feels so wrong on multiple levels.
Back when I was in school, I was getting some of the textbooks second hand from the year older students and selling mine to the younger ones, on a fair organized by the school.
In portrait mode the iPad screen will match the page of a book more closely. With a screen wider than it is tall, you’ll either have the page really zoomed out to read, or only have half the page on screen and have to keep futzing with the scrolling.
It is not the hardware you need to spend the most on... It is to the inflated cost of apps, like Oxford Dictionary, etc that charge more due to the Apple Tax. The lower cost of the iPad is not enough incentive for us to upgrade any time soon.
I will never understand why they don't just rebrand the Macbook Air as just the Macbook... The new Macbooks look ridiculous to me. They look more like something that could be called the Macbook Air instead. They should swap the names. And if they did that and THEN got rid of the Macbook Airs (currently the Macbooks) I would not be bothered by that. I think Macbooks are hideus compared to how nice they used to look before they discontinued them. But that's beside the point. I hope they figure this simple trick out. It would make their line up way better. Not like they haven't changed their OS name already.
I love the 12 inch MacBook. It's super small and light and I can carry it in just a sleeve, and the battery still holds for many hours. Granted, it's not a powerhouse and I mainly use it for presentations and very light coding, but there's the Pro model if you need more. Each tool has a purpose, and the 12" is great for my needs.
The current Air is larger for no particular reason and has a lower res display, so it's obviously the budget version.
I have a 13" MBP (2017), and it fits in the sleeve I bought for my 12" Windows tablet (Samsung TabPro S). Battery life is adequate to great, though it feels pretty low-spec. I'm not sure if that feeling is because it is comparatively low-spec, but because I recently bought a desktop for gaming and am comparing it to that.
How long does it take to draw diagrams and modify and annotate them over time on note taking apps? You can do it in seconds by hand. The situation applies to drawing arrows between phrases and such too. For some things, the simple way is the best.
It's not one or the other, even in the classroom. Computers didn't kill handwriting or print, and latter don't hinder the use of computers. They all complement each other.
Useless tangent: In my experience (= K-12 + 10 years at universities) the best way to lock things in ones head is to take quick handwritten notes and then reread, correct, and enter them as notes on one's computer.
I didn't make myself clear. I agree, I use pen and paper every day to complement my laptop use, and it's miles better for some things than can be accomplished digitally even today.
It's still doable to only have a laptop and use that for everything, if not practical or quick enough in many cases. Pen and paper is nice to have, but it's not 100% required.
Programming is not the backbone of primary education and you shouldn't design a education curriculum around a niche subject. Primary education is for teaching literacy, history, and arithmetic not a trade.
But you can certainly teach programming with pencil and paper. Some of the most influential programmers in history of computer science did not do their work on physical computers or used (now) esoteric methods like punch-cards as input. Several of my university CS classes were all pencil and paper, especially midterms and exams.
Are they really going to teach programming on an iPad? For sure they have the beginner puzzle stuff you find on Code.org, but to really learn code you can't use an iPad or a Chromebook for that matter.
They could. It would probably go as well as teaching programming on an iPad. And programming really isn't the backbone of primary education. We're graduating kids who can't read.
Seems to be a lot of Chromebook comments. Has anyone actually seen one used in the real world? I contract at a bunch of different places and I've never seen anyone use one in a business setting. I'm not sure just learning how to use an iPad is better but I definitely see those being used.
I’m in the IT industry in Australia, loosely related to education. Within my job I see an even split between iPads and Surfaces, with MacBook Airs in third place.
The closest I’ve come to a Chromebook is when Google offered our company one if we evaluated GCP.
I've owned a Chromebook Pixel and a cheap Asus chromebook. For a business setting they are pointless. For schoolkids (or elders who just want to browse the web [1]) they are brilliant.
The Chromebook is targeted toward education, you can use a real keyboard to type your homework and, if you are savvy enough, you can even install Linux on them and learn to program. In a business setting you probably want a light laptop with Windows or macOS.
I know of two people who used Chromebooks around 2015. One of them basically used it as a light laptop. Took notes with it, traveled with it, etc. The other guy used it as his primary computer. In spite of him praising it whenever someone would ask about it, he was always complaining about how difficult it was to use as a development machine. Once you got external software properly installed and configured, it was fine.
Hearing him complain was reminiscent of using Linux in the early 2000s. No one really wrote consumer applications for Linux at the time, and driver support was a nightmare. Once you figured out all the warts and quirk, it was fine.
This was 3+ years ago though, so I imagine things have improved in that space.
The nice thing about Chromebooks is that they don't really require any special software. Just web apps of the things you need. Though I guess you could say that about any OS at this point.
In my case I'm using it in the context of a master's degree, and it's more than enough. I use Google colab for assignments and sharelatex for any reports I have to write. It works quite well and the battery life is amazing. I also don't care if it gets stolen.
The Apple Pencil should be a key strategic advantage for the iPads and should be compatible with every model if not included in the box outright. Instead Apple restricts the Pencil to the Pro models. Microsoft won the Business world by owning the document format. Apple could win the education world by owning the handwritten notes format [1] if Pencils were standard
What is Tim Cook's vision for education? Nobody fucking knows. One year Apple is trying to sell iPads claiming it's "whole new kind of computer" then a few months later they are wondering "what's a computer". Without a compelling vision the iPad will continue to flounder.
p.s. I want a 7.9" iPad Pro
[1] there is no open source .txt equivalent for hand written notes. We'll need one if OneNote/Apple Notes ever takes off
I put some effort into seriously transferring over note-taking and journaling to an iPad Pro and Pencil. The initial experience was so delightful that I thought it could be amazing.
- I initially liked the experience of writing on glass - its fast and the responsive but quality seriously suffers - letter roundness and stroke subtlety is lost to become spider-scrawl. This meant that reading it back later became a deeply unpleasant and difficult experience reducing the value of writing anything at all. I committed to it and it didn't seem to be a technique issue but a combination of the zero friction pen/screen interaction and how strokes are recorded and rendered. The one thing I did not try was a screen protector to add more friction.
- electronic store of handwriting did not not prove useful. It became a worse experience than flicking through loose leaf paper which you can layout, rearrange, pin up etc. There is no handwriting recognition or anything to add value like searching. If I ever wanted to make ink digital, I could take a photo in 2 seconds.
- There is something psychological and so special about ink, paper, flow experience. When you write with ink, you make a mark on the world. The experience and art is lost on a screen. Its also pretty weird when the screen gets hot and it increases the time you are staring closely at a screen which is more fatiguing than taking a break to stare at paper.
- IOS is just a bad productivity platform - copy text out of a webpage/ebook into notes? Ugh. Get a pdf onto the iPad. Ugh. It hobbles the user at every turn. Delight turns into impotent rage at anti-user design decisions to keep you buying media from Apple. I found I either wanted real text notes and all the high quality text tooling I am used to on a laptop or the real pen and ink experience for the flow and flexibility.
A week later, I returned the 12" pro and pencil - the initial wow-factor turned into loathing. Its worse than the cheapest pen and paper.
I completely agree, except my experience was on a Surface Pro 4. Let me start by saying it's a fantastic product and the experience of writing/erasing with the pen was great. I commit to it for a few months in college and while it was fun to write on, I found that it became more of a hassle when I would try to study or refer back to my notes. I would be switching tabs constantly on OneNote then back to a browser, then back to my notes, etc.
With traditional pen/paper, it leaves your computer fully available for research, videos, or quick references without having to switch around. Great products overall, but the experience is still lacking in that regard.
I just came from a state-wide, three day tech conference for K-12. I came as a technology person and thought I might just attend the sessions for teachers and boy did I get my eyes opened—Google Classroom is a major hit. Teachers really, really like Chromebooks. This is major.
My previous job was in K-12 tech, and I still keep in contact with my old boss.
When I started at that position, the school district (~5k students) was nearly 100% Apple. Nearly every device was the low-cost polycarb Macbook. The district purchased them with a heavy investment from "Classrooms for the Future" program, which covered a large portion of the cost.
Since that time, Apple retired the less expensive model and (same as they still are) trying to position the iPad as a replacement.
Here's the problem though:
Students are never going to be effective at long-term use on a tablet. Can you imagine writing a grade 12 level book report on a touch screen? Budget-wise, the district would only be able to purchase the iPads, a case, and that's all. Bluetooth keyboards would not be able to fit in the budget.
Compared, feature for feature, and price- Chromebooks and other traditional low-cost laptops are much more effective to the success of getting technology into students' hands.
You worked for Penn manor? That is pretty cool. At Philadelphia fosscon last year I saw a presentation by the it director at Penn manor (who is who I assume you are talking about). It was a really interesting talk, and it was an impressive achievement. More than just the saving money or more foss use in schools, I thought the program was especially cool for how it taught actual it and computer skills to the children.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadI use an iPad Pro to grade math homework for my online students. I wish they all had iPad Pros (or Surface Pros) but I can’t force them to buy an iPad for one class. It would be nice if the college required their usage but there aren’t enough compelling reasons to do so at this time. I’m skeptical that there will be enough after Tuesday’s event.
The feature is not just on the Pixel book. It's also in the $400 Samsung Chromebook Plus or Asus Chromebook Flip.
The 'regular' iPad (and presumably this cheaper iPad) do not support the Apple Pencil. There are Chromebooks with wacom pen support e.g. Samsung's Chromebook Plus/Pro [1]. Those Chromebooks start at $499. The iPad Pro starts at $649 (+$100 for the Apple Pencil).
[1] https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/chromebooks/all-chromeb...
When the iBooks development software came out I was excited. I create my own materials for my college math courses and I wanted to write a book. But iBooks is only on Apple devices so why would I spend time creating materials for iBook? Apple needs to open up some of their stuff if they want a wider adoption in education.
At least with a Chromebook, there is a gate that you can open if you want. The Crouton project allows anyone to install a full OS. The best part is that if it gets broken, there is no danger or punishment. Just reset and everything is back to default and your files come back. Get good at it and then it is probably time for a real computer...
Some schools also avoid Apple and instead use recycled/repurposed computers that can run as a Linux or Windows thin client.
Edit: wording
In our case we were 3 weeks at sea with only email access.
Initially our school district planned iPads, but backtracked over cost. We were initially excited for them, so that our kids wouldn't have to carry so many heavy textbooks. But the quality of the textbooks on the Chromebook are terrible. It's as if the publishers simply took galley proofs and dumped them into a pdf.
Would you expect the textbooks to be better quality on the iPads vs on the Chromebooks? Why?
Back when I was in school, I was getting some of the textbooks second hand from the year older students and selling mine to the younger ones, on a fair organized by the school.
That being said you have to understand what chromeOS is and isn't.
The current Air is larger for no particular reason and has a lower res display, so it's obviously the budget version.
You do know they have the ability to keep notes, right?
It's not one or the other, even in the classroom. Computers didn't kill handwriting or print, and latter don't hinder the use of computers. They all complement each other.
Useless tangent: In my experience (= K-12 + 10 years at universities) the best way to lock things in ones head is to take quick handwritten notes and then reread, correct, and enter them as notes on one's computer.
It's still doable to only have a laptop and use that for everything, if not practical or quick enough in many cases. Pen and paper is nice to have, but it's not 100% required.
But you can certainly teach programming with pencil and paper. Some of the most influential programmers in history of computer science did not do their work on physical computers or used (now) esoteric methods like punch-cards as input. Several of my university CS classes were all pencil and paper, especially midterms and exams.
Even if you get a physical keyboard, are there any mature apps for writing and executing code on the device?
It seems that we need to build mature apps for writing on device.
Yes, yes, I know, Swift Playgrounds. Not convinced.
The closest I’ve come to a Chromebook is when Google offered our company one if we evaluated GCP.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10884918/i-bought-my-mom-a...
Hearing him complain was reminiscent of using Linux in the early 2000s. No one really wrote consumer applications for Linux at the time, and driver support was a nightmare. Once you figured out all the warts and quirk, it was fine.
This was 3+ years ago though, so I imagine things have improved in that space.
In my case I'm using it in the context of a master's degree, and it's more than enough. I use Google colab for assignments and sharelatex for any reports I have to write. It works quite well and the battery life is amazing. I also don't care if it gets stolen.
What is Tim Cook's vision for education? Nobody fucking knows. One year Apple is trying to sell iPads claiming it's "whole new kind of computer" then a few months later they are wondering "what's a computer". Without a compelling vision the iPad will continue to flounder.
p.s. I want a 7.9" iPad Pro
[1] there is no open source .txt equivalent for hand written notes. We'll need one if OneNote/Apple Notes ever takes off
'The Apple'? Apple is the name of the company, not any particular product or feature. What do you mean it should be compatible with all iPads?
- I initially liked the experience of writing on glass - its fast and the responsive but quality seriously suffers - letter roundness and stroke subtlety is lost to become spider-scrawl. This meant that reading it back later became a deeply unpleasant and difficult experience reducing the value of writing anything at all. I committed to it and it didn't seem to be a technique issue but a combination of the zero friction pen/screen interaction and how strokes are recorded and rendered. The one thing I did not try was a screen protector to add more friction.
- electronic store of handwriting did not not prove useful. It became a worse experience than flicking through loose leaf paper which you can layout, rearrange, pin up etc. There is no handwriting recognition or anything to add value like searching. If I ever wanted to make ink digital, I could take a photo in 2 seconds.
- There is something psychological and so special about ink, paper, flow experience. When you write with ink, you make a mark on the world. The experience and art is lost on a screen. Its also pretty weird when the screen gets hot and it increases the time you are staring closely at a screen which is more fatiguing than taking a break to stare at paper.
- IOS is just a bad productivity platform - copy text out of a webpage/ebook into notes? Ugh. Get a pdf onto the iPad. Ugh. It hobbles the user at every turn. Delight turns into impotent rage at anti-user design decisions to keep you buying media from Apple. I found I either wanted real text notes and all the high quality text tooling I am used to on a laptop or the real pen and ink experience for the flow and flexibility.
A week later, I returned the 12" pro and pencil - the initial wow-factor turned into loathing. Its worse than the cheapest pen and paper.
With traditional pen/paper, it leaves your computer fully available for research, videos, or quick references without having to switch around. Great products overall, but the experience is still lacking in that regard.
When I started at that position, the school district (~5k students) was nearly 100% Apple. Nearly every device was the low-cost polycarb Macbook. The district purchased them with a heavy investment from "Classrooms for the Future" program, which covered a large portion of the cost.
Since that time, Apple retired the less expensive model and (same as they still are) trying to position the iPad as a replacement.
Here's the problem though: Students are never going to be effective at long-term use on a tablet. Can you imagine writing a grade 12 level book report on a touch screen? Budget-wise, the district would only be able to purchase the iPads, a case, and that's all. Bluetooth keyboards would not be able to fit in the budget.
Compared, feature for feature, and price- Chromebooks and other traditional low-cost laptops are much more effective to the success of getting technology into students' hands.
In fact, they currently run one of the largest 1-to-1 Linux laptop deployments in the eastern US: https://technology.pennmanor.net/11-laptop-program/