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The grass may look greener on the other side, but it's not really. The iBooks in your district are probably taken care of by the school system, and not Apple techs. That's what happened in Henrico County, VA. So we switched to Dells in the high schools, and we've been regretting it ever since. The IT budget had to be tripled, then doubled again, to keep up with all the problems. It's costing us so much money that the school board decided to keep Apple in the middle schools, and word has it we are switching back after the Dell contract is out. Just a little food for thought.

every couple of months is nothing, if your school switches to PC's youll have a lot more than that, esp with spyware and virius's becuase people dont know how to run XP safetly. We used to have dell laptops at my school but they switched over to mac, why? Becuase every new update was a total time waster to take everyones laptop back to do the updates. Yes i know mac's have updates but they are far and fewer.

Dont even get me started when they had to convert to sp2.

No obviously you've never worked with school computers, and have no experience with setting them up. If they setup a computer for kids to use with no restriction either they are dumb no matter what OS they are using, or you are flatout lying. I have never heard of any school computer not being setup with deepfreeze or fortress or something along those lines. If you have deepfreeze on a computer, not matter what you think you wont be able to **** it up, its nearly impossible.

^ im talking about being on the user end: how many times computers could get infected by active X and what not. There were always computers that would not "connect to the network". And such, people love to bash windows, im not trying to go that route as i am on a windows laptop right now, but when we switched we had far fewer problems in class.

Damn you MSFT fanboys are completely blind to the problems people had with XP SP2. The corporations that held off installing SP2 had very good reason beyond the initial problems with machines not rebooting after the update. Among the products affected were some of MSFT's own products including MS Office 2000. That particular product exhibited problems when running on a standard or power user account. Obviously, MSFT had done all their QA with admin accounts. This type of problem is not isolated to their Office product line.

People like me, who notice these problems do so while earning a living. Maybe if some of you fanboys would leave your mother's basement and actually use their products in a "real" job, you would have a different point of view.

That was political hot air.

I think you'd be suprised what UK kids do get, all 6th formers were getting laptops at my school.

We get education discounts, if are in the NUS you save alot of money.....

And a shiny new laptop doesn't encourage kids to read? I don't see how having a laptop precludes the children from thinking creatively and analytically?

I don't know what you do with your computer, but I do more than "run software" whatever that means.

It neither encourages nor discourages a child from reading. It can, however, become a distratction. it is simply a tool, and if we're talking about programmers and designers, it becomes a real tool. But we don't need more of those, that's for certain. Witness the current Bush adminstration and the willingness of half the American population to give in to harmful neo-conservatism, the effects of which were already apparent back in 2001. Not to mention the censoring (and in many cases, silencing) of learned critics, mostly from academic spheres, whom could actually benefit the rest of us if welcomed to formulate national policy.

I'm just concerned about American school systems that are producing more IT people. We need more scholars and people in political and legal professions. Literature, poli sci. and the HUMANITIES in general help foster this.

Shiny new laptops have nothing to do with the above. And e-books are far from ubiquitous. Something can be said for Google as a research tool, but alot of academic/professionally published material is not on the web.

Children need to have a very strong grasp of the BASICS. The American school system is woefully lacking in this area.

Sure, laptops for every child is a nice bonus. I'm just wondering what that will encourage in the long run.

Last edited by LTD on 02 Jul 2006 - 02:52

So you are trying to say that Apple computers don't belong in education because the only experience you have had with them is with some old machines that barely ran. That makes no sense whatsoever.