Snippet: Apple to Replace iPads with MacBooks in Maine Classrooms ☇

Tim Hardwick for MacRumors:

Apple and the Maine Department of Education have offered to swap school iPads for MacBooks at no additional cost, after it emerged that students and teachers overwhelmingly favor the use of laptops in class.

According to a report in the Lewiston-Auburn Sun Journal, schools in Auburn and other districts in Maine are set to benefit from the “Refresh” swap, following surveys of students and teachers across grades 7 through 12, which revealed that 88.5 percent of teachers and 74 percent of students preferred laptops over iPads.

iPads were perceived to have poor educational value in the classroom and were often used to play games in class, while laptops allowed students better opportunities for school work. The preference gap widened even more when it came to older students, who saw laptops as better devices for coding and programming tasks.

Although I know there are many, many teachers that work hard and put in way more time than their paychecks reflect, it sounds like a handful from the original article are morons with technology. You can’t turn an iPad into a viable education device for the classroom? Once again, the iPad gets dinged because it’s not a “real computer” and it sounds like some of the teachers and administrators wrote it off before they took the time to learn about some of the content-creation capabilities. Besides that, one could assume that nobody planned the deployment, instead leaving the iPads fully open for students to do whatever they wanted. Although I applaud Apple for sticking their neck out to keep the the Maine Department of Education as a customer, I worry the MacBook deployment will be just as sloppy. Furthermore, what makes anyone think students won’t play games or socially loaf on their MacBooks?