All it takes is two decades of relentless lobbying by some of the richest companies in history

I was issued an iPad in high school in like 2014. Even then, they were distracting. We all played games on them. They did have some benefits, though. They ensured that every kid consistently had a small, portable, fairly rugged device to take home so that they could take online quizzes, write essays, do digital homework assignments, do research or reading assignments, scan paper documents, do video assignments, check schedules and announcements, etc., all without requiring parents to spend hundreds of dollars on devices for their kids.

Our school district uses Lenovo laptops and Microsoft for everything. My daughter couldn't do her homework yesterday b/c of the Microsoft outage. They use teams for absolutely everything.

I have seen tons of university students taking note on their iPad with a pencil. Felt like a legit usage: read the course material on the iPad instead of printing everything, annotate PDFs, take notes.

Back in my days we were printing the slides and annotating (sometimes) them. That was a big waste of paper.

Yeah, I used an iPad and an Apple Pencil all through college. Lifesaver, I did all my homework on it and skipped paper completely.

Fascinating to call printing a few hundred pages a "waste of paper" but buying a $1000 device to act as paper is somehow not a waste.

I believe they are working on other functions for the device. Don't quote me on that.

They are, but each function takes 16 clicks.

I’ve got mixed feelings about the whole thing. I go out as-a-fox to do all sorts of things such as photography and ritual leadership [1] and tarot readings and I always have a “fox-in-a-box” kit for each activity.

Overall I don’t like it that people in ritual spaces are reading off their phones all the time but, hey, I use the compass to figure out where the quarters are though I do try to mark them early on. I still like having books to read tarot and I have a few that fit in my bag but the really good ones (the spiritually oriented ones, not the ones that give answers like “in the basement of the Alamo”) would take up like 1/4 of the volume of my bag and that’s a lot.

So yeah, I may pack a mass market paperback that explains Smith-Waite imagery and a little materialistic book but I am going to fall back to my iPad if I need Rachel Pollock. It doesn’t help that the physical form of books has gotten worse over time, like the 1st edition of The Spiral Dance that was rebound by my Uni library is great but the later edition trade paperback I have reminds me of why I hate trade paperbacks and it doesn’t help that Starhawk’s practical magic got bulked up with a lot of speculation…. So i keep falling back to “get another book for kindle” because i can pack 10k books on my iPad.

[1] with the unusual OKR of “people can’t tell better than chance that this was Paul’s circle”

First, I only said that "back then, printing all that stuff seemed like a waste". I didn't say anything about the iPad.

Second, it's not like modern students wouldn't have an iPad or a laptop, is it? It's not exactly a waste if they use a device they have anyway. Probably some even have an iPad instead of a laptop, so...

I'm not a parent and none of my friends are. what's the benefit they're supposed to be providing?

Is it just grading and parental access?

I see iPads (class 7 to 13, german school system) very positive. Let me just point out 3 aspects:

My students can really work with book or materials (make a photo, then annotate, cut, copy paste, extend the pages ...)

It added a lot to how I teach (make a podcast, produce videos, simulate, ...)

And as parent: I was more than happy when my son had (for the first time) all learning materials together in one place and not scattered in bags, on the bed, in the school locker...

Let me assure you from personal experience that iPads can (used right) contribute to better education.

Does any of this lead to better outcomes for the students?

Screens in general tend to produce less desirable outcomes. Learning goes down, retention, attention, etc.

It doesn't just have to be at school. Screens after school affect learning in school.

the amount of "better education" we would have with kids driving a desktop/tower running a proper desktop (Linux) is immeasurable better than a locked down system like Appleland - tech literacy is literally one of the most discussed/emergent topics, be at the ed. tech field or traditional discussions about pedagogy

[0] probably over hour 600 on pedagogic scientific research and other podcasts talking exclusively about it

I agree with the importance of tech literacy and having a Linux-box could be way to achieve this but I hope you will grant me that its possible that in my subjects (Biology and German language/literature) an iPad is of greater use (as a tool outside, in the lab, to produce something cool with language) than a desktop pc. I don't see them as mutual exclusive.

which solution iPad has that can't be re-created in Linuxland? given AI, the possibility of doing a clone being quite cheaper than 5 years ago... now the trade-off of teaching and promoting freedom principles Linux surf (the GPL itself is a GREAT example) and allow users to have, against something hostile (whatever you say about Apple hardware and it's ecosystem, it's a net negative company for society) by a monopoly-like tech giant, on my opinion it's non-negotiable! i believe education is one of the most revolutionary (effective) acts we can do and just by excluding the dialogue FOSS can promote, make it instantly a great loss

i still tangle my head till today when proprietary musical software discussions emerge, on HN that's even more surprising, and no Csound, pd is cited even when those have decades old mature and updated codebases, with efficient DSP programmed by academics, all free of price with very permissive licenses - Bitwig costs 399 USD and that's like a lot for a lot of people - that's just a silly example, i'm not even getting into ed. tech software (for educators or kids) ecosystem which sometimes i still have a hard time why someone don't just learn Emacs org-mode for 1 week and stop using N services their school have to pay a subscription... Apple hardware, often deprecated much faster than hardware which run libre software, isn't a great monkey-see-monkey-do example on how teaching how important is rights of repair and permacomputing principles

> which solution iPad has that can't be re-created in Linuxland

- The school goes to a supplier and order 500 iPads and says they want them preloaded with X and X apps and be centrally managed by their Device Management software.

I love Linux, but nobody is creating Linux tablets and supplying them to schools at discounted rates and pre-configuring them with MDM ready out of the box.

Again, I agree with you: all the points of your first paragraph are valid to some extent.

But sometimes a totally dumb and closed system like an iPad is a feature. It is so simple that Students (from 10 to 19 years old) and teachers (from 25 to 70) can use it. It is so closed down that the teachers can easily and reliably distribute tasks, apps, restrictions and don't have to deal (they will stand no chance) with students tampering with their systems.

It would be great when all school subjects would address FOSS and the impact of closed systems on society but they also have to address their core curriculum. Here I see the possibilities that the iPad opens up as a net positive.

...you know, being "digital native" means today actually being able to use an app on your smartphone and swipe into the correct direction :-D

> My students can really work with book or materials (make a photo, then annotate, cut, copy paste, extend the pages ...)

What's the point of that? Seems like unproductive busywork. How does it help with memorization and brain training? (Or isn't that the point of school anymore?)

[delayed]

It isn't for learning, it's for spying. Edutech in American schools are very much into surveillance.

> It isn’t for learning, it’s for spying.

It’s ‘for spying’ by whom?

Look up "Surveillance capitalism" - both the corporate and the government benefit from it. Recall that the US is also a nation of immigrants and so keeping an eye on the kids in schools was always a part of that process - teachers and counsellors were expected to observe students and keep notes on their "well being" and their records are preserved for a long time.

Procreate, Nomad Sculpt, Final Cut, Logic Pro, Garageband and the Affinity Suite would love a word.

[delayed]

>Not many people use iPads professionally - they are designed for consuming.

Tons of people in the arts do, it's a bit silly to claim otherwise.

Some of the pain in this specific example case seems to be haven gotten into a state where both iPads and Chromebooks are regularly used side by side in the classroom. They are using Google Workspace accounts with a custom SSO "app" on an iPad presumably so that everything is synchronized with Chromebooks, too.