Superintendent takes iPads away from administrators and gives them to kids

[Gore1FL]

29. This Educational IT guy thinks this will be a disaster.

I don't mind making technology available to kids. (It's my freaking job to do so.) I don't know if the place to start is primary education. From what I gather from the article, my generational equivalence would be spending time each day teaching students how to work television knobs. It was fine we had an used TV's on occasion, but the point wasn't to teach specific technology

I'd like to know if there was thought put into the infrastructure and curriculum, or is this an ill-conceived and poorly executed move? All I read boils down to "the kids are excited to use these to learn." That's great, assuming they can find useful apps for the device, develop curriculum around those apps, and have a way to manage the software on them, get them network access. (350 devices is a lot of wireless capacity, not to mention consideration of IP ranges to support that many.)

I have yet to see anyone come up with a useful classroom activity where everyone has an iPad. One might exist somewhere. I am unaware of it. I have been to conventions (as recently as last November, with lectures on BYOD situations with iPads in a educational environment. The best idea I heard was using them as terminal to launch remote apps. That's another layer of infrastructure.

A grant to buy more is a horrendous waste of money if all they have is "This is exciting" for curriculum, and "Why can't I connect to the internet?" as infrastructure. Speaking of waste of money, why did the iPads cost $745 ($261,000/350) each? That seems pricey unless they got really high-end devices. I know that's the sort of thing I'd want in the hands of a 5-year-old!