Comments on: Farmington Asks Families to Insure iPads for $28/yr

By: MSPD

MSPD — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 21:42:43 +0000

I’d promise each of these kids a Cray XK7 if I knew it would make them able to articulate a point better than Brian Treakle in post #21.

Can someone decode that gigantic, illegible mess of run-on sentences and grammatical offenses up there?

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By: lefty

lefty — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:26:09 +0000

We are cutting expenses, like the annual $500k we spend making $22million paper copies

It is sort of a shame that local school districts now need to be counterfeiting money in order to pay for things.

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By: Brian Treakle

Brian Treakle — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:15:22 +0000

To Fehler, no, there is no insurance charge for those not bringing the iPad home. Only grades 4-12 will be able to bring them home, and they are in very tough, military spec (Griffin Survivor) cases.

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By: Brian Treakle

Brian Treakle — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:14:44 +0000

I would like to add a few things to help clarify the iPads at Farmington. #1, we are not using cost reduction as a motive for the iPads. We are cutting expenses, like the annual $500k we spend making $22million paper copies, to pay for the iPads. #2, initiatives like the flipped classroom as explained above give our kids better access to working with teachers to learn and work problems, rather than relying on parents who often get to the point where they can no longer help their kids, or worse, who are never interested or able to help. The results are very promising where it has been done, including pilot programs in our district. # 3, our text books are $80 plus each and are outdated by the time they go to print. The iPad textbooks are updated continuously and cost less than $15 ea. they are far more engaging in the content they provide, and can help the students organize their notes for review when needed. This is another cost offset that will help pay for the iPad, while at the same time increasing student engagement. #4, Work books that we buy each year are limited by the paper they are printed on. With the iPad, we can increase the number of problems a student sees, or change the level as needed to fit the student’s individual progression. Which leads to the most important part. #5, the iPad gives us a tool to track each students progress and individualize their learning experience to give them the level of work or challenge that fits them. We are working to have each student reach their full potential by mastering skills for each level of learning, rather than pushing them to the next level before they are ready, ultimately alienating them and destoying their confidence, or holding back those who can go much faster. There has been a lot of thought put into this, planning by teachers and administrators, and lots of discussion with the public that have led us to the decision to go this route. I would be happy to discuss this in further detail, as I am sure our superintendent would as well. I can be contacted though the Farmington school district website. Brian Treakle, Farmington School Board

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By: lefty

lefty — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 16:45:09 +0000

Thanks to Mikeh for the reminder about how insurance fraud works.

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By: Mikeh

Mikeh — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 16:27:36 +0000

Students do not have to pay insurance, nor do their parents. The article states that parents of students that take home ipads must either purchase insurance through this school program, or agree to pay for the devices if they are damaged. So if a student wants to take the ipad home, their parents will pay for the damage, one way or another.

One thought, I wonder how the insurance works? I know some insurance for devices is really really stupid. For example, for Dish Network you can enroll in insurance that covers your equipment should it fail. Monthly fee is $8 or something like that. But, the insurance is setup so that you can start the insurance one moment, and the next report a device that needs replacement. So you really don’t need to carry the insurance. you just pay $8 when the device breaks to get the insurance. Then cancel it once the part is replaced.

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By: Fehler

Fehler — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 05:01:47 +0000

Wait, the students have to pay insurance, but then do not bring the I-pad home?

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By: Sarad

Sarad — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 01:25:41 +0000

Bill, I’m an avid reader of the blog, haven’t commented yet, but you’ve hit my hot button with this post. I was/am totally against the iPad initiative in the Farmington district. I agree with one of the other posts that the 1:1 ratio of iPad to student is completely unnecessary. Much of the same learning could be done on the iPads in a lab environment or by sharing a few classroom sets around a particular school. Farmington did this to put the district on the map; to try and attract more kids (read: more revenue) to the district. Now that they’ve spent $3M on iPads, somehow they’re suddenly projecting a $4-$6M budget shortfall over the next few years. Gee, how did the budget shortfall happen? It’s a shortfall caused by short-sightedness. The board heard less money on textbooks and jumped. I really don’t think the difference in cost is that significant, book publishers are huge companies and they will find a way to gouge buyers. Furthermore, our kids will probably suffer because teachers/administration will be purchasing cheaper books that have no proven results/research behind them. Some unknown author could be selling a similar textbook at 2/3rds the price of the well known one with wrong information. Next thing you know, our kids are learning that Columbus came over on the Titanic.

The board made yet another bad decision, not based on data or research, but on gut feel and, as an engineer, that drives me absolutely INSANE.

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By: MSPD

MSPD — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 21:21:35 +0000

We’re in 196, so I don’t know about 192.

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By: jorn

jorn — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 19:16:17 +0000

MSPD: I’m intrigued by the inverted classroom idea, but I’m religious about very little in life. I should also clarify that it is entirely possible I gave ISD 192 far more credit than they deserve. ;)

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By: Chris Johnston

Chris Johnston — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 18:54:25 +0000

We have an elementary aged student in the Farmington school district. Students are not allowed to bring the I-Pad home and for us this is a pattern that will continue for the foreseeable future.

Each day students are given time during the day to work on their assignments and she will need to continue this pattern in future years. We are already tempting fate by having her transporting a musical instrument back and forth but it our choice to have her join band and purchase an instrument.

We had no say in rental or insurance decisions for the I-Pads and we are unwilling to assume the responsibility that comes with removing it from the school.

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By: MSPD

MSPD — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 18:50:24 +0000

Great thoughts jorn. I would probably enjoy (and learn from) a debate about comment #9 as I don’t strongly agree with that concept, but I’d rather just compliment you on some great input here. I do strongly agree with post #12 and the troubling aspect of the thought process.

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By: jorn

jorn — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:39:13 +0000

Andyc, agreed. I think there should be some sort of rules about responsibility. And, as Carl Colmark was quoted in the original piece, parents can pay for the insurance or take the risk that they will pay replacement costs.

The troubling thing here (and I’ll go so far as to suggest this is one of the things Bill was hoping to point out by this post) is the “Oh, woops, we forgot this important and obvious part up front!” It feels, at least to me when I read the article, that the school district is coming around NOW with the whole insurance ask.

If that’s true, I think Mr. Colmark has some explaining to do.

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By: Ryan M

Ryan M — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:21:20 +0000

jorn, you did a much better job of explaining the reason for bringing devices home.

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By: andyc

andyc — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:17:47 +0000

I can wrote more later, but I have at least two thoughts now:

(1). I would guess the district trying to have parents put some skin in the game as a means of encouraging student responsibility. There are a bunch of ways to do these programs and, properly led and organized, there is very little damage. One example is Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop who has a great iPad program. If you just toss kids iPads and cross-fingers for good luck, you’ll see much more damage. We don’t have a take-home program at my school, but we have 425 iPads out on kids desktops all day long and have had not one student iPad damaged.

(2). I wish schools wouldn’t lead with cost-savings as an argument for iPads. Maybe they will save money, maybe they won’t. The best argument for iPads is that you can significantly improve student learning. You won’t spend more $$ on textbooks, but you WANT to then spend some of that on apps so that the iPads are actually useful for more than browsing web.

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By: jorn

jorn — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 16:41:59 +0000

The point of the iPads *IS* that they come home. We’re working towards the “inverted classroom” model, wherein kids watch lectures, etc. on their own at home and do what was historically the homework in class, where somebody is there to help them sort out what they learned.

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By: MSPD

MSPD — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 16:35:26 +0000

What I look forward to is the news story about some crack-addled degenerate mugging a 6 year-old girl walking home from school in Farmington now that they know she’s carrying home an iPad.

I agree with Jason2. There is no reason why these need to be coming home. For what it’s worth, our kids are in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) schools where they are constantly using a variety of hardware, software, and media, including iPads as early as 1st grade. It’s simple for the school to tailor the workload such that they don’t need to have them at home in order to “learn outside of the traditional school day”.

I also don’t see a need for a 1:1 ratio of iPads to students. These can be shared resources used in a lab environment.

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By: jorn

jorn — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 16:08:10 +0000

Nils, good point. The sort-of answer to your ponderance is that Apple did a pretty decent job of proactively courting the textbook publishers to create an ecosystem that works pretty well out of the gate.

http://www.apple.com/education/ipad/

Like you said, if this could happen on something that represented a lesser capital expense, all the better.

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By: Nils

Nils — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 15:58:02 +0000

I can only assume that the school districts are going with iPads because of the availability of content. I wonder if any of the text book companies are creating content for the Kindle or Nook ecosystem? The costs of those are half of what a current or even previous generation iPad. I’d feel better about my kid being provided a $200 tablet, than a $400+ tablet.

Of course, by the time my kids are old enough to be in school, they will have moved on to something else. I hope that they work out the bugs by then.

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By: Bill

Bill — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 15:48:41 +0000

The district is spending $3 million over 4 years to supply the iPads. Assuming the district had to pay $28 per student (this will be slightly inflated due to not every family having less than 3 kids) it would end up being $670,000 over four years for the insurance (they’re already paying $50,000 for those on free/reduced lunches).

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