Not only does it use far less fuel and effort, it's actually more secure. Coin sized chips scattered in the ocean could, if you wanted to put the effort in, be trawled up and read. Something that's been scrambled on an atomic scale, not so much...
]]>Security: If you don't grind up your chips and disks they can be reconstructed, but for most data a hammer is sufficient, or the microwave.
New kit: Regretable had to buy a new commuter car (I'm American don't we all commute). The Ford Fiesta is easier to interface my phone to than else. First over Bluetooth, then with a Microsoft download to my iPhone4, full interop.
Love the Rasberry, but looking at arduino for central control of home. Cell phone hardware is getting very cheap for the power if you drop back a generation or two.
Got to replace evaporative air conditioning unit (desert dweller) before summer, but staring at solar PV incentives for the future.
Home computing: want a server class processing ( building a wargaming machine ) and finding that Dell server components that 5 years ago the company paid thousands for are cheap on ebay.
Examining opportunities ala Roku et al
Still frustrated with piles of music CDs and gap between internet radio and my stereo.
Really enjoy the American politics watching! Frightening choices face my nation.
]]>We're looking at moving to ebooks as textbooks. Cost is about the same over the lifetime of a textbook, with the advantage that we only need to license as many books as we have students in a given year (rather than buying for a peak year and having unused copies in a cupboard). Also a lot easier for the kids to carry around.
Downside is retention isn't as good for things read on a screen — but better than not reading anything because they didn't want to carry the big book around. (Or books — some of our kids have 4-5 kg of textbooks in a day's classes.)
That works for the kids with their own devices, which most have. But some students are on social assistance and don't have phones or tablets (or computers). I'm thinking that we could purchase cheap loaner tablets to function as e-readers for these students. The textbooks are formatted as PDF files, in colour.
I'm looking for something that can display PDF files. Wifi access would be useful (although we could side-load the files if we had to*). Battery life 5+ hours. Gaming capabilities: as poor as possible :-)
Anyone have an recommendations?
*And I can think of advantages to NOT having WiFi available as well, such as conserving batter life for reading textbooks rather than watching YouTube.
]]>I'd look at giving the kids tablets, bureaucracy allowing. Previous-generation tablets are pretty cheap, and the inventory overhead and the basic problem that tablets are, like laptops, fragile things can be better addressed sometimes if replacement is known to be the user's problem, rather than the organization's.
At which point tablet selection is probably a function of finding out who will give you the best deal.
]]>So the only textbooks that would be hauled around by the kid would be the ones they had to take home for homework or bring back the next morning. No schlepping of huge backpacks between classrooms!
...
But to the question in hand: just about any Android or iOS tablet can display PDFs. You might want to buy a site license for a better-than-standard PDF reader app, preferably one that supports annotation. The real problem is that firstly, higher resolution displays give you better retention, secondly, for text books you really want a larger screen, and thirdly, you also need to have a charger/cable and some sort of soft case to prevent the screen getting all scratched up. (Kids are hard on tech toys.)
The cheapest option out there is the Kindle Fire 7", at $50/unit, but it's only a 7" screen and rather poor resolution.
Unfortunately, to get a decent screen at 9" or larger you're looking at something like a Google Nexus 9, a Google Pixel C (that's their top-end option), or an entry level iPad Air 2, or maybe a Samsung Galaxy Tab S. The Kindle Fire HD 10 or Fire HDX 8.9 are also decent options, but a bit proprietary. Of this lot, the Fire HD 10 is the cheapest at £169, with a 1280x800 display -- the others are generally highest resolution and more expensive, to the point where at the high end (iPad Air 2, Pixel C) we're getting into the same budget territory as a Microsoft Surface 3 or a real laptop.
]]>Now, kids are allowed to bring backpacks into classrooms so either they tend to carry absolutely everything or (in some cases) everything but their books (so they have an excuse to go to their locker to get it, and chat to their friends along the way). In many cases their lockers are full of lawn chairs and other leisure equipment so they don't have room for textbooks!
In any case, our priority is going to be 'cheap' over 'ideal' — partly because of a limited budget, and partly because the better the device the higher the chance of it being stolen (or forcibly 'borrowed').
Two quick technical questions:
1) Can a Kindle Fire be side loaded by us (so we don't have to go through Amazon)?
2) Is there a way to set it up with an admin override password (or no password changes)? A returned/recovered device with a password we don't know is a useless device, and our chances of recovering the costs is low. (That's why we're looking at loaners, because these kids don't have money.) Seeing how many forget their network passwords every week, we'll need a way in or we'll have useless bricks soon enough…
]]>Or flogged for a bit of extra pocket money.
Quite a few times round here I've been stopped in the street by kids trying to flog me phones (said kids being a bit young to be flogging weed yet). I would bet my arse that if they were handed out free electronic gadgets at school they would be flogging those as well. It would be assumed (probably correctly) that the buyers would know where they came from and wouldn't care, and if you locked them down to make them less attractive it would simply mean that some nerdy kid would be in clover unlocking them. It would also not be only the poor kids doing it.
Even without that I still think it's a bad idea, because trying to learn from a PDF is a significant arseache compared to using a real book. (If I find myself designing something with a complex and unfamiliar component I am quite likely to print out the relevant sections of the datasheet instead of referring to them on screen, even if it comes to several hundred pages.)
]]>What did keep the book load under control was simply having a maximum of 7 single periods a day. Of those, at least one duple would be concatenated into one; at least one would be occupied by PE, art, music, or something else that didn't require books; at least one would require only a textbook of paperback novel size (before paperback novels decided to try for the domestic building materials market) and an exercise book; possibly two disjoint periods would be allocated for the same subject.
Backpacks were not all that common, although ex-army/RAF ones were reasonably popular; quite a lot of people just used variations on the sports bag or something between a briefcase and a suitcase. Nearly all the backpack people and probably a majority of the bag/case people would visit the lockers only once, on arrival at school, to prepare the contents of their bag for the day, and then carry every required book with them for the rest of the day.
As far as I'm aware nobody really noticed the weight; we just accepted that books are heavy (although some of the older bags showed signs of disintegration and repair). Also, when we didn't want to lug the bag around for the whole of break, we would dump it either in the room with the lockers or on the landing outside - so all the hassle we were saving was that of exchanging books between bag and locker. Nevertheless, that seems to have been enough for an awful lot of people to consider it the easiest option.
]]>And we're not handing out free tablets to every kid. We're looking at a few loaner tablets for a few kids in need. Most kids already have devices that are good enough (and better than we could afford).
]]>The primary needs could be met by a just-over-£100 Tesco Hudl; in secondary, by a just-over-£200 netbook. Offhand and without looking, I think it was 1GB of RAM / 256GB of disk as a guidance minimum.
What pushed the prices up was the insurance deal; essentially, a premium that over three years, comes to about a quarter of the retail price - but guarantees replacements throughout.
In terms of packages, the Scottish Government has got a free license for most of Microsoft Office, for every kid in Scottish education. Meanwhile, the Google Docs / Drive / Classroom / Sheets / Slides stuff is excellent. No more "dog ate homework", no more "no, I don't have homework tonight" - all work is held in the cloud. I suggested that youngest (still just in primary) log in on my iPad to do some of his work, the unintended benefit was that we get all his assignments ping on our iPads when the teacher sets them...
The experience from the early-adopter schools is that the kids are rather careful with their kit - more so than you would expect - and any fears about "kids mugged for the laptops they're carrying" were (so far) unfounded - But give the Daily Express / Daily Heil time...
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