California School Adopts iPad Program from Kindergarten

The Corpus Christi School in California has revealed a new technology program that puts an iPad in every classroom from kindergarten to eighth grade.

The Corpus Christi School has replaced their classroom computers with iPads, as teachers use the tablet-computers to teach language arts, social studies, math and science to their 255 students, writes Sue Pascoe at the Palisadian-Post.

Corpus Christi joined the ranks of about 1,000 schools in the country that have implemented an iPad program from kindergarten through eighth grade.

The Corpus program was triggered by a $30,000 donation from parent Anthony Marguleas to buy 30 Apple laptops. From that, the program has expanded – despite cost hurdles.

It began as a few laptops in the classroom, but by early October, a fiberoptic cable network was installed throughout the campus and the school had leased 140 iPads for $22 a month, which covers lease payments, interest, taxes, and e-Waste fee and insurance, writes Pascoe.

After three years, the school will own the currently leased iPads for a $1 buyout per unit.

Corpus is also able to sub-lease the products to families, who will be able to own them outright after 36 lease payments.

“Schools can’t afford to keep up with the costs of computer technology,” said Corpus Christi technology committee head, Bill Sewell.

“The current situation at most schools is they are constantly having to fund technology upgrades. In the past, schools purchased enough computers for a lab, typically between 20 and 40, which meant raising $30 to $50,000 just for hardware’it didn’t include software and infrastructure.”

He believes that the current goal in most schools to have a computer for every student will force budgets to grow tenfold if spent on traditional computers – something that won’t be possible for most schools n this current climate.

This comes after an initiative, heralded the launch of Apple’s iPad2, whereby customers donated over 10,000 iPads to needy schools when they upgrade to the newer model.

The donated iPads were given toTeach for America graduates who teach for two years in the country’s under-performing districts. So far, Apple, whose former Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs was married to TFA board member Laurene Powell, has collected over 10,000 iPads to offer to teachers. According to Fortune.com, that means that every one of TFA’s 9,000 current graduates will receive one.

The ultimate goal is to supply one to every student.

Comments

Joe

January 11, 2012 at 1:55 pm

Why an iPad? Why provide them with the most expensive of available tablets when there are plenty of Android tablets that are half the price for the same functionality and features? I hope, at least, Apple is paying a hefty amount of money for all the free publicity they are getting and all the new customers they are landing.

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Linda Brees

January 11, 2012 at 1:57 pm

Did you compare the price of leasing an iPad to leasing an Android tablet? Did you notice that most of these were donated? Before you thow a fit over any student accidentally getting a penny more than they deserve, did you actually do the research about the most cost-effective options? I guess not. But please, prove me wrong.

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Tom Harper

February 1, 2012 at 12:05 pm

I volunteer in a school that has done the ipad experiment. I spent an hour this morning in my sons first grade class doing twice as much work to get the kids logged into the pads, running the reading app, and keeping them from jumping out of the app to play games and tinker with the pad. At the end of the session, they recorded all of the information about their scores on a piece of paper. The ipad was a huge detraction in teaching reading and reading comprehension. As mentioned by Joe, they could have put a cheap tablet in every kids hands. At our school we got 5. There are 24 kids in the class broken into reading groups of six, so one kid has to sit patiently while the other 5 do the exercise, then the 6th gets to do it while I go through the whole thing again.

If people want to donate stuff, how about we sell all those expensive ipads and hire more teachers?!?

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